Debates of anthropocentrism must engage questions of racial capitalistic expansion – By problematizing these temporal dynamics, a deeper understanding of power dynamics and environment impacts can be achieved

Does this bring to the fore the ways this model is temporal while evading the ‘rhetorical energy’ (Eriksen et al., Citation2012, p. 13) such temporalities mobilize? Yes. The temporal dimensions of the Capitalocene are central to the conversation of the ecological challenges and growing sense of urgency. Debates and analytical frameworks focusing on how to secure a ‘good life’ today and in the future or attempting to alter the unsustainable trajectories of the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene have colonial structures of time at the heart of their epistemes. If colonial time is at the heart of understanding capitalism, then time is also at the heart of understanding the ‘present’ and the ‘history’ of ecological concerns and issues. Racial capitalism co-constitutes certain categories of historical temporality; all historicisms presume these categories as a given. Any debate about to whom the earth belongs and its exhaustion should problematize whether the colonial expansion of the planetary project’s structure of time and temporality (i.e. climate disasters, environmental emergencies) mediates the trajectory of the unfolding of power in the form of events and causal relationships, giving them coherence. Desiring to shame the agents for our planetary crisis personalizes the issues and leads to an impossibility of depicting future and history as ‘history.’ Narrations that depict the creation and evolution of crises in linear temporal terms (i.e. the present is dangerous) or in eschatological orientations by claiming the present orients us toward the ‘threat of the end of time’ (Fagan, Citation2019, pp. 55–63; cited in Rothe, Citation2020, p. 145) are themselves technologies. Not only do they displace conquest and theft long enough to evade the stakes in considering such moments and their un/thinkability, but they also facilitate the ongoing and violent displacements that racial capitalism’s flux of energies and environmental degradation demands. How can we grapple with histories whose temporal operational structures are themselves presumed? And how are we to understand the decolonial and the creation of a planetary whose primary values are not unlimited conquest, growth, and supposed progress when the majority of the world seems to be arriving as a historical afterthought to imperial and colonial power?