• Corpus ID: 208005318

Racism and the Anthropocene

@inproceedings{Pulido2018RacismAT,
  title={Racism and the Anthropocene},
  author={Laura Pulido},
  year={2018},
  url={https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:208005318}
}

• L. Pulido
• Published 2018
• Environmental Science, Sociology

To what extent has racism contributed to the Anthropocene? Although there have been heated debates on who, what, and where has caused the Anthropocene, there has been relative silence on the question of race. Discussions of liability are difficult under the best of circumstances, and including racism would certainly make them harder. But does that warrant ignoring it? Those parties most culpable for creating a new geologic era have actively sought to erase the power geometries that have… 

To what extent has racism contributed to the Anthropocene? Although there have been heated debates on who, what, and where has caused the Anthropocene, there has been relative silence on the question of race. Discussions of liability are difficult under the best of circumstances, and including racism would certainly make them harder. But does that warrant ignoring it? Those parties most culpable for creating a new geologic era have actively sought to erase the power geometries that have produced it. Consequently, much of the Anthropocene discourse, especially emanating from the Global North, portrays it as a global problem that we have all contributed to. In response to such framings, Malm and Hornborg have suggested that the term “Anthropocene” is a misnomer, as it obscures the fact that only a relatively small percentage of the global population is actually responsible for and has benefited from the conditions that produced it. On those occasions when such disparities are raised, they typically emphasize the chasm between rich and poor, or “developed” and “developing” countries, as if the geography of wealth and power was somehow nonracial.