The anthropocene, as a newly found concept geologists have put forward, has been portrayed as a new geological era caused by the newly found suggestion that ‘humans now dominate the planet’ (Kawa, 2016) and therefore have an impact in causing its geological structure and natural systems to alter. The terms anthropocene and capitalocene have both been used and debated in literature, however both show a dualism in nature and society and how one affects the other.
Humans have become such a driving force on the planet that the debate about whether we are living in a new epoch has arisen. As mentioned in a paper titled ‘The new world of the Anthropocene’ (Zalasiewicz* et al., 2010), since the start of industrialisation, human activity has caused modification to the earth’s landscape to a scale comparable to the one of major events in the geological past, such as major volcanic eruptions and colliding continents. The cause of this new era, as mentioned in the journal, is primarily due to the rise in population in the last 200 years, increasing by almost 7 times, from under a billion in the 1800s to the 7 billion we are today. This is widely referred to as overpopulation and has lead to rapid urbanisation in the last few decades causing both the destruction of natural habitats and an increase in carbon dioxide emissions. The driving mechanism of these unsustainable practices was the industrial revolution in which the necessity of powering modern technological farming methods was necessary to accommodate for the extra billions of people needing to be fed. This led to a huge increase in the use of fossil fuels and therefore the associated effects such as the greenhouse effect and global warming, with data showing that today, the rise of CO2 is over a third of that of pre-industrial levels. This alongside the previous use of CFCs and aerosols by humans at a local scale had a global impact in the form of ozone depletion.
Another reason geologists emphasise that the term ‘anthropocene’ needs to be used is due to the fast growing rate of urbanisation and megacities which has vastly increased rates of erosion and sedimentation, harming the geological structure of the earth. In order for geologists to accept the anthropocene within stratal context on the geological time scale, such as the ‘Jurassic’, stratal successions were necessary in order to approve this era on the geological clock. While observing rock strata geologists have discovered that sediment layers were either human made for example concrete layers that form the bases of our cities, or modified due to human action such as in agricultural fields due to fertilisers and different types of farming. This has been the key to proving that the anthropocene is not just a term to bring media attention to the influence humans have on the environment but more importantly to suggest we have been the main driver of this new geological era.
There is an ongoing debate about whether the term ‘anthropocene’ or ‘capitalocene’ should be used. The capitalocene places an emphasis on the underlying socio-economic system based on markets and consumerism which some academics such as Raj Patel believe is the main cause of environmental harm which has led to this new era (ROAR Magazine, 2018). He suggests that not all people are equally responsible for this environmental degradation and that it is only due to the creation of industrialised capitalism that such detrimental degradation has occurred. Therefore the term ‘capitalocene’ reduces the blame on the individual human but rather establishes it is the fault of the political system which aims to maximise growth through promoting unsustainable consumer behaviour such as the desire for imported goods increasing.
To conclude, both the terms anthropocene and capitalocene are terms which have been put forward by geologists and convey the idea that human behaviour is largely to blame for the depreciating geological condition of the planet since the 19th century. However, the two concepts differ as one places the blame directly on individual human actions, whilst the other one holds the capitalist system of the majority of the world responsible for the degradation of natural resources and changes in air composition leading to rapid climate change and global warming.