2017/02/08 by Dipesh Chakrabarty · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #Climate Change and Geoengineering #Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature #Religion, Ecology, and Ethics
paper · doi:10.1177/0263276417690236
openalex publication_date 2017/02/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Discussion of global climate change is shaped by the intellectual categories developed to address capitalism and globalization. Yet climate change is only one manifestation of humanity’s varied and accelerating impact on the Earth System. The common predicament that may be anticipated in the Anthropocene raises difficult questions of distributive justice – between rich and poor, developed and developing countries, the living and the yet unborn, and even the human and the non-human – and may pose a challenge to the categories on which our traditions of political thought are based. Awareness of the Anthropocene encourages us to think of humans on different scales and in different contexts – as parts of a global capitalist system and as members of a now-dominant species – although the debate is, for now, still structured by the experiences and concepts of the developed world.