The AFF is emblematic of the Popular Anthropocene – an imperial imaginary fraught with the ‘Human vs. Nature’ binary, a narrative of collective responsibility which invisiblizes the historical significance of imperial class structures. The eco-catastrophe narrative enables Green Authoritarianism and ignores the present reality for the Global South

The Environmentalism of the Rich, Or, Why the Popular Anthropocene Is Part of the Problem The Popular Anthropocene has studiously avoided these questions.61 As we have begun to see, there are two Anthropocenes. One is the Geological Anthropocene. This is the scholarly conversation about planetary history, centering on so- called “golden spikes” in the geological record. The other, the Popular Anthropocene, is a conversation over the historical causes of – and the proposed institutional, market, and technical solutions to – our deepening climate crisis. The line between the two Anthropocenes is fuzzy and porous. This is not accidental. Rather, it concerns how scholarly and media gatekeepers license “natural scientists” to speak freely about matters of policy and world history. The powers-that-be can sleep easily at night knowing that leading climate scientists will rarely upset the ideological apple cart and identify the capitalist class and capitalogenic climate crisis as the core of the problem. None of this is new. The 1968 birth of the Environmentalism of the Rich was in part a creation of a mass media apparatus desperate to manufacture consent at a moment of profound legitimation crisis.62 One could scarcely pick up a newspaper or magazine in the year before the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970) without reading about “the” environmental crisis. When Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, he was greeted with fawning media coverage – in stark contrast to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring six years earlier.63 Carson had attacked herbicide and pesticide manufacturers; Ehrlich demonized poor Indians allegedly unable or unwilling to limit their fertility. Carson’s science led her audience to identify corporations as a political problem; Ehrlich’s populationism identified the Third World as the problem. Just as The Population Bomb appeared, Garrett Hardin published “The Tragedy of the Commons.”64 It’s the most influential Environmentalist article ever published. Hardin, a biologist, was also a well‑ known eugenicist. His worldview resonated deeply with Malthus’s thinking two centuries earlier. The danger, he wrote in 1969, was that “poor women” might “outbreed the rich.” If “poverty is even in part genetically caused (as it surely must be) … class discrimination in the availability of … birth control must have a dysgenic effect.”65 Published in Science, the world’s leading scientific journal along with Nature, “The Tragedy of the Commons” purported to explain the environmental crisis by recourse to an avaricious and anti‑social human nature. In 1968 – Wallerstein called it a “world revolution”66 – the subtext was clear. The selfish and irrational savages of the Third World must be subdued, their appetite checked by imperial coercion: a word that appears thirteen times in a five‑ page article! It’s worth underlining an undisputed fact: Hardin knew nothing about actually existing commons. Such arrangements are amongst human history’s elemental socio‑ ecological relations – and even at the time, they were well known in the story of England’s early modern enclosure movements. His historical ignorance did not, however, prevent the editors of Science from publishing the article, or countless other scholars from reproducing its statements as ontological fact. Here is the violence of Good Science as ideology: it enables the most ideologically charged premises of human nature to present themselves as “natural laws.” So it is with leading earth- system scientists today. Many are happy to dispense their wisdom on the geohistorical drivers of the climate crisis: population, technology, urbanization, and so on. When figures like Johan Rockström tell us that “bankers and executives” are necessary to solve the climate crisis, virtually everyone in the mass media, and nearly all academics, are happy to give them a pass.67 (No matter that Rockström is the Chief Scientist for Conservation International, a billionaire- funded NGO deeply complicit in corporate greenwashing and the financialization of nature.68) This reminds us of the flexible boundary between the Geological and Popular Anthropocenes – and that this flexibility is neither innocent nor accidental. Ruling strata favor the Popular because it does not question the relations of power, re/production, and thought that created the climate crisis. The Anthropocene reduces these relations to technological, technocratic, and market‑ oriented fixes. Here, the Popular Anthropocene is revealed as an “anti‑politics machine.”69 Like most Environmentalism, it converts political questions of inequality and injustice into technical and scientific problems to be “solved” and “managed.”70 To appreciate the Popular Anthropocene’s flight from world history, let us consider one of its iconic representations: Felix Müller’s widely circulated figure that accompanies the planetary boundaries argument of Rockström and his colleagues (Figure 1).71 It makes a strong point. The boundaries of major earth- system processes are now being crossed. Extremely serious, non‑linear shifts beckon. What’s causing this epochal transgression of planetary boundaries? For Rockström and virtually all earth‑ system scientists, there’s a simple answer: Humanity. The “human enterprise” – what a deliciously neoliberal phrase! – is drawing the curtain on the Holocene.72 If that phrase, human enterprise, sounds familiar, it’s for good reason. It comes from the authors of the twentieth century’s definitive Malthusian screed, The Population Bomb.73 And just when does this human enterprise start to cause serious trouble for the biosphere? The “logical” and “reasonable” beginning is 1800 74 – even though the major uptick in atmospheric carbonization doesn’t appear until the later nineteenth century, during the “second” industrial revolution, and the origins of modern fossil fuel extraction go back to the early sixteenth century! Two aspects of Müller’s image stand out. One is the assumption that planetary crisis is the creation of the Anthropos: the human enterprise. In this scheme of things, the climate and biodiversity crises have anthropogenic causes. The planetary boundaries image does not invoke change over time, but it is associated with another assumption that does. This is the claim that the origins of planetary crisis are found in the century after 1800, commonly narrated as “the” Industrial Revolution. The formula is simple, comfortable, and therefore tempting: coal plus steam power equals global warming. These two assumptions – turning on anthropogenic change and the 1800 boundary line – have been pivotal to a half‑ century of Green Thought.75 They contribute mightily to a hegemonic imaginary of planetary crisis as the doing of all members of the human [FIGURE 1 OMMITTED] species. And they sustain a historical imagination that presents modernity’s long history of global inequality and violence as secondary to securing “our common future.”76 These assumptions and their ideological basis are frequently explained away. Here’s a recent headline in The Conversation: “The term ‘Anthropocene’ isn’t perfect – but it shows us the scale of the environmental crisis we’ve caused.”77 Replete with references to colonialism and historical transitions, such formulas endorse the imperial bourgeois vision of planetary crisis. Gone from such accounts is the history of capitalism and its class dynamics. Colonialism is – like globalization two decades ago – cleansed of its class character. So too with extractivism, climate apartheid, speciesism, and other environmental bads: they are all generally deployed as academic detergents to wipe our thinking clean from the muck of class analysis.78 This Environmentalist language often sounds radical. In practice, it amounts to little more than professional- managerial- class virtue signaling.79 Such class‑ denialist conceptions of historical process are but a stone’s throw away from the Environmentalism of the Rich and its Malthusian vista, transforming the class dynamics of inequality into anodyne “distributional” questions of the rich and powerful.80 (In what follows, I will abbreviate this Environmentalism with an emphatically uppercase “E.” The counter- tendency is expressed by working class and anti- imperialist environmentalism, often shorthanded as environmental justice.) Such arguments typically redefine the Capitalocene thesis in economic terms – ignoring how Malm and I, our differences notwithstanding, offer critiques of economic reductionism! Simply put, the climate crisis is not merely about distributional consequences; it is about class power in the biosphere. It is extremely dubious to claim that the Popular Anthropocene raises awareness. (So does advertising the latest electric car!) The Environmentalism of the Rich has been telling us that we are living in End Times since 1968.81 If there was a high tide of environmental awareness before the present, it was in the early 1970s.82 The outcome was hardly an ecological revolution. Instead, everywhere in the imperialist countries, Environmentalism readily made its peace with neoliberalism; testimony to the Environmental Imaginary’s Janus‑ faced character.83 The crucial question is the character of the awareness and its willingness to break with capitalism’s business as usual. Figures as diverse as Audre Lorde and Albert Einstein underline the essential idea: the ideas and tools of the ruling class will not solve the problems they have created. The Environmentalism of the Rich and its Popular Anthropocene shapes popular consciousness in ways that are consonant with techno‑scientific authoritarianism.84 Eco‑catastrophism is altogether compatible with Green authoritarianism – a point argued since Environmentalism’s origins in 1968, and already a reality across the Global South.85 This Environmentalism imagines the biosphere – and even regional environments – as somehow outside relations of power, re/production, and inequality. It excises questions of financialization, of homelessness, of precariousness, of hunger, of poverty, of climate apartheid, climate patriarchy and the climate class divide. In short, it presents a political imaginary of planetary crisis that designates questions of democracy as unnecessary. Consider something like the Sixth Extinction.86 This is usually discussed as the “biodiversity crisis.” What is rarely pointed out in these discussions is that the Sixth Extinction isn’t anything like the five previous extinctions on Planet Earth. It’s not the work of an asteroid. It’s not the work of bad technology or inefficient markets or the “imperial mode of living.”87 It’s the work of capital. It is a capitalogenic process – co‑ produced through modernity’s relations of capital, power, and nature. It is not anthropogenic – even if figures like Ehrlich continue to insist that it’s all driven by human overpopulation.88 Overpopulation. That must be a bitter pill to swallow for descendants of the fifty million Native Americans who died in the aftermath of 1492 – a slaving‑ induced movement of genocide that contributed to capitalism’s first great climate crisis in the “long, cold seventeenth century.”89 To underline the point: it was not a disembodied European colonialism that propelled these killing fields; it was an emergent capitalist order hungry for Cheap Labor. The ideology of Cheapness was manifest from the start, expressed in the Prometheanism of the Civilizing Project and its redefinition of indigenous, Celtic, African, female, Slavic, and other populations as “savage.”90 The Popular Anthropocene’s cosmology is built on a simple opposition: Man versus Nature. The conflict, we are told, can be navigated by Enlightened Civilizers endowed with the scientific expertise and institutional‑coercive power to enforce something euphemistically called “earth-system governance.”91 This binary frame is the common sense of planetary crisis today: humans are now threatening to cause planetary breakdown. Such claims might sound innocent enough; they are anything but. The mainstream discussion of anthropogenic climate change short-circuits the conversation we need if we want to envision a politics of planetary sustainability that is also a politics of planetary justice. Let’s walk through the three big questions of today’s planetary crisis. Who and what caused this? When and where did this begin? And how did we get here? This might sound banal, but how we answer these questions decides our politics. The Environmentalism of the Rich, as it coalesced after 1968, delivered a straightforward message: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” The cartoonist Walt Kelly’s iconic 1970 Earth Day poster crystallized that sensibility (see Figure 2). That same year, Richard Nixon sounded a strongly environmentalist theme in his second State of the Union Address: “Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country.”92 When I say that the Anthropocene is an anti‑politics machine, that’s hardly new – as Nixon’s 1970 speech suggests. Before the Anthropocene, there was Spaceship Earth: old wine, new bottle.93 Both speak to a quintessentially modern cosmology of Man vs. Nature, a conflict that can be “realistically” managed with the appropriate technology and rational governance. That cosmology has nourished Environmentalism’s [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] philosophical and historical premises: “we’re all in this together,” and “we created the environmental crisis together.” Like any hegemonic mythology, that cosmology blends truth and illusion. The insistence that we are all connected through webs of life – “On Spaceship Earth … everybody is a member of the crew” – has a kernel of truth.94 But the reality is very different, and no one seriously disputes it. Spaceship Earth has a command structure. Most of us are packed into steerage, and following orders.95 If a metaphorical Spaceship Earth evokes a fanciful sci‑fi space communism, the actual Earth in recent history resembles a Slaveship, not the starship Human Enterprise.96 No doubt Environmentalism’s popular appeal owes much to the specifically capitalist forms of alienation that humans experience – from their work, and from their sense of connection to the rest of life. Environmentalism serves up a lot of comforting language about oneness, reconnection, and healing. But soothing language without revolutionary strategy in an era of climate crisis is not a good thing. We should not be comfortable – but neither should we be terrified. Needed is disconcerting language and unconventional thinking that strikes at the heart of capitalism’s fetishisms: Humanity, Civilization, and Nature above all. The Popular Anthropocene’s claim that the mythical entity, Humanity, is now “overwhelming the great forces of nature” is hardly a value-neutral statement.97 Spreading blame for the trajectory of Slaveship Earth is tantamount to blaming slaves and immigrant workers for imperialism. Saying Humanity has caused planetary crisis is a bit like saying Humanity is responsible for the New World genocide after 1492 – or that Humanity is responsible for the modern slave trade, world wars, or neoliberalism’s Washington Consensus of finance‑driven dispossession. Anyone uttering the phrase “anthropogenic genocide” would be laughed out of the room! Because of course specific relations – of empire, capital, and class – created these disasters. Calling the planetary crisis anthropogenic is a non-explanation. This is worse than a failure of interpretation. Humanity, Civilization, and Nature are not merely words floating in the ether. They are ruling abstractions, reinvented since 1492. The geocultural boundary between Humanity and Nature was central to the New World genocides, to the African slave trade, to modern patriarchy, which defined the rise of capitalism and its Civilizing Project. Indigenous Peoples, Africans, and women – all were cast out of Civilization and into a very different realm, Nature.98 Their lives were rendered expendable, and their labor became cheap, on the reasoned grounds that they were not – or not fully, or not yet – Human. The question of who is – and who is not – Human is therefore at the core of the climate crisis. It’s fundamental to how modern power is structured and legitimated. This is not merely a question of language – although language is important. It’s a question of civilizational praxis in which dominant “material” forces are dialectically bound to “ruling intellectual forces.”99 At the core of that praxis is a knowledge factory that frames reality as a series of binary and hierarchical oppositions: Humanity/Nature, Man/Woman, White/Not-White, Europe/America, and so forth.100 These ruling intellectual forces are real abstractions that not only reflect material relations, but are the necessary symbolic moment of these material relations. When I say that the language of Humanity/Nature has been saturated with profound violence, I don’t just mean symbolic violence. I mean the blood and violence of capitalist development, of colonialism, of domination and exploitation. For good reason, then, the policing of the Humanity/Nature line – through violence, markets, and culture – has been a recurrent feature of capitalist development, from Columbus to the present. And this policing – and sometimes the line itself – has been fiercely contested all along. When movements for justice on questions of sexuality, gender, and race self‑identify as civil or human rights struggles, they register this world-historical boundary between Civilization and Nature. In one way or another, class struggles and boundary struggles are always tightly linked.101 This explains why the language of the Popular Anthropocene is so dangerous. Its premise is a strict divide between Humanity and Nature, a binary code at the heart of the modern exercise of power, production, and profit. The Anthropocene – and the Environmentalism of the Rich – embodies the very system of thought that has created the planetary crisis. It is a unique form of magical thinking to believe that the system of thought, power, and production that created the crisis will solve it.