What do you mean by “epochal” change? Theorizing planetary transformations in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Abstract

Although the social sciences and humanities have engaged extensively with the topic of the Anthropocene, much of this research has been conducted at a distance from “classical” geo-disciplines, which can provide valuable insights into the earth’s capacity for self-differentiation. More specifically, geological research into the Earth’s deep past points to magnitudes of planetary transformation (like epochal change) that are much more dramatic than is often assumed by critical social and environmental scholarship. This is particularly evident in the eight theses concerning the origins and trajectory of the Anthropocene that dominate discussions about the topic today. By comparing these theses to classical geology’s research on intervals of geologic time, epochal transformations, and the Earth’s capacity for self-differentiation, I argue that the critical scholarship on the Anthropocene must engage more closely with these geo-disciplines to develop more robust strategies for meeting the challenges of the current geo-historical conjuncture.

Introduction

Increasingly, what were considered rare climate events are now yearly record-breaking occurrences that are making “death by planetary crisis” a likely possibility for many around the world. We are facing these planetary transformations in a unique time of informational abundance in which the facts of climate change are readily available to many around the world and the destabilizing impacts of human activity on the Earth system constantly on display through countless sources and formats. Yet, many continue to respond to the realities of the planetary crisis with either denial or fatalism (Wallace-Wells, 2019) – a fatalism that is driven not so much by the gravity and complexity of the situation as by a general skepticism about our institutions’ ability (or willingness) to rise to these challenges. Some reasons for this are laid out in Klein’s (2014) book This Changes Everything, which highlights how a quasi-religious belief in the free market has overheated the planet, promoting denialism and disaster capitalism as government officials and big polluters cycle through the “revolving door” of contemporary politics.

These changing planetary conditions and compiling systemic crises are dramatically reshaping the global political landscape, inspiring a broad range of critiques and alternatives to dominant models of extraction, production, and development. Among these are calls for the development of sustainable economies built on green energy sources and infrastructure, corresponding techno-scientific innovation, new legal instruments and institutional arrangements for the protection of the environment, and alternative models of economic planning and development emerging from critiques of the destructive power of fossil fueled modernity and the need to “degrow” (Foster, 2023) our economies.

The challenges of the planetary crisis have also inspired an “eco-territorial turn” in political movements characterized by collective resistance and struggles centered on the defense of land and territory, accompanied by the articulation of alternative modes of inhabiting these spaces. According to Svampa (2019), this eco-territorial turn has introduced into the political landscape new themes, languages, slogans, and debates regarding socio-environmental issues, many of which originate in grassroots movements and ongoing collaborations between intellectuals, activists, and NGOs. Together, these interactions have exposed various modes of appropriation and eco-territorial militancy, translated new languages and discourses into numerous politico-ideological orientations, introduced to the political stage new or re-imagined entities (e.g. Gaia), proposed alternative cosmologies, widened dialogs of knowledge, and inspired new technical and legal instruments to tackle the planetary crisis.

Because of this, our current political moment features dynamic and polyvocal modes of contestation that operate at ethico-onto-epistemological as well as legal and institutional registers. Yet, despite these theoretical and political innovations, the extent to which these interventions can adequately grapple with the realities of the planetary crisis in an effective and informed manner remains to be seen.

A complicated relationship with the science of the Planetary Crisis

Although the current state of the world is making critical social and environmental scholarship undergo important theoretical and disciplinary changes (Chakrabarty, 2021; Thomas et al., 2020), its engagement with the realities of the changing Earth state appears to be constantly trying to catch up to the evolving insights of the natural sciences (e.g. by relying on the often conflicting prognoses of the latest scientific studies to develop corresponding political and institutional responses). This is particularly evident in researchers’ reliance on IPCC reports, which provide an important empirical basis for thinking about the challenges of the Anthropocene. However, the credibility of these reports is often undermined by the IPCC’s own report-making process. As Tol (2023) demonstrates, despite its status as an internationally recognized authority on matters concerning the science and policy requirements of the changing Earth, the IPCC has found it difficult to communicate its findings openly and accurately. In fact, the organization has struggled to publish politically inconvenient results, challenge members of the Panel of government representatives that signs off on the reports, deviate from the official stance of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and has even contributed to the obfuscation of policy failures with the announcement of more ambitious targets for a later date while failing to acknowledge openly when it was wrong itself (Tol, 2023) – all of which undermines the empirical and academic integrity of the reports in the interest of political objectives.

Other difficulties faced by researchers trying to theorize and develop responses to unfolding and geologically significant (e.g. epochal) magnitudes of planetary change are the empirical and political challenges entailed by the “diachronicity” (Edgeworth et al., 2015; Malm, 2016) of the problem. Precisely at a time when we are faced with an existentially urgent need to develop alternative political and socio-economic arrangements that can effectively respond to changing planetary conditions, we are confronted with “a messy mix-up of time scales” and a “falling in of history on the present” (Malm, 2016) that stretch from deep pasts to distant futures, further obscuring the historical and planetary grounds on which these struggles must be waged. Politically, diachroneity complicates efforts to develop an environmental politics that is faithful to the links between current planetary conditions and productive systems of the past. As Vergès (2017) points out, diachronicity has negatively impacted the politics of environmentalism by inserting a gap between the colonial roots of environmental problems and the realities of a planetary crisis whose effects have only become visible in the postcolonial era.

To attend to these limitations, Clark and Szerszynski (2021) argue that social thinkers must extend beyond their disciplinary boundaries and “geologize” their conceptual and analytic frameworks by engaging closely with research that was, until quite recently, exclusively within the purview of the geosciences. But working through the implications of the claim that the Earth is undergoing geologically significant transformations requires an examination of temporal and spatial scales that are not familiar to many researchers in the human sciences (Thomas et al., 2020). As such, the planetary crisis confronts us with a politically significant empirical problem: one concerning the scientific basis of our knowledge of – and ability to respond to – unstable planetary conditions in a context of rapidly changing projections, questionable scientific reports, and diachronous expressions of material social relations. Because of this, it is difficult to not think of much of our work as playing “catch up” with the evolving dynamics of the planetary crisis, trying to capture and theorize its realities as they acquire new forms and render obsolete recently refined conceptual toolkits, analytic frameworks, and empirical bases.

As mentioned earlier, the human sciences have witnessed a proliferation of powerful ethico-onto-epistemological and institutional innovations aiming to generate alternative ways of organizing production and human-nature relations. Yet, given the uncertainty and rapidly changing projections of the trajectory of the changing Earth, it is difficult to gage the extent to which these interventions are adequately equipped to respond to the challenges of our time. Indeed, researchers must often content themselves with imagining the rate and scope of these transformations based on the countless studies and projections of bio-geo-chemical disruptions to the Earth system that we encounter on a daily basis – research that is subject to re-evaluation at dizzyingly rapid rates that make it difficult to think concretely and methodologically about the socio-political implications and requirements of these planetary changes.

As a corrective to this analytical rootlessness, I propose a further geologization of the human sciences: a closer engagement with “conventional” or “classical” Geology ¹ and related geo-disciplines, which deal with much larger timescales and geologic formation that excludes human influence on geologic processes and forms (Becker et al., 2012) as well as geologic forces that are far beyond our control (from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions to the movement of tectonic plates). These geo-disciplines are particularly well equipped to think through the significance of geologically epochal planetary transformations. Their work examines the deep history of the Earth, the planetary conditions that characterize different intervals of geologic time, and the extent to which we may reasonably expect to influence or respond to already-unfolding planetary changes.

This call for a greater geologization of critical social and environmental thought may seem superfluous in light of current discussions about the Anthropocene. However, my goal is to encourage explorations of a notion of the Anthropocene articulated through the insights of classical geo-disciplines like Geologic stratigraphy rather than those encountered in the context of Earth System Science (ESS) and IPCC reports – which generally prioritize examinations of our planet’s “critical zones” or “Gaia’s skin” (Latour, 2014), engaging with much smaller timescales and immediately perceivable rates of change than does classical Geology (e.g. bio-geo-chemical cycles that have a visible impact on the flourishment of life on Earth). Indeed, much of this ESS-led work can be said to feature what Wallace-Wells (2019) refers to as a “century bias” that hinders important discussions about what it means to live in a planet whose average global temperature has increased above the dreaded 4°C. In his own worn words, “in a cognitive bargain, we have chose to consider climate change only as it will present itself this century” (Wallace-Wells, 2019).

This century bias in discussions about the changing Earth is no accident. As ESS scientist Lenton (2016) explains,

what is part of the Earth system depends on the timescale being considered. If we are concerned with global change over the next century, we exclude the tectonic cycling of the Earth’s crust in our models, because that takes place over many millions of years. Indeed we barely need to consider the weathering of the continents and the deposition of sediments in the oceans. (16)

Contrary to Lenton’s view that these dynamics can be ignored when thinking about currently unfolding planetary changes, I argue – alongside Clark and Szerszynski (2021) – that it is precisely through an engagement with significantly larger timescales that we can fully understand the planet’s capacity for self-differentiation. In other words, what I propose is not a greater engagement with ESS-led Geologic research and its focus on relatively immediate changes to the Earth’s bio-geo-chemical processes resulting from human activity (e.g. carbon mineralization and sequestration, methane emissions from thawing permafrost regions, geological sources of CO₂, changing coastlines, anthropogenic elements in geologic strata, mining planning, etc.). Though helpful in understanding the immediate impact of human activities on the planet, this work is subject to the same challenges of scientific research discussed above. Instead, I propose a greater engagement with classical geo-disciplines, which may provide steadier (and more humbling) grounds on which to theorize the severity of the planetary crisis and our ability to respond to it. Indeed, the disciplines offer valuable scientific resources for researchers in the human sciences to think through the socio-political implications of our current geologic moment, advancing an alternative reading of the Anthropocene that may help us overcome the analytic rootlessness discussed above.

The Anthropocene

The Anthropocene has emerged as an important concept to think through the multifaceted and multi-scalar dimensions of the planetary crisis, bringing together researchers, activists, and communities with diverse backgrounds and experiences (Thomas et al., 2020). The term was proposed in 2000 by ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer and atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen to indicate the development of human civilization into a global geological force that is quickly driving the Earth out of conditions favorable to human life (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). Although the idea of human-driven global destruction was not new, their claim was nonetheless significant: anthropogenic destruction has reached geological proportions. Accordingly, the Anthropocene proposes that human activity has disrupted Earth’s basic functioning as a system, driving us toward a “non-analogue” state characterized by new and unprecedented planetary conditions – a state of planetary terra incognita (Steffen et al., 2004).

Thinking simultaneously through the geological and socio-political implications of these Earth state transformations is no easy task. In fact, the challenges of studying the Anthropocene are as technical as they are conceptual. For one, Anthropocene temporal and spatial scales are so enormous that researchers require colossal amounts of data and sophisticated computer modeling to adequately track and make sense of planetary changes (Edwards, 2010). Things get even more complicated when we try to translate this information into meaningful socio-political action. Indeed, what has come out of two decades of interdisciplinary conversations about the topic has not been a simple “yes” or “no” answer to the question of whether the Anthropocene is an accurate name for our current geologic moment but a proliferation of alternative “cenes” ² that aim to identify more accurately the current epoch’s key protagonists, markers, histories, and trajectories.

The term itself was a key point of contention within the International Union of Geological Sciences. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) had tried to settle this debate since 2009, struggling with tensions concerning the empirical basis and political significance of their research. In fact, on July 12, 2023, ecologist Erle Ellis resigned from the working group with whom he had worked for almost 14 years. In his resignation letter, Ellis identified as one of his main reasons for his resignation the team’s commitment to a narrow mid-20th century account of the Anthropocene that leaves no room for dissent or for a broader perspective within the team. According to him, this narrow perspective is problematic not only for scientific reasons but also because of its denial and depoliticization of the deeper history of the planetary crisis, leading him to ask: “Are the planetary changes wrought by industrial and colonial nations before 1950 not significant enough to transform the planet?” (Ellis, 2023, para. 4).

Ellis’ resignation highlights politically charged controversies in scientific research on the Anthropocene that have been a part of it since the term was first introduced by Crutzen and Stoermer. ³ For example, in a well-known piece published in The Guardian, Kate Raworth (2014) argued that the constitution of the AWG reflected a structural bias in the sciences that continued to marginalize the voices of female researchers, adding that we should “just call it the Manthropocene” (para. 2). These criticisms of scientific research on the nature of the planetary crisis have also been articulated on the grounds of Eurocentrism, not only because of the Anthropocene’s assertion of Western modernity as both root cause and solution to the planetary crisis (Ghosh, 2016) but also because of its reliance on Western knowledge systems that resist alternative readings and periodizations of our present (Morrison, 2018). Because of this, critics have argued that the realities of Anthropocene research are profoundly incompatible with those of its presumed protagonist: an anthropos or universal being with no sex, gender, class, or race defined by its species belonging rather than its socio-historical milieu (Colebrook, 2016; Di Chiro, 2017; Zylinska, 2018).

In the end, the AWG rejected the formalization of the Anthropocene (Zhong, 2024), highlighting important – but often-overlooked – tensions between Geological (i.e. stratigraphic) and ESS formulations of the term. While figures like Steffen et al. (2007) had advocated for – and, in many ways, standardized – mainstream accounts of the Anthropocene as an umbrella term for the totality of the impact that the “human enterprise” has had on the planet, this ESS formulation of the concept was different from that of the AWG. In fact, when the AWG officially rejected the formalization of the Anthropocene, the term had already been officially adopted by the IPCC, which included it in the first chapter of its Sixth Assessment Report, titled “Framing, Context, and Method,” citing ESS scientists Paul Crutzen, Eugene Stoermer, and Will Steffen (IPCC, 2021).

Due to the political and empirical tensions that characterize ESS-led research on the Anthropocene, critical social and environmental thought has not had a good relationship with the concept or the scientific traditions with which it is associated. On the one hand, critiques of empiricism and scientific research have inspired alternative (i.e. non-Geologic) readings of the Anthropocene meant to highlight more accurately the power dynamics that have brought us here today as well as the radical politics needed to overcome them. On the other hand, this has limited engagement with important geoscientific research on the deep history of the Earth, without which the planetary significance of “geologically epochal” planetary changes cannot be fully appreciated. As a result, despite the historical rigor and theoretical sophistication of critical social and environmental thought’s engagement with the topic of the Anthropocene, much of this work continues to fall short in its understanding of the true nature and scale of the planetary crisis. Importantly, this scholarship tends to overlook classical geo-disciplines’ ability to provide steadier grounds on which to theorize and methodologically develop adequate responses to these challenges (Collao Quevedo, 2025). This is clearly evident in the eight theses that currently dominate discussions about the Anthropocene in critical social and environmental scholarship.

Eight Theses

Although the literature on the topic of the Anthropocene that has come out of the social sciences and humanities varies widely, it is possible to identify within it eight distinct theses concerning the origins and trajectories of the planetary crisis. Despite some overlapping, these tend to draw on different intellectual traditions that yield alternative understandings of the Anthropocene and the politics needed to overcome its challenges. For the sake of brevity, I will discuss these theses in general terms, focusing on their understanding of the history and nature of the crisis.

Non-Reflexive Anthropocene (NRA)

Mainstream accounts of the Anthropocene tend to advance an apolitical story of the planetary crisis that emphasizes humans’ “awakening” to the negative environmental impacts of modernity. Following the work of historians Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016), I refer to this as the Non-Reflexive Anthropocene (NRA) thesis, which proposes that “There was a long moment of unawareness, from 1750 to the late twentieth century, followed by a sudden arousal” and a general recognition that “We are the first generation with the knowledge of how our activities influence the Earth system, and thus the first generation with the power and the responsibility to change our relationship with the planet” (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016).

To this can be added the claims by environmental historians McNeill and Engelke (2014) that

So far humankind has influenced basic Earth systems only by accident, as an unforeseen and unintended by-product of actions undertaken for routine quests for wealth, power, and contentment. Late in the twentieth century many people noticed that humans were doing so, which in some circles seemed imprudent and alarming. (209)

Along a similar vein, Lovelock (2006) asserted that “by changing the environment we have unknowingly declared war on Gaia” (13).

Simply put, the NRA thesis advances a narrative of innocence and non-reflexive modernization that overlooks and depoliticizes ecologically driven struggles of the past, arguing that prior to the scientific achievements of the 20th century, societies lacked the ecological knowledge and reflexivity to understand the scope of the environmental impacts of industrial society (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016). This is believed to have changed in the 1970s when, aided by scientific and technological innovation, “most societies found ways to regulate some but not all of their ecological impacts” (McNeill and Engelke, 2014: 210).

At the core of this ecological reflexivity is the belief that scientific knowledge is the key to solving the planetary crisis and that ecologically responsible behavior on the part of societies, states, and corporations is a matter of scientific and technological advancement. As such, the NRA thesis hinders broader discussions about how we got here today while obscuring the power dynamics and ideological mechanisms through which this narrative of innocence, non-reflexivity, and green modernization continues to influence current discussions about the planetary crisis. Instead, this story of ecological awakening features an old modernist trope that glorifies techno-scientific advancement and portrays scientists as the heroes of the Anthropocene. In the words of Bonneuil and Fressoz (2016), “scientists are represented as the ecological vanguard of the world. Not only do they appear as spokespeople for the Earth, but also as shepherds of a public opinion that is ignorant and helpless.”

Capitalocene (CAP)

Within the ecological Marxist tradition, examinations of the planetary crisis have centered on histories of capitalist exploitation of humans and non-humans. This approach generally frames the planetary crisis as the product of historically specific class-based antagonisms and the continuous expansion of a “cannibal” (Fraser, 2022) global capitalist system. This has driven many to replace the term Anthropocene with Capitalocene or the Age of Capital (Malm and Hornborg, 2014; Moore, 2015) to identify the rise of capitalism as “a turning point in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities – and in relational terms, greater than the rise of the steam engine” (Moore, 2015). As such, the Capitalocene thesis challenges ahistorical and apolitical accounts of the planetary crisis, advancing instead a critical exploration of the topic from the perspective of historically specific, politically contested, and continuously evolving conditions of capitalist extraction, commodification, rationalization, alienation, and expansion.

Among advocates of the Capitalocene thesis are figures like John Bellamy Foster, Andreas Malm, and Jason W. Moore, all of which have proposed their own accounts of capitalism’s role in the planetary crisis. For his part, Foster (2023) argues that the capitalist mode of production is strictly oriented toward unlimited exponential accumulation and maldistribution, and “imposes scarcity and austerity on the population in order to compel workers to sacrifice their lives” while “threatening a planetary habitability for all humanity along with innumerable other life forms” (23). More specifically, capitalism has decoupled and destabilized human and natural metabolisms, producing a “metabolic rift” (Foster, 2000) between the two that jeopardizes nature’s capacity to regenerate itself – in turn endangering environmental conditions favorable to human life. Therefore, if we currently find ourselves unable to secure, say, long-term food supplies for all humanity, this is not because of productive limitations rooted in immutable natural laws (e.g. about soil fertility and the availability of arable land), but because of the expansion of capitalist relations and their corresponding organization of human labor – which is itself “a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature” (Foster, 2000: 141).

This has created and intensified historically specific contradictions between labor and capital in ways that continue to destabilize metabolic interactions between humans and the Earth. Because of this, Foster (2000) argues that to overcome the metabolic rift that we see under capitalism, what is needed is a historical transition to a new social formation characterized by associated producers that can rationally organize human-nature relations. Such a transition will require, among other things, economic planning “in order to create a new set of social priorities aimed at human flourishing and a sustainable social metabolism with the earth” (Foster, 2023: 22) – thus ending once and for all capitalism’s alienation of humans from the natural conditions that form the basis of their existence.

Commenting on the specific decisions that capitalists have made to bring the Earth to its current state of crisis, Malm (2016) argues that neither climate change nor the fossil economy that drives it have developed naturally or inevitably out of efforts to modernize our societies and meet human needs. Instead, inventions like the steam engine and the fossil economy were developed in environmentally destructive ways to meet historically specific requirements of capital such as the disciplining of an increasingly militant working class in the 1800s and the overcoming of spatial and temporal limitations to industrial production and expansion. Therefore, the shift to steam power and the development of the fossil economy was not made by British society in the spirit of progress and modernization but was purposefully driven by industry leaders because it suited capital’s needs better than less environmentally destructive labor and energy systems.

Therefore, according to Malm, the story of the Capitalocene is one of capitalist alienation and class discipline: it tells a story of the movement and development of capital under fossil capitalism that must be understood along the lines of capital’s efforts to achieve greater independence from geography and human labor. As such, meeting the challenges of the planetary crisis is, for Malm, not a matter of understanding the social production of nature and space under capitalism or of achieving control over such geographical processes according to class struggles structured by uneven development (Smith, 2008). For him, the crisis of the Capitalocene calls for a strategically organized commitment to the most militant and unwavering opposition to this system (Malm, 2021) – especially in the energy sector (Huber, 2022) – as well as a breaking of the “ultimate taboo”: planning the economy.

Meanwhile, Moore (2015) proposes an alternative reading of capitalism’s historical development, emphasizing its reliance on the strategic deployment of Cartesian dualisms and capitalist technics for the production and exploitation of Cheap Nature. According to Moore, since the 16th century, capitalist expansion has relied on the appropriation and exploitation of historically contingent conceptions of nature characterized by specific constraints and opportunities for accumulation. He refers to these as “historical natures,” arguing that concepts like “nature” do not point to distinct ontological categories but are the product of social formations characterized by specific tools and regimes of power, knowledge, and production (technics) (Moore, 2015). With this, Moore argues that capitalist accumulation and expansion relies not only on the ongoing appropriation of Cheap Natures (Moore, 2016) but also on the production of these natures in ways that meet the needs and interests of capital.

However, because of today’s dwindling availability of Cheap Natures, Moore argues that capitalism is coming to an irremediable crisis whose signs have been especially evident since 2003. This crisis stems from the fact that capitalism has finally achieved a truly global reach and appropriated just about every easily accessible Cheap Nature, making the capitalization of nature the only way to remain competitive in the global market – which has resulted in an outpacing of rates of profit by rising costs of production worldwide. On top of this, this capital-intensive mode of production is generating negative-value by producing forms of nature that increasingly disrupt productivity (e.g. heatwaves) and resist capitalist appropriation (e.g. superweeds; Moore, 2015). Because of this, he argues that capitalism is on the brink of collapse: the contradictions on which it relies are intensifying, there are fewer and fewer new frontiers or Cheap Natures to facilitate new waves of appropriation, and political movements are taking important steps toward the establishment of more sustainable non-capitalist world-ecological orders.

Martial Anthropocene (MAR)

The Martial Anthropocene (MAR) thesis highlights the ways in which the various bio-geo-chemical markers commonly associated with the onset of the Anthropocene are directly linked to a Western “martial logic” of planetary organization in which “war and security are the most significant financial, creative, social, cultural, technological, and political investments of almost every nation-state on Earth” (Grove, 2019: 21). According to Grove (2019), this martial logic lies at the heart of Euro-American cosmologies, coloring all of its possibilities, from knowledge production to planetary ordering and violence against other forms of life. This line of thought is evident even in the work of thinkers like Latour (2017), whose discussion of the Gaia War, Schmittian enemies, trials of strength, and peace through war reflects a commitment to the martial logic of Euro-American cosmologies that do not allow the story of the Anthropocene to change in any meaningful way (Haraway, 2016). According to Grove (2019), this martial logic has shaped our planetary conditions and thus warrants a different naming of the Anthropocene: the Eurocene.

Although the origins of the Eurocene can be traced back to the 16th and 17th centuries, it was at the turn of the 20th century that its production of warlike environmental conditions, lifeforms, and social relations really began to destabilize planetary conditions. By then, war had become both deadlier and more frequent, which points to a link between advancements in productivity and states’ destructive capacities (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016). Indeed, after 1914, the world’s most developed countries would not only be involved in more wars than their poorer counterparts but would also develop extraordinarily powerful war machines “fed by colossal industrial, technological and logistic systems. . .that required growing quantities of raw materials and energy and had an unprecedentedly heavy impact on the environment” (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2016). This military-industrial complex would go on to destroy entire ecosystems worldwide in times of war as well as peacetime.

Statecraft and imperialism also played a key role in the development of the fossil economy. As Angus (2016) explains, in the early 20th century, imperial powers became major consumers of oil and gas, driven primarily by their need to power military vehicles. The two world wars also made possible the onset of a system of total war that, through military-industrial production, began to entrench itself in civilian life (McBrien, 2016). Indeed, by the mid-20th century, chemical warfare had already made its way from the Western Front to the streets of Western liberal democracies as a means of “crowd control,” with American police departments purchasing rebranded tear-gas supplies by the late 1920s (Feigenbaum, 2017).

Another major marker of war-driven planetary destruction is the worldwide presence of small particles of radioactive debris from nuclear explosions since the beginning of the nuclear age (Monastersky, 2015; Zalasiewicz et al., 2015). In the words of Monastersky (2015), the boundary between the Holocene and the Anthropocene could be defined “by the first A-bomb test in 1945 and the stratigraphic presence of radioactive elements from the blast and the much larger nuclear ones that took place over the next decade” (para. 4). These war- and extinction-making practices were both intensified and normalized during the Cold War years, which facilitated the development of a scientific culture directly tied to geopolitical and warfare interests. In fact, the link between war and geopolitics to the planetary crisis is perhaps most evident in the realities and legacies of the Cold War years, whose “techno-politics” of altitude (Edwards, 2010) paved the way for the development of climate and Earth System science (Hamilton and Grinevald, 2015), technocratic “command and control” mentalities concerning planetary management (McBrien, 2016), and even climate denialism (Oreskes and Conway, 2008). Not to mention that the earlier studies of Paul Crutzen were on the atmospheric effects of nuclear war (Crutzen, 1974; Crutzen and Birks, 1982).

Accordingly, the MAR thesis puts especial emphasis on warfare and geopolitics as key drivers of the planetary crisis, arguing for greater attention to be paid to the military’s role in the permanent destruction of global landscapes, its historical pursuit of fossil fuels, and its use and development of technologies that have reached unimaginable levels of energy consumption (Hynes, 2015). Alongside these critiques have also emerged theories concerning the more-than-human biopolitics of war and state violence (Pugliese, 2020), more expansive accounts of geopolitics and the political ecology of war and security (Grove, 2019), and new considerations about the role of empire, the nation-state, and international institutions in the planetary crisis (Ghosh, 2016; Wainwright and Mann, 2018).

Colonial Anthropocene (COL)

In a 2015 article published in Nature, Lewis and Maslin (2015) proposed that the year 1610 should mark the start of the Anthropocene as stratigraphic records show a significant drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide during this period. They call this drop in the stratigraphic record the “Orbis spike” and attribute it to the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, which “led to a catastrophic decline in human numbers, with about 50 million deaths between 1492 1650” (Lewis and Maslin, 2015: 176). Because of this, the Orbis spike indicates a major event in world history and provides a geologically verifiable record of the impacts that colonialism and the global trade have had on the Earth system.

Expanding on this, Davis and Todd (2017) argue that the Orbis spike does more that simply link the current planetary crisis to the beginning of the colonial period: it opens “the geologic questions and implications of the Anthropocene beyond the realm of Western and European epistemology,” advancing an understanding of the planetary crisis “as inherently invested in a specific ideology defined by proto-capitalist logics based on extraction and accumulation through dispossession – logics that continue to shape the world we live in and that have produced our current era” (Davis and Todd, 2017: 764).

Accordingly, the Colonial Anthropocene (COL) thesis proposes not just an examination of extractive colonial formations and their severing of entangled relationships post-1492 but also a re-framing of the Anthropocene as an “extension and enactment of colonial logic [that] systematically erases difference, by way of genocide and forced integration and through projects of climate change that imply the radical transformation of the biosphere” (Davis and Todd, 2017: 769). As such, this re-framing of the planetary crisis points to not only the long history of colonial violence but also to coloniality as a mutating and enduring logic of social organization (Pratt, 2022; Vazquez, 2017; Wickberg, 2020).

The Colonial Anthropocene thesis can be further subdivided into three distinct arguments: Black Anthropocenes, Place-Less Anthropocene, and the Plantationocene. The Black Anthropocenes (BAS) thesis is rooted in a Black and Caribbean intellectual tradition that explores how hegemonic, racially coded, and naturalized Western epistemological systems and categories have made other knowledge systems and ways of being unthinkable (Mignolo, 2015; Wynter, 2003). Accordingly, examinations of the Anthropocene from the perspective of the BAS thesis tend to scrutinize how knowledge about the planetary crisis is constituted, proposing a reconceptualization of the Anthropocene that delinks it from the logics of imperial coloniality and the knowledge systems out of which the concept emerges.

As Yusoff (2018b) explains, the Geology through which the concept of the Anthropocene is articulated is itself an epistemic regime that has historically obfuscated the multi-sited and hetero-temporal violence that has shaped the planetary crisis. For one, this understanding of our current situation mobilizes a White Geology (Yusoff, 2018a) and epistemic regime that conceals the role that black and brown bodies, labor, and deaths have played in the production of this geological epoch via slavery, colonialism, and racism. The term also obscures how productive and technological achievements commonly associated with Anthropocene “golden spikes” (e.g. the testing of nuclear weapons) were made possible through the dispossession, exploitation, and vulnerabilization of black and brown populations worldwide. As such, the Anthropocene can be said to be the product of ongoing processes of “geologization” that imbue the geological record with the bodies, labor, and deaths of black and brown populations while producing knowledge about this geohistorical moment through a White Geological epistemic regime that obscures this fact (Yusoff, 2018b).

Therefore, a critical engagement with the concept of the Anthropocene from the perspective of the BAS thesis entails both an examination of the anti-Black logics and realities embodied in the geological record as well as of the strand of (White) humanist thought that dominates mainstream discussions of the topic. Indeed, the challenges of the Anthropocene warrant not only a re-historicization of the geological record, the identification and subversion of dominant Western epistemologies, and the unveiling of the anti-Black underpinnings of the planetary crisis but also a decolonizing engagement with the question of what if means to be Human – ideally one capable of developing a “counterhumanism” that can effectively move us “beyond Man, toward the Human” (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015). In other words, overcoming the challenges of the Anthropocene, requires both a recognition of anti-Blackness and coloniality as markers and drivers of the Anthropocene as well as a centering of Black and Indigenous alterity as necessary epistemic points of departure for overcoming the planetary crisis (Gill, 2021).

Meanwhile, the Place-Less Anthropocene (PLA) thesis proposes that the planetary crisis is driven by expanding forms of environmental destruction inflicted on Indigenous peoples worldwide via centuries-old colonial practices and policies – all of which continue to make territories vulnerable to harm and available for settlement and capitalist exploitation (Whyte, 2017). Accordingly, the PLA thesis draws attention to a long history of Indigenous dispossession and genocide through colonial efforts to render geographical spaces more favorable to settler interests and lifestyles. As Keeler (2020) points out, the story of the Anthropocene is one of not only economic, societal, and technological changes, but also one of deliberate efforts by colonial actors to alter – and weaponize – environments to transform human and non-human inhabitants into masses that can be produced or destroyed according to colonial interests.

In this context, accounts of the Anthropocene as a problem produced by “humanity” reflect a Eurocentric bias that conceals the fact that the apocalyptic conditions feared in mainstream accounts of the crisis are precisely those that Indigenous peoples have had to endure throughout the entire history of colonialism (e.g. disruption of relations between humans and nonhumans, ecosystem collapse, species loss, economic crash, drastic relocation, and cultural disintegration) (Whyte, 2018). As such, mainstream accounts of the Anthropocene not only fail to resonate with Indigenous peoples’ experiences with colonial regimes but also place them into narratives, spaces, and temporalities that they did not choose (Whyte, 2018).

Proponents of the PLA thesis also scrutinize the extreme “rootlessness” of mainstream accounts of the Anthropocene, advocating for a robust recognition and protection of our kinships with the more-than-human world. Through this, the PLA thesis challenges Eurocentric notions of territories (and their inhabitants) as abstract entities that can be disentangled from one another and made measurable, predictable, and useful to colonial interest (Liboiron, 2021). Indeed, concepts like “rootedness” and “place-based thinking” draw on Indigenous thought and cosmologies to assert “place” as an ontologically foundational site of unique and multifaceted relations. In the words of Larsen and Johnson (2017), place “convenes our being together, bringing human and nonhuman communities into the shared predicaments of life, livelihood, and land. Place calls us to the challenge of living together” (1). Therefore, place is understood as both progenitor and custodian of relationships and lays out protocols of more-than-human coexistence along knotted paths of responsibility.

By centering this long history of colonial violence, place-based relations, and Indigenous resistance and resurgence, the PLA thesis mobilizes a politics of decolonization that challenges colonialism’s structural and ideological basis. Such a politics entails not only a recognition of the colonial underpinnings of the planetary crisis but also a revitalization of Indigenous knowledge systems and a coming together of Indigenous communities to strengthen their own self-determined planning for climate change (Whyte, 2017).

Lastly, the Plantationocene (PLAN) thesis suggests that the planetary crisis stems from the logics of environmental modernization, homogeneity, and control that were developed through the plantation economies at the turn of the 16th century (Davis et al., 2019; Haraway et al., 2016; Moore et al., 2019). As such, the thesis highlights ecological and racial dynamics at the core of colonial economies, emphasizing the plantation’s role in the development of capitalism, the simplification of landscapes, and the global circulation of people, plants, animals, and capital (Davis et al., 2019; Moore et al., 2019). In the words of Moore et al. (2019),

It was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. (para. 7)

Therefore, the Plantationocene tells the story of the planetary crisis through the history of plantation economies and their reliance on the exploitation and relocation of more-than-human “generative units” (Haraway et al., 2016), highlighting how plantation requirements inspired environmentally destabilizing organizations of space that continue to this day. According to Anna Tsing, the plantation system provided a blueprint for modern structurally mediated landscapes and industrial productive formations that extend beyond social formations into more-than-human space and time in ways that continue to intensify the planetary crisis (Tsing et al., 2019). This means that the plantation provided more than an economic model favorable to colonial interests: it also helped developed ecologically simplified landscape structures (e.g. monoculture plantations) that arranged heterogenous generative units into the homogenous, scalable, and interchangeable productive formations that characterize colonial and capitalist planning to this day (Tsing et al., 2019).

But the PLAN thesis does more than bring together histories of colonial and capitalist expansion, plantation economies, and the productive simplification of more-than-human landscapes. According to Davis et al. (2019), the Plantationocene also provides a means of de-centering Eurocentric narratives of coal, the steam engine, and the Industrial Revolution as the epicenter of global environmental change. It also highlights networks and relations that have been forged historically across species lines, reading the current situation through a multispecies lens rather than one committed to modernist Nature/Society dualisms (Davis et al., 2019).

Therefore, the PLAN thesis does not envision decolonization as a human or human-led project but calls for a multispecies consideration of structures of thought and production that originated in plantation economies and continue to influence the organization of land, bodies, and capital today. This means that to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene, we need to develop new observational and analytical ways of examining intertwined more-than-human histories (Tsing, 2015a), kinships (Haraway, 2016), and feral proliferations (Tsing et al., 2019). For Tsing (2015b), this warrants the cultivation of new modes of political listening and arts of noticing that can help detect traces of not-yet-articulated common agendas without relying so much on “expert listeners” (e.g. modern knowledge) to spot “latent commons” and potential (more-than-human) allies. Ultimately, the goal is to produce a “counter-plantation politics” capable of challenging the “species-level thinking of the Anthropocene” (Moore et al., 2019, para. 8) as well as the “intertwined death-dealing logics of racism and ecocide” (Davis et al., 2019: 3).

The geology of the anthropocene

As the section above shows, critical scholarship on the Anthropocene rarely engages seriously with the claim that the Earth is undergoing geologically epochal change or with the geoscience that underpins it – much less as key theoretical and empirical inputs for meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene. Instead, the geoscience of the Earth’s geological past is discussed in one or more of the following three ways: (i) briefly or in passing, (ii) as an object of critique (e.g. colonial science), or (iii) only to be quickly dismissed in search for answers elsewhere (e.g. in the realm of collective social action). This limited engagement with the geosciences is especially evident in the all-too-common translation of the Anthropocene as the “Age of Man” when, in the context of Geologic stratigraphy, geologic “epochs” are significantly larger units of time than are “ages” – meaning that to refer to the Anthropocene as an age rather than as an epoch is to significantly downplay the magnitude of planetary transformation that the notion of the Anthropocene entails. This marginal engagement with classical geo-disciplines ultimately undermines the central role that these will inevitably have to play in the development of just green planetary futures (Dixon et al., forthcoming).

Critical social and environmental scholarship’s limited engagement with these geo-disciplines may be attributed to researchers’ troubled relationship with scientific accounts of the Anthropocene. On the one hand, the literature recognizes the need to translate diachronous planetary disruptions and evolving climate data and projections into concrete evidence-based courses of action. On the other hand, it features a general skepticism toward the disciplinary, institutional, and ideological commitments of dominant strands of scientific research on the topic. This has limited engagement with the geosciences’ insights into the planet’s transformational capacities – the exception being the literature on “planetary multiplicity” (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021), which urges social thinkers to take seriously the planet’s capacity to leap from one operating state to another suddenly and unpredictably, and whose evidence is available in the Earth’s geologic record.

Aside from this, the critical Anthropocene scholarship appears to be stuck on a state of analytic rootlessness: it grapples with dizzying informational abundance and structural obstacles as it reluctantly relies on overly optimistic ESS-led accounts of the changing Earth to develop adequate climate strategies, in the meantime rejecting or underplaying the centrality of classical geo-disciplines to the achievement of these goals. What we need is thus a more robust and stable empirical basis in which to ground our understandings of the magnitude of planetary transformations that are currently underway and the form that environmental thought and politics must take to address these challenges. Classical geo-disciplines can provide exactly this.

Consider, for example, what “epochal” change means in the context of Geologic stratigraphy. If the AWG had formalized the term, the Anthropocene would have been added to the GTS as an epoch in the Quaternary Period within the Cenozoic Era of the Phanerozoic Eon. But what does (or should) this mean for critical social and environmental scholarship? The following paragraphs will try to answer this question by briefly highlighting the radically different planetary conditions that characterize different geologic epochs. For the sake of brevity, I will start with the second (and current) era of the Phanerozoic, the Cenozoic, which contains seven different epochs.

The first and oldest of these epochs is the Paleocene, which began with a general spread of fern cover and featured the spread of giant forests, dominated for the first time by flowering plants rather than conifers and their relatives (Davies, 2016). Expanses of woodland raised humidity worldwide as global temperatures rose, impeding the formation of polar icecaps while intense and seasonal rainstorms brough subtropical climates as far north as the Arctic circle. These planetary conditions allowed the diversification of the smaller species that had survived the Chicxulub impact that ended the time of the dinosaurs.

This was followed by the Eocene, which witnessed the spread of mammals to new parts of the world as global temperatures continued to rise and the Indian tectonic plate began to reach Asia, permitting the further diversification of mammals. Later, the Oligocene ended the warm phase of the prior two epochs. By then, Australia had pulled away from Antarctica (which was now over the South Pole) while the circumpolar current of the Southern Ocean cut off the latter from the warm currents of the equator. As Antarctica cooled down, an ice sheet grew over it, dramatically lowering sea levels, oceanic temperatures, and planetary levels of carbon dioxide. This caused the forests that characterized the Paleocene and Eocene to shrink, driving a series of extinctions as drier grasslands expanded. Nonetheless, the cooler, drier conditions favored the global spread of mammals like rodents and early cats and dogs.

The fourth epoch, the Miocene, witnessed yet another set of drastic transformations in the Earth system, including the spread of the prairies and the formation of mountain chains that accelerated the rock weathering process that strips CO₂ from the atmosphere. As cooler climates and drier summers spread, new species of grasses, weeds, and herbaceous plants flourished alongside small seed-eating animals and their predators. Many herbivores went extinct, likely due to seasonal rainfall shifts or lower CO₂ levels that favored more abrasive grasses.

The start of the Pliocene was marked by the onset of the Zanclean flood, a mega flood coming from the Atlantic that refilled the Mediterranean in a span of less than 2 years (Davies, 2016). This epoch featured sea levels higher than today’s, a general absence of ice sheets in the north, a sweltering eastern Pacific, and drastic changes in plant and animal migratory patterns as the two westering American continents came together, forming the Isthmus of Panama. This stretch of land split the Atlantic from the Pacific, changing their temperature and salinity while rearranging the ocean currents that underpinned climate patterns and maintained the state of the earth system. Meanwhile, the Arctic’s glaciers began to grow, developing icesheets at the North Pole to go with those in the south.

The Pleistocene featured a recurring cycle of glacial periods or “ice ages” separated by warmer interglacials. Glacial cycles were governed by slight variations in the Earth’s tilt, wobble, and distance to the sun, which subtly altered solar heat distribution. Though minor on their own, these changes triggered powerful feedbacks, altering planetary dynamics like ocean circulation. Together, these processes repeatedly reshaped the carbon cycle and Earth’s climate state. This brings us to the ending epoch of the Holocene, which began ~11,700 years before the present and has featured relatively warm global temperatures, stable planetary conditions, the rise and fall of human civilizations, and the birth and destructive power of capitalism, colonialism, and militarism (to name a few).

Terra Incognita, or the anthropocene Earth

As this brief survey of the Earth’s most recent epochs demonstrates, the geological record makes evident the centrality of climate to the course of geologic intervals, the inseparability of organic and inorganic factors in the course of Earth history, and the planetary conditions that characterize “epochal” Earth state transformations (Davies, 2016) – changes that Thomas et al. (2020) characterize as “almost like a succession of very different planets” (22). Therefore, if stratigraphers are correct in their assessment of the Anthropocene as a currently unfolding epochal shift in the Earth system, then we truly are venturing into terra incognita. From this perspective, entering the Anthropocene epoch means, quite literally, having to inhabit an unimaginably strange new world that is sure to render obsolete the conceptual repertoires that have dominated social and political imagination in the last few centuries as well as the institutional arrangements through which the world’s nations are trying to confront such challenges today (e.g. annual UNFCCC summits informed by IPCC reports produced through the empirics of ESS).

As Stengers (2015) explains, the magnitude of the changes that the Earth system is undergoing can only be described as the “intrusion” of an indifferent Gaia into human affairs that signals a profound need for societal transformation and the arrival of a radically new planetary regime. Gaia is an intruder in the sense that nothing in modernity had been prepared, thought, planned, predicted, or instituted for life under its appearance. At the ontological level, she can only be described as a type of unprecedented transcendence that does not have the types of noble qualities that would allow us to invoke her as an arbiter (e.g. of social problems), guarantor (e.g. of civilizational progress), or resource (e.g. for human projects). Epistemologically, this means that the consequences of Gaia’s intrusion are as unknowable and unpredictable as Gaia is indifferent to human affairs, interests, motivations, and responses. She intrudes on us whether we like it or not and shows little interest in our response, but is here to stay, nonetheless. In Holloway’s (2022) words, “Just when another world no longer seemed possible, it became inevitable” (p. 3).

Therefore, to assume that Gaia will respond in specific ways to human interventions (e.g. geoengineering) is already to expect too much from her. Instead, Gaia – or, rather, the arriving Anthropocene Earth – makes us lose our bearings, reminding us that the Earth is not arranged for our pleasure or benefit, in turn heralding the end of progress as a guiding myth of contemporary society. Such is the nature of the claim that the Earth is undergoing geologically epochal changes. But it is precisely this that is often overlooked by dominant debates about the Anthropocene, where the object of critique has been ESS’ formulation of the Anthropocene, which generally proposes a “thermostat” vision of the Earth as a system whose biogeochemical inputs and outputs may be regulated through concerted human intervention. The popularity of this style of climate science is not surprising given its political and institutional usefulness: if we miss our targets one year, we can set more ambitious targets for the following one.

Such characterizations of the Anthropocene clash with classical Geological accounts of planetary processes, which resist the climate reductionism (Hulme, 2011) of Earth System models that elevate climate as a dominant factor determining our planetary future. Instead, classical Geology confronts us with a thoroughly “inhuman” geos: geologic matter and processes that are far beyond human control, timescales, comprehension, or prediction. This is different from discussions of the Earth and the planetary that analytically prioritize the planet’s biogeochemical cycles and their vulnerability or responsiveness to human activity.

The eight theses discussed above do not engage directly with these types of geologic processes, featuring instead a commitment to human temporalities and scales of change that are commonly discussed in the context of ESS and that are traceable back to either the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, the start of the Industrial Revolution, or the onset of the Atomic Age. Even when looking into the future, this work tends to gaze only as far as the year 2100, jumping hastily from there to imagined futures of eco-modernist, more-than-human, or apocalyptic planetary conditions (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2017). In both the backward- and forward-facing gaze of the eight theses, what we encounter are stories of empire, capital, and technology that pay little attention to the true magnitude of the Earth’s transformational capacity: the intrusion of an arriving Anthropocene Earth whose radical alterity we can only begin to theorize by taking seriously the insights of classical Geology into the planet’s indifferent capacity for self-differentiation.

Until recently, modernity had witnessed the organization of human life according to our knowledge of a generally responsive and predictable Holocene Earth that permitted the development of conceptual and institutional architectures whose legitimacy depended on the stability of planetary conditions (e.g. territorial boundaries). As we bid goodbye to the Holocene Earth, the question becomes that of what conceptual and institutional innovations will have to replace these end-of Holocene inventions – for it is increasingly evident that the coming Anthropocene Earth is as hostile to these as to our efforts to halt its arrival.

Answers to these questions can only be sought in recognition of the intruding arrival of an Anthropocene Earth that, as the eight theses show, continues to be excluded from important discussions about the planetary crisis. Even when the topic of the changing Earth state is taken seriously as the starting point for considerations about how to inhabit the planetary futures that lie ahead, the empirical bases of these discussions are often filtered through the lens of ESS and the ESS-informed IPCC, which is itself committed to the official stance of the UN on climate issues. This work analytically prioritizes smaller magnitudes of planetary change that feed overly optimistic aspirations of stewardship and planning while undermining the Earth’s capacity for self-differentiation. Ultimately, the imagined planetary parameters of these discussions are those of a Holocene Earth whose response to various forms of intervention can be predicted or at least imagined.

Whether such predictions are coming from a place of hyper-humanist fantasies of geoengineering or more-than-human modes of alliance and coexistence, the specter of the Holocene Earth is always present in the form of assumptions about how the planet will or could react to our interventions (e.g. in life-supporting ways). Such approaches are themselves the product of the Holocene Earth and may have worked at a time when planetary conditions provided a degree of familiarity and stability that made it possible to anticipate how the Earth might react to specific types of human actions or relation to the planet. But this might no longer be the case. Currently unfolding epochal transformations and the new metaphysical and epistemological conditions that they confront us with are simply not as receptive to such knowledges, institutions, relations, and intentions.

If the goal is to prepare ourselves to inhabit (or render habitable) an unimaginably strange new world, the task at hand is one of developing strategies for responding swiftly and methodologically to the planet’s capacity to reorganize its component parts and leap from one operating state to another (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021). To paraphrase Stengers (2015), what is left to do now is not to respond to Gaia itself but to that which provokes her (e.g. unbridled capitalism) and to the consequences of her intrusion (e.g. mass extinction). This will require a greater engagement with classical geo-disciplines, which propose much more comprehensive and sobering accounts of the disruptive potential and historical significance of the planetary crisis, paying close attention to the planet’s brute materiality (Collao Quevedo, 2025). Ultimately, these geo-disciplines confront us with geologic forces and magnitudes of change that are far beyond our control (despite the optimism of climate modelers), challenging us to think beyond considerations about the human condition, computational theories of the Earth system, and overly simplified policy-friendly representations of the planetary crisis.

Conclusion

As the eight theses show, although critical social and environmental scholarship has tried to think seriously through the nature and challenges of the Anthropocene, its engagement with the topic has been limited to the intellectual parameters, metaphysical forms, and epistemological conditions of the Holocene Earth – telling stories of power and responsibility unfolding on a Holocene-centric geo-historical stage. Yet, currently unfolding epochal transformations and the new metaphysical and epistemological conditions that they confront us with are simply not as receptive to modernity’s end-of-Holocene conceptual and institutional toolkit. As I have argued so far, much of this can be attributed to the fact that the magnitude and historical significance of the planetary crisis has been theorized from a Holocene-centric empirical basis that fails to grasp the broader significance of our current geo-historical conjuncture – one that can only be appreciated through the insights of classical geo-disciplines into the deep history and transformational capacities of the Earth.

As such, what we need now more than ever are theories that adequately recognize the instability, unpredictability, and unknowability of matter, relations, and environmental conditions in a planet undergoing geologic magnitudes of change – that is, theories that recognize that, regardless of where the boundary between the Holocene and the Anthropocene is located, undergoing geologically significant transformations means that nothing will be as it was before. Indeed, we are on the way to inhabiting a strange new world that is as unknowable as it is unpredictable: a veritable “end of the end of history” (Holloway, 2022) that challenges the social sciences and humanities to seek new empirical and theoretical grounds for developing effective institutional and ethico-onto-epistemological interventions (Collao Quevedo, 2025) without confining their analyses to the human condition or to the Holocene Earth as the background against which these interventions will take place.

Classical geo-disciplines, I have argued, provide such resources for theorizing the severity of the planetary crisis and our ability to respond to it, helping critical social and environmental researchers overcome some of the challenges of theorizing in systematic and empirically informed ways the significance of unfolding Earth state transformations. A good place to start exploring how to incorporate these geoscientific insights into critical social and environmental thought is the work that geoscientists themselves are undertaking to transform geo-disciplines’ relation to pressing social and environmental issues. While this work has not received as much attention as the scholarship discussed above, it offers important resources for thinking differently about geologic knowledge, matter, and processes. Of particular interest here are current efforts to develop the embryonic fields of “Critical Geology” and “Geoethics,” which feature important critical inquiries into the culture, imaginaries, and methodological assumptions that underpin geo-disciplines, Geology as a realm of knowledge production with a diverse epistemic landscape, and the social and ethical responsibilities of the geosciences (Bobrowsky et al., 2018; Chilean Geoethics Group, 2024; Dixon et al., forthcoming; Dixon et al., 2025; IAPG, 2024; Pico, 2023). Together, these emerging fields of research may provide important resources for inquiry into the political, analytic, and institutional requirements of life on a planet undergoing geologically significant magnitudes of change.