The following are excerpts from a project called Seeding Planthropocenes. Taking the impossible and almost entirely absurd form of a step-by-step guide to the Anthropocene, this project responds to recent calls for forms of speculative fabulation. This format works well to channel both my anger at our current situation, and my playful and tender (yet serious) aspirations to dream of different worlds.
This is not so much an essay as an incantation. We need to remember that we live under a spell and that spell is destroying our worlds. It is time to cast another spell, to create other worlds, to conjure other worlds within this world. The situation we find ourselves in right now leaves us at the edge of language, trying to hold on to the limits of imagination. We need art, experimentation and radical disruption to learn other ways of seeing, feeling and knowing.
Consider this an invitation to experiment with ways of imagining a different kind of “we” to catalyze action in the world.
Step 1 | Never forget this: “we” are not “one”
Say it again. And again. We can't forget to keep asking: Who exactly does this evoke? Anthropos, the figure standing before the Anthropocene? Anthropocene rhetoric calls “Man” the agent of his own misfortune and, at the same time, exalts him as the only viable savior of the planet: “We got ourselves into this mess. Only we humans can get out of it.”
Even as Anthropocene thinking attempts to draw our attention to the abhorrent effects of our actions – and ultimately to take responsibility for them – it still positions humans as a singular, transcendent agent separate from an endangered Edenic nature. These narratives refocus, rather off-center, “Man” as an agent with natural dominion over the future of the planet.
Do not be distracted by the misguided concreteness of scientific efforts to articulate the physical markers and temporal boundaries of a human-created geological era. What we are witnessing is the apotheosis of five centuries of colonial violence, extractive capitalism, white supremacy, misogyny, and the hubris of human exceptionalism. Capitalocene and Plantationocene are apt monikers to identify the forces that have long been terraforming the planet. These destructive forces are not driven by all people, but by particularly damaging ways of shaping life in the image of self-exalting Man.
Remember this: Not everyone feels evoked by this figure or way of life. Capitalism and colonialism should not be confused with natural or innate human existence. They are not inevitable consequences of human evolution or civilization. But they have catalyzed and conditioned our current situation: a world plagued by anti-blackness and other kinds of racism, expanding forms of extraction and slavery, climate emergencies and ecological ruin.
Marisol de la Cadena draws attention to those Anthropos-invisibles, whose lives and lands continue to be depleted in the accumulation of wealth by colonial and neocolonial powers. These are the people who continue to be targeted for expropriation and even enslavement – perhaps especially – today, as capitalism asserts its drive to “go green” and “save the world.” Don’t believe the fad of sustainable rhetoric. The worlds constructed by colonialism and racial capitalism are uninhabitable for all of us.
Step 2 | Break this world to make other worlds possible
There is no way to “mitigate” the violence of the Anthropocene using the logic of the Anthropocene. Rejects calls for creating for the Anthropocene. These creations are precisely what Erik Swyngedouw identifies as the “technological solutions” that will keep us trapped in the same rhythms of extractivism and expropriation. Refuse to be drawn into those climate change edu-tainment complexes, such as Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay, whose infrastructures of concrete, metal and gleaming glass and designs Labor- and capital-intensive greens deftly expose the charade of sustainability as an aesthetic maneuver rooted in Edenic visions of nature. This is not the kind of green that will save us.
Yes, apocalypses are already happening around us. The destruction of the boreal forest to extract bitumen from stolen indigenous lands in Canada is one such apocalypse. Yet indulging in apocalyptic reasoning is itself a kind of escape strategy, an easy escape. Ruin porn, including those oh-so-captivating images of plants emerging from abandoned buildings in Detroit and Chernobyl, feeds into this “world without us” narrative. The Earth will be much better off without people, they say. Beware of this apocalyptic thinking. Anthropocene thinking captures us in a thrall to the apocalypse and sets us all to work, furtively dreaming of the end of time.
We need to reject what Donna Haraway calls the “tragic detumescence” of a narrative arc that focuses on dragging the entire planet toward an uncontrollable catastrophe. Don’t resign yourself to thinking that this is how it has to be, as if the apocalypse were exactly what would have been.
Resist the temptation of apocalypse as if your life depended on it. Frederic Jameson reminds us that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but the only way to slow the momentum of the Anthropocene is to break up capitalism and activate processes of decolonization. And while it is evident that the time has come to dismantle these infrastructures of the Anthropocene, there is no need to wait until the end of this world to begin to conjure up habitable worlds. As Stuart McLean reminds us, there are still other worlds in this world. And, for now, there are worlds to come. But which worlds will be habitable? Aimi Hamraie asks us to question the neoliberalism and ableism of the concept of habitability: habitable for whom? It is time to rethink the very constitution of this “we” if we are to learn how to make worlds habitable. habitable for all.
Step 3 | Repeat this mantra: “We are not alone. We are not alone. We are not alone…”
If we look at the last five hundred years of efforts to assert Western Man’s independence from – and power over – nature, it becomes clear that we must never be relied upon to act alone. Anthropocene thinking is so fixated on Man’s independence, unilateral action and autonomy, that it forgets that there are other forces and powers among us, including those with significantly greater capabilities in the realm of world-making and planetary change. In some cases, these beings have billions of years more experience than we do in terraforming habitable worlds.
Step 4 | Identify our most powerful ally
Who made this planet habitable and breathable for animals like us? Say it out loud: the photosynthesizers. Photosynthetic organisms form a biogeochemical force of a magnitude that Lynn Margulis says we still don’t adequately understand. More than two billion years ago, photosynthetic microbes drove the event now known as the oxygen catastrophe or the Great Oxidation Event. These creatures dramatically altered the composition of the atmosphere, suffocating ancient anaerobic creatures with poisonous oxygen vapors. If we continued to fall into the trap of naming linear, time-bound eras after singular agents, we might be lulled into thinking that we live in the wake of what should have been called the “Phytocene.”
Photosynthesizers, such as cyanobacteria, algae, land plants, and trees, are the most powerful agents of elemental rearrangement on the planet. Duygu Kaşdoğan shows us that the science of photosynthesis, with its metrics focused on extracting value from green beings, is deeply imbued with the logic of naturalized capital. These green beings must be understood differently; that is, as practitioners of a kind of alchemical and cosmic materialization. We believe that plants cannot move, but they spread throughout the cosmos and collect energy from the Sun in their tissues in order to perform their earthly magic. By capturing matter from pure air, plants must be understood as world-producing magicians. They teach us the most subtle lessons about matter and nature. materialization.
More powerful than any industrial complex, communities of photosynthetic creatures rearrange the elements on a planetary level. They know how to create habitable, breathable, nourishing worlds on land and water. As they expire, they form the atmosphere; as they decompose, they materialize into fertilizer and feed the soil and oceans. Holding up the Earth and supporting the sky, they sing in barely audible ultrasonic frequencies as they sweat, moving enormous volumes of water from deep within the Earth to the highest clouds. They cleanse the waters and nourish all other life forms. And for those enthralled by an economy that fetishizes carbon, perhaps the most important art these creatures practice is that of gleefully absorbing the gaseous carbon emissions we humans generate in such abundance.
To say that forests and marine microbes form the “lungs of the Earth” is an understatement. They literally create us with their breath. All cultures revolve around the metabolic rhythms of plants. Plants are substance, substrate, support, symbol, sign and sustenance of political economies around the world. We must learn to work with and for plants so that we can enjoy and be nourished, clothed, protected and healed, without destroying the Earth.
Plants are the producers of the worlds we need if we hope to create habitable worlds. And our worlds will only be habitable when people learn to conspire with plants.
Step 5 | Foster conspiracies with Plants Everywhere
Repeat this over and over again: we are plants. Now, if this is true, then the figure that should inform our actions is not that of the self-exalted Anthropos, but a strangely hybrid figure that we could call PlanthropusNow try to pronounce this word until it comes out of your mouth fluently: Planthropocene (Yes, it’s weird and it will seem silly, but give it a chance and try it.) A Planthropocene is an aspirational episteme, not an era governed by time, that invites us to create new scenes and new ways of seeing and sowing plant-person relationships in the here and now, not in some distant future. It is rooted in the wisdom of ancient and current radical projects of solidarity that plants already cultivate with numerous people.
Rather than circumscribing the horrors we face now, the Planthropocene is an invitation to hold on to a way of life that would break the fabric of the Anthropocene’s logic. Planthropocenes point to the united and uncertain futures of plants and people and demand that we change the terms of encounter so that we can become allies of these green beings.
Anthropologist Tim Choy makes an important call for the formation of a respirator conspiracy. It is a fascinating politics in which people learn to conspire, that is, to breathe together, to fight against the atmospheric effects of industrial exuberance. Choy helps us think of conspiracy differently, not as a sinister partnership, but as a form of solidarity for a livable politics. It is time to broaden his call to a respiratory conspiracy that includes plants. In other words, we need to learn not only to collaborate with plants, but also to conspire – to breathe – with them.
Remember this: What is good for plants is good for all plants, human and nonhuman. Stand with them. Consider yourself in their service. Get to know plants intimately and on their terms. Be sure to explore your concerns about ways of life different from our own. Support their efforts to keep the soil cool and the waters clean. As Maria Puig de la Bellacasa reminds us, plants and their soils must be given space and time to flourish outside the rhythms of capitalist extractivism and the chemical violence of industrial agriculture. Remember: they need their pollinators; they need their fungal relations; they need their animal allies.
Above all, they need us to reconfigure how we establish our relationships with them. In fact, if plants worship the Sun, perhaps we should be plant worshippers. A little reverence for plants would go a long way. Invent rituals. Create a place where plants can be worshipped. Don’t worry: reverence for plants doesn’t mean you can’t eat them. But it does mean that it would be nice to thank them for their generosity. Think about it for a moment: if we had to look at blueprints to ask permission to use them, industrial agriculture, strip mining, clear-cutting, and the concrete expansion of urban sprawl would be unthinkable. Ask them, they’ll tell you.
