Ruptures of the Anthropocene: A crisis of justice

Abstract

The Anthropocene and associated sense of crises, most prominently climate change, have opened up an urgency versus justice dilemma. While an epochal thinking drives the urgency, it is essential to attend to the ruptures illustrated by historical events like colonisation that shape the fabric of the Anthropocene and its impacts. Historical patterns of extraction and racialisation that underline the Anthropocene and climate change fit neatly into the schema for contemporary and future energy transitions shaped by an apolitical discourse of urgency and emergency. Attending to the historical ruptures helps root universal and apolitical urgency in justice for/from particular places and peoples and reframe ideas like climate emergency and climate crisis as more accurate climate justice emergency and climate justice crisis.

Clarifying rupture: An authors’ reply

“…Besky (2023) sees rupture as a valuable framing for the interactive and temporally complex processes that are leading to exhausted resources and people in West Bengal, India. Kumar (2023) emphasizes that – if the timelines are calibrated to European colonization rather than the industrial revolution – epochal frames like the Anthropocene can help to support claims for justice by highlighting the role of coloniality in contemporary environmental crises. Wilmsen and Rogers (2023) find resonances with their research on social and ecological disruptions associated with dams in China, while asking a series of important methodological questions on how to ‘put rupture to work’.…”