Bottom: world measured by climate-related death
Earth system crisis, which includes climate change, mass extinction, ocean acidification, sea level rise, nitrogen increase, and other human-induced alterations to the biosphere, is a decolonial crisis. Africa is set to pay the human price for Western consumption and with the onset of drought and desertification throughout the continent it is already doing so.
Anti-racist science understands evolution as “niche construction.” Capitalism has instead aspired to totality. How do we decolonize and construct anti-racist ways of seeing and thinking the Earth system? South African scholar-activist Lesley Green ties together Rhodes Must Fall, decolonizing and the Anthropocene. Her edited collection Contested Ecologies offers some possibilities–read her introduction and especially Harry Garuba’s piece: “On animism, modernity/colonialism, and the African order of knowledge: Provisional reflections.”
Visual activist Brian Holmes brings the Anthropocene into the city.
For background, see my essay “It’s Not the Anthropocene, It’s The White Supremacy Scene.”