Feminist thinkers have taken issue with the idea of the Anthropocene almost since its inception: to name the human as a geological force is to mask the fact that not all humans share equal responsibility for the current course of anthropogenic destruction. Moreover, the processes of industrialization, colonization, urbanization, and extractivism that lie at the heart of the idea of the Anthropocene as an epoch are clearly bound up with issues of gender, race, class, and colony. At one level, failure to name the epochal “force” more precisely takes crucial attention away from the specific anthropogenic activities and relations that are the largest engines of planetary ruination.

Read the full review.