"A Genealogy for the End of the World": An essay by Travis Holloway (Keywords: Anthropocene;Climate Change;Counter-history;Justice;Decolonial Thought)

From The Philosopher, vol. 108, no. 2 ("Questioning Power")

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Our planet has entered into an era of instability for the first time in about 11,500 years. Biologists warn that a “sixth extinction” is underway, while geologists confirm that we have long left the Holocene, a period in the Earth’s history where humans and nonhumans were able to flourish alongside one another (holos). We no longer imagine a safe and sublime refuge from “nature” like Kant or Shelley. We encounter intense storms and tides of algae like pendulums our species set into motion – ones that now swing back at us with a force of their own. Culturally and philosophically, we are trading in our lyrics and confessions about the earth for apocalyptic epics set in cosmic space and deep time. We think about where we’ll live according to the melting of glaciers. We measure critical thresholds of carbon in the air. And we talk casually about the end of the world.

On the brink of ecological disaster, attempts at a new frontier are ubiquitous – flights and departures that, like Sputnik or medieval theology, promise to catapult us out of this world. An Instagram ad pops up with a single white man sitting padmāsana before the bare, amber plateaus of the American Southwest. A different ad on my way to work invites me to be a “pioneer” on “a new frontier.” Elon Musk. The Fyre Festival. And, of course, governments that abandoned their constituents and the planet long ago. “From the 1980s on,” describes Bruno Latour, “the ruling classes…concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone else…. [They] stopped purporting to lead and began instead to shelter themselves from the world. We are experiencing all the consequences of this flight, of which Donald Trump is merely a symbol….” From hurricanes to pandemics, many are now aware that our current governments will likely not prevent the next disaster or in some cases even try to save us from it. It is up to us to start something new.

Can philosophy help us respond before catastrophe? Can it help us respond better in catastrophe’s midst? Can it raise this moment to the level of thought in a way that sharpens our understanding of it, touches us, and introduces the possibility of a different future?

I think one of the critical tasks confronting philosophers today is to engage seriously with the periodization of a new geological epoch before us, the so-called “Anthropocene,” and offer a contrasting narrative, a counterhistory, of what it has meant to be a “human being” in this era. Like the geologists attempting to date and describe the birth of the Anthropocene epoch, philosophers have tools for periodization and historical description that lead them to tell the story of anthrōpoi in a significantly different way. Philosophical genealogies interpret prevailing historical narratives with suspicion, search for alternative discontinuities or transitional events, and differentiate between those with power and those without it. And whereas master narratives about history often leave us with a false, immobilizing sense that no past or future exists outside of them, counterhistories direct us to events and ways of life that are external to these narratives. What I am proposing here, ultimately, is a certain philosophical inheritance of the Anthropocene that reappropriates or detourns its predominant narrative – with the hope that this might lead to a different future.

My specific intervention is to sketch a genealogy or counterhistory of what it has meant to be a “human being” and its other in the Anthropocene epoch. Thus far the predominant Anthropocene narrative, put forward by atmospheric chemists, stratigraphers, and historians, has focused on the ecological impact and responsibility of humans as a totality or species. This narrative has been accused of obfuscating the ways in which “man” has historically been differentiated in terms of power, subjugation, and responsibility. To begin with, it has told a supposedly universal story of “man” from the point of view of Europe and the Global North, and it has omitted entirely the perspective of what Sylvia Wynter once called the “Human Other.” Using the resources of genealogy and historical modes of thought, I propose a counterhistorical narrative of anthropogenic events. This project would excavate an unrecognized archive – of colonization, slavery, plantations, fossil capitalism, heteropatriarchy, war, and other scenes of power and subjection – in the geological strata of the Earth. For example, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the reforestation of their land is actually registered by an unlikely decrease in carbon dioxide in the ice cores from the same period. What else are we able to document or know in this way?

What the Anthropocene narrative offers is extremely tempting in another regard: In a neoliberal culture of the self, it describes human beings as a collective. It has the potential to introduce a profound sense of time and events after the so-called “end of history.” This includes an eschatology that further collectivizes, historicizes, and politicizes the public before the threat of climate change, offering what some believe is a new approach to solidarity at a time when solidarity has been difficult to find or produce. A counterhistory of human beings is needed to rewrite this story with subaltern histories and anthropogenic events, and to better specify the distinct cultural, historical, and political processes that have brought us to this place.

Philosophers sometimes forget that telling a story is a concept too, especially one about history. One reason for telling this particular story is to correct the narrative of the Anthropocene – to clarify who and what is responsible for this supposedly universal “age of man” in an effort to better respond to it. Another, less obvious reason is to think about why it seems important today to tell this type of story, an epic, and to engage with the question of how we should tell it. The Anthropocene narrative does not begin with my own subjective life, just as archaeologies and genealogies, as Michel Foucault put it in The Archaeology of Knowledge, “do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same,” but offer us “a method of historical analysis freed from the anthropological theme.” In an era of capitalism that depends on “self-capital,” this story offers us a poetics not of individual adventure, confession, or self-examination, but one of history, politics, and all that surrounds us, including everything that I am not. This poetics has the potential to help us see ecological issues not just through the lens of private concerns or individual moral responsibility, but in terms of an entire biosphere, and in terms of the kind of collective actions that we must take if we are to find a way out of the Anthropocene.

We live in a period of history that is defined, supposedly, by what it means to be human. If Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” and Foucault’s The Order of Things clarified “the end of man” in theory, culture, and art, recent books like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, or Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement narrate an epic about what it means, historically, to belong to the human species. Surprisingly, it was neither writers nor filmmakers, but geologists who have presented the most prominent and accessible narrative about this “age of man.” Their story begins after the last glacial period, or about 11,500 years ago, when the Earth entered into a relatively stable climate period known as the Holocene in which human civilization was able to flourish in a temperate climate alongside the rest of the Earth.

Then, at a February 2000 meeting of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, the Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen proposed that we were living in a new epic: “We’re no longer in the Holocene, but in an Anthropocene!” In an article published that year called “The Anthropocene,” Crutzen and the ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer argued that we had entered into a new, human-dominated geological epoch in the Earth’s history; they posited that this geological timescale began with the invention of the steam engine (and its use of fossil energy). By 2016, a group of prominent geologists had formally concluded that the Earth had entered into a new era, the “Anthropocene,” so named because it is an age defined by human impact on the planet.

The name and narrative that Stoermer and Crutzen had imprinted upon this new timescale – the Anthropocene, an age of humans or anthrōpoi – would define our understanding of its history by attributing it to the human species as a totality. In a landmark 2009 essay entitled “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” the historian and postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty endorsed the implications of this collective human “we” in the context of history and the humanities. There is, Chakrabarty wrote, “an emergent, new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of the danger that is climate change.” For Chakrabarty, there was a new sense of history that “arises from a shared sense of a catastrophe” and posed the “question of a human collectivity, an us” in the entrance to the age of man or “Anthropocene.” This involved thinking about humans as a collective “geological force.” Others, like the celebrated Indian author Amitav Ghosh, confirmed Chakrabarty’s position, writing: “Anthropogenic climate change...is the unintended consequence of the very existence of human beings as a species. …[G]lobal warming is ultimately the product of the totality of human actions over time” and “[e]very human who has ever lived has played a part” in it.

Yet as Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue in The Shock of the Anthropocene, Crutzen’s “Anthropocene” and Chakbrabarty’s “universal history of humans” reinscribed and gave force to a wealthy, white, Eurocentric, and revisionist narrative of history. To begin with, the Anthropocene narrative presented “an abstract humanity uniformly involved…and uniformly to blame” for catastrophic climate change. Meanwhile “Chakbrabarty,” they wrote, “formerly a Marxist historian and a leading figure in subaltern studies, explained that the main critical categories he had previously applied to understand history had become obsolete in the time of the Anthropocene. […] [B]y placing humanity in the narrative as a universal agent, indifferently responsible, [Chakrabarty abandoned] the grid of Marxist and postcolonial reading in favour of an undifferentiated humanity.” The geological action of the human species, they argued, “is the product of cultural, social and historical processes,” and for this reason “an undifferentiated anthrōpos as the cause of the Earth’s new geological regime is scarcely sufficient.”

Elsewhere, Kathyrn Yusoff argued in her 2018 book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None that the Anthropocene narrative is “White Geology” pure and simple. What is needed, she wrote, is a “redress to the White Geology of the Anthropocene” that neutralizes, consolidates power, and reclaims “innocence” in its name. “To be included in the ‘we’ of the Anthropocene is to be silenced by a claim to universalism that fails to notice its subjugations,” argued Yusoff. “The Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of the world,” she wrote, “but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence.” Yusoff showed that rather than being an agent of the age of man or “Anthropocene,” being black and subjugated meant belonging to realm of the inhuman. She presented a counterhistory, a “Black Anthropocene,” that narrates a division between the human and the inhuman and tells the stories of the inhuman.

In the end, these criticisms only reinforced the sense that a new epoch is upon us – one that has the potential to collectivize, historicize, and politicize us into something more than neoliberalism’s culture of the self. There is a sense, in other words, that this epoch might initiate a shift in our poetics away from individual life, literary confession, and “human capital” towards the oceans that surround us and the histories beneath our feet. After decades of neoliberal government and economic individualism, could we break up the concrete of our culture of the self and rebuild public spheres that include something like what Michel Serres calls a “natural contract”? Could we build the kinds of worlds, this time around, that do not destroy someone else’s world or divide a world into two? My wager is that this project begins at least in part with a counterhistory that archives the forms of life that were colonized and subjugated by what Europeans thought it meant to be “human.”

***

How do we tell the story of human beings begetting an Anthropocene more accurately? Some think a better narrative begins with the name, the title of the story. “Naming can…be a covering over,” writes Kathyrn Yusoff. Nothing less than “the story of the Earth is at stake” in this name, adds Donna Haraway. “Surely such a transformative time on earth must not be named the Anthropocene!” she writes.

For many, the name “Anthropocene” implies a universal, undifferentiated, and equally responsible anthrōpos. As an alternative, Anna Tsing, with others, has offered the name “Plantationocene” to describe a development that brought together colonialism, slavery, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy in order to exert a new kind of control over the land. Bonneuil and Fressoz offer a host of alternative names like “Thanatocene” that would begin this story as an age of war, or “Anglocene,” since Great Britain and the United States made up 57 percent of all emissions as recently as 1950. Haraway, among others, has argued that “if we could only have one word for these…times,” “surely it must be the Capitalocene.”

Naming is also, of course, an attempt to date and describe something at the moment of its birth, or what in philosophy is called genealogy. Like the stratigraphers who search for “Golden Spikes” that begin geological epochs (i.e. the agricultural revolution, the birth of the steam engine, etc.), philosophers like Nietzsche, Foucault, and others have long taught us how to search for events, ruptures, or discontinuities that indicate the transition from one period to another. If geologists name the major anthropogenic events or “Golden Spikes” as the “Columbian exchange,” the dawn of the nuclear age, or the mid-20th century population surge known as the “Great Acceleration,” Kathyrn Yusoff provides us with a counterhistory of these periods, reminding us, for example, that Christopher Columbus carried slaves on his second voyage to the Americas, and that the United States conducted early nuclear testing on the Marshall Islands precisely because the US did not count the indigenous population there as fully human.

In addition to contesting the Anthropocene narrative, and offering a counterhistorical narrative of anthropogenetic events that includes the shadow archives of the inhuman, philosophers have also developed a number of concepts that are especially helpful for defining what precipitated this new geological epoch. Haraway’s work is flooded with new concepts like critters or kin, defined as fellow “earthlings…in the deepest sense” whom we “make-with, become-with, compose-with.” Yusoff introduces the notion of the “geosocial,” or the way in which racial, gender, sexual and class differences are inscribed in the strata of the earth. Elsewhere, Quentin Meillassoux has generated concepts like the “great outdoors,” defined as an “outside which was not relative to us”; the “arche-fossil,” which indicates “the existence of an ancestral reality…that is anterior to terrestrial life”; or “factiality,” which, he speculates, would mean “to know what there is when we are not.”

Concepts like these clean the rear-view mirrors and expose the blind spots of Modern philosophy, and they are a foray into new avenues for thought and art in this epoch. As Haraway remarks, what this new epoch finally makes indisputable is that “human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old laws of Western philosophy and political economics, [have] become unthinkable.” We can no longer pretend to be “good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts, act[ing] alone.” Similarly, Meillassoux critiques the failures of “correlationism” after Kant, which he describes as, quoting a phenomenologist, when “the world is only world insofar as it appears to me as world”; in other words, when there is no reality that exists independently of me, the subject.

***

In lieu of renaming the “Anthropocene,” I propose a certain philosophical inheritance of the term: a counterhistory of anthrōpos (and its other) for the anthropogenic timescale in question, that is, at some point over the last 550 years or so. Foucault offered us one account of the invention of “man” in Les Mots et les Choses, or what he called “an archaeology of the human sciences.” Elsewhere, Rosi Braidotti reminded us that the idea of man from the Renaissance to the 19th century was always a particular idea of man: a “male…assumed to be white, European, head of a heterosexual family and its children, and able-bodied….a full citizen of a recognized polity.” Yet it was Sylvia Wynter who racialized and contextualized this notion of man in the context of its colonial other, laying out a trajectory for thinking what she referred to as “the Human Other.”

Wynter wrote, “the new ‘idea of order’…enacted by the dynamics of the relation between Man…and its subjugated Human Others (i.e. Indians and Negroes)…was to be brought into existence as the foundational basis of modernity.” She continued: “[I]t was to be the discourses of this knowledge, including centrally those of anthropology, that would function to construct all the non-Europeans…as the physical referent of…its irrational or subrational Human Other to its new ‘descriptive statement’ of Man as a political subject.” According to Wynter, “the West’s transformation of the indigenous peoples of the Americas/the Caribbean (culturally classified as Indians, indios/indias), together with the population group of the enslaved peoples of Africa, transported across the Atlantic (classified as Negroes, negros/negras)…that of the Human Other to…the ostensibly only normal human, Man.”

For me, some of the most compelling passages of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None are the clarion moments when Yusoff draws upon this conception in the context of the Anthropocene, explaining that to be black, indigenous, or enslaved during these years meant to fall outside of the human or anthrōpos. It was a division between the human and the inhuman, she argues, which we can register as early as 1493 or Columbus’ second voyage on which he carried slaves, that should begin – if anything should begin – the era of the anthrōpos or the Anthropocene.

In the context of the Anthropocene debate, we should listen to Wynter and Yusoff and others as they contextualize what it has meant to be a human being and when. For Yusoff, this means narrating a “counterhistory of geological relations” that tells the story of the effects of anthrōpoi on the inhuman. Perhaps all that we can expect from this counterhistory is to document what happened, to remove the weight of guilt from those who were not responsible, or even to create a speculative time capsule for the end of the world. But one hopes that such a genealogy could also respond to history again, produce assemblages that repair our culture of the self, and begin to struggle for what Jean-Luc Nancy has called the life of “all of the living together.”

It seems likely that this epoch will intensify our disparities and make all of our problems far worse. But it is also possible to imagine, in the face of this catastrophe, the creation of more just and equitable worlds. Could living at the door of such a crisis compel us to change the way we treat one another and the Earth? Could it collectivize us and politicize us into something more than neoliberalism’s culture of the self, and something less than entrenched borders and national identities? How might philosophy play a role in this? As Jacques Derrida once wrote in Advances:

It is up to us to make the world survive…to make what ‘we’ inadequately call the human earth survive, an earth that we know is finite and must exhaust itself in an end. But ‘we’ will have to change all these names, beginning with ‘ours’…names that will come upon us more than we will choose them.

How, then, might philosophers inherit the name “Anthropocene”? For, as put it elsewhere, even as we may choose to be “delegates of this word,” “[w]e do not yet know what we have inherited.”

Travis Holloway is a poet, translator, and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Farmingdale. He lives in New York City and writes frequently about politics, art, and ecology. He is the co-translator of two books by Jean-Luc Nancy and co-author of Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America. Reach him at hollowtw@farmingdale.edu.

 First published online on 15th February 2026

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