Since the pivotal summer of 2022 and yet another failed COP, it has become increasingly clear that we are not returning to the Holocene. The fantasy of a stable climate, a reliable ecosystem and a world that politely accommodates human activity is over. What we have instead is a chaotic and accelerating planetary crisis, conveniently attributed to a vague and universalized concept—”humanity.”
This crisis has a name, but it’s not “the Anthropocene.” That term, with its neat Greek etymology and its implicit universality, suggests that all humans are equally responsible for the mess we’re in. It is a linguistic sleight of hand that disguises the real culprit: a system designed for endless extraction, exploitation and accumulation at any cost.
The Anthropocene as a convenient cover story
The term Anthropocene—meaning the age of humanity—claims to describe an era in which human activity is the dominant force shaping the planet. The problem is not that this description is entirely wrong. The problem is what it conceals. The term treats “humanity” as a singular, undifferentiated mass, as if an Indigenous farmer in Bolivia and an oil executive in Texas are equally responsible for carbon emissions. It turns a system designed for profit into a species-wide failing, shifting blame onto the entire population while obscuring the specific structures of power, wealth and extraction that have driven the planet to this point.
The idea that “humanity” is destroying the planet is convenient. It keeps the conversation focused on personal responsibility, lifestyle changes and vague calls for collective action while ensuring that the power structures responsible for the crisis remain untouched. The Anthropocene narrative allows CEOs, oil barons and financial elites to lump themselves into the same category as subsistence farmers and precarious gig workers. It implies that we are all equally at fault and therefore equally powerless to stop it.
This is how the system defends itself. It is not enough to extract and exploit—capitalism must also distribute the blame.It does this through media narratives about individual consumption, carbon footprints and overpopulation. It tells you that recycling your plastic bottles is an ethical act but questioning the corporations churning out millions of tons of waste is “unrealistic.” It asks whether you really need to drive a car but never whether car-dependent infrastructure is itself an absurdity.
The historical context: how capitalism and colonialism engineered the crisis
The Anthropocene does not explain how we got here. If “humanity” has always been capable of reshaping the planet, why didn’t this crisis start thousands of years ago? The truth is that environmental devastation is not an inevitable outcome of human existence—it is a direct result of a system built to extract as much as possible from people and nature for profit.
The real rupture in planetary history is not the general emergence of human societies—it is the consolidation of capitalism. Some scholars, like Jason W. Moore, argue that the Capitalocene began not in the 20th century with industrialization but in the 15th and 16th centuries with the rise of colonialism, the global plantation economy and the commodification of land, labor and life itself. The industrial revolution did not appear out of nowhere; it was fueled by centuries of violent land grabs, genocide and resource extraction.
The massive environmental destruction we see today is inseparable from the history of colonial expansion. European empires plundered ecosystems across Africa, Asia and the Americas, deforesting vast regions for plantations, mining resources for industry and building infrastructures that funneled wealth toward the imperial core. The destruction of forests, the draining of wetlands and the conversion of entire landscapes into sites of monoculture were not “human” activities—they were economic and political projects that served the interests of capital.
This history is not over. Today, the same logic continues under new names: neocolonialism, neoliberalism and financialized capitalism. Multinational corporations extract oil, minerals and agricultural products from the Global South while Western financial institutions dictate economic policies that force countries into dependence on resource exploitation. The world’s largest fossil fuel companies—most of them based in the U.S., Europe and China—are responsible for the vast majority of emissions, yet the climate narrative continues to frame the problem as the result of “humanity” as a whole.
Global inequality and the blame game
The Global North—the industrialized, heavily polluting consumption-driven core of the capitalist world system—has spent decades pretending that environmental collapse is either everyone’s fault or nobody’s fault. Western media routinely portrays the Global South as the problem, whether through panic about overpopulation or patronizing calls for “sustainable development” that ignore centuries of colonial extraction. Meanwhile, Europe and North America continue to consume far more than their fair share of planetary resources, externalizing waste and pollution onto the very nations they blame.
Calls for sustainability rarely target the billionaire class that generates more emissions in a week than most people will in a lifetime. They don’t question the logic of endless growth, the financial institutions that fuel ecological destruction or the governments that subsidize fossil fuel giants. Instead, they focus on individual behavior—urging the world’s poorest to tighten their belts while the ultra-rich charter private jets to climate summits.
The Capitalocene: naming the real crisis
If we are to address this crisis, we need to stop talking about it as if “humanity” is to blame. The problem is not some inherent human tendency toward destruction—it is a specific economic system with specific rules, incentives and mechanisms of extraction. This is why the term Capitalocene is necessary. It identifies the real driver of the crisis: capitalism’s relentless demand for growth, its dependence on fossil fuels, its disregard for ecological limits and its ability to turn even catastrophe into profit.
The Capitalocene does not just describe an era. It forces a question: What would a world beyond capitalism look like?If capitalism is the system that created this crisis, then solving it means dismantling that system—not tweaking it, not reforming it but replacing it with something that does not depend on ecological destruction for its survival.
Beyond the Anthropocene narrative: a call to action
The idea that we are all responsible for the climate crisis is a lie designed to keep us passive. The idea that the system responsible for this crisis can be reformed is equally absurd. The choice before us is not whether we should transition to a sustainable economy but whether we allow the same economic forces that created this disaster to dictate what comes next.
If we accept the logic of the Anthropocene, we accept a world where the ultra-rich get to manage collapse while everyone else suffers the consequences. If we accept the logic of the Capitalocene, we recognize that this crisis is not the result of human nature—it is the result of capitalism’s nature. And like every system before it, capitalism is not inevitable. It can be dismantled.
The question is not whether we have the power to stop this system. The question is whether we are willing to use it.