On the Ecocene, the Chthulucene, the Ecozoic, and other Holocene successor terms
The term “Anthropocene” has come to be accepted among many intellectuals as the best, or perhaps least worst, name for the geological present, when human activities have come to dominate the planet. It’s still debated among geologists, with “Holocene” or “Late Holocene” preferred by many (and left-leaning social scientists preferring Capitalocene, Technocene, or one of a series of others). But among humanists and popular writers concerned with environmental issues, the verdict can sometimes look as if it’s already in and the Anthropocene is here to stay.
The term’s valence is sometimes taken to be negative (“What a mess we’ve made of things!”), sometimes positive (“We are as gods,” as Stewart Brand has said, and may as well start acting like it), and most frequently a mix of the two (we’ve “ended nature” and are, for better or worse, in control of the wreckage). It rarely carries any assurance that things will continue indefinitely in the way they are going now. And its critics, by now, are legion.
The more optimistic among us like to speculate about a future that does better than the present.
The main dividing line within the ranks of these “optimists” (a word I’ll use loosely) is one that separates technophilic modernists — believers in a “good Anthropocene” who follow Brand’s inclination that humans are “as gods” and who desire, like the biblical God, to shape the world into our image — and those whose estimation of humanity’s capacities is much less sanguine, more humble, and more cautious. The latter, among which I usually count myself, seek not a future dominated by humans (or by machines), but one that allows for the flourishing of a diversity of mutually beneficial relationships among many living beings including humans. (And some split the difference by redefining “good Anthropocene” in more humble terms, or by envisioning wilder fusions of biology, technology, and ecology.)
It’s difficult to articulate a hopeful vision of the future without giving it a name, and several have been proposed.
In the ranks of terms unlikely to catch on very widely, there are Donna Haraway’s darkly captivating “Chthulucene,” Glenn Albrecht’s more functionalist “Symbiocene,” John Michael Greer’s open-ended “Neocene,” and David Abram’s ambivalently optimistic “Humilocene.” (There seems no inherent reason why an epoch of humility, as Abram calls for, couldn’t also be an epoch of humiliations.) A little less jargony is “Ecocene,” now found in the names of schools, journals, and design proposals.
Beyond the “-cene” is Thomas Berry’s geologically more ambitious term “Ecozoic,” which too has come to be used by centers, schools (including my university’s Leadership for the Ecozoic program, which my own EcoCultureLab has emulated in its self-description), and occasionally elsewhere.
The problem with jumping levels from the “-cene” to the “-zoic” — as I’ve come to realize thanks to an innocent question raised about it by my 11 year old son — is that its geological significance suggests the inevitability of catastrophe: “Ecozoic” is intended to be the successor to the Cenozoic in the series “Paleozoic – Mesozoic – Cenozoic” (all of them being part of the Phanerozoic, the era in which life appears), and each of these has ended with a mass extinction. (A “mass extinction” is defined geologically as an extinction of at least 75% of known species in a period of about two million years.*) It’s that ending that has allowed for a dramatically new set of relations to arise among surviving species.
Berry used to describe our time as the “terminal Cenozoic,” which would mean that we are getting pretty close to the end of life not only as we know it, but as Earth has known it for the last 65 million years. I don’t think he quite intended the catastrophism that suggests; the term is meant to be less of a geological time marker and more of an inspirational call to build a world in which animate life (zoos) can ecologically flourish in a common home (oikos, meaning ecological home).
In any case, we are no doubt facing a mass extinction of this scale. But it hasn’t happened yet, and if it does, it’s unlikely that humanity would survive to tell the tale (in any form recognizable to us), let alone contribute to the harmonious set of relations Berry envisioned between humans and nature.
Geologists need not be the definers of these kinds of things, so we could go with “Ecozoic” for its inspirational value and ignore the catastrophist implications. (Or “Chthulucene,” which for my money is the most evocative of the “-cenes,” and just work with it until it’s understood.) But it’s worth considering what alternatives there might be.
If “Ecocene” is still too technical, there’s always “Ecological Era” (capitalized or not), which has a history of usage that long predates “Anthropocene.” That it doesn’t pay much attention to the technical definition of “era” among geologists might just be to its benefit.
But even that may seem too scientific for popular usage. Politics has given us plenty of utopian alternatives — from anarcho-communist, socialist, and open-endedly postcapitalist visions to green, Indigenous, Afro-, BIPOC, and trans- futures of one or another inflection. Most of the first, more politically “modernist” group, are different enough from real-world efforts at instituting anything like them (socialism in deed always having been somewhat different from socialism in aspiration) that they may be best left in the bin labeled “utopian” — literally, no-places, since our imagining of them reflects no place yet attained, even if glimpses of them, as David Graeber and David Wengrow suggest, are to be found all across history.
The arts have given more promising glimpses of utopia, if only because they beckon but do not try to convince. And it’s no coincidence that the more resonantly diverse forms of utopian imagination have emerged in literature, the visual arts, and music.
Utopia is always tainted by the possibility of its going wrong and turning dystopian, so my own preference has been to opt for ecotopian scenarios, visions that are not “no-places” but “home-places,” each distinct because of its location within a history of possibilities realized to be ecological in the multiplicity of ways conveyed by (at least) the three ecologies of materiality, sociality, and perception/mediation. The term “ecotopia” is a bit too overdetermined by the book that introduced it, and its uses have perhaps been too freewheeling (judging by books like Alan Marshall’s all-over-the-map Ecotopia 2021). But it remains provocative enough in its prefigurative possibilities.
The problem with all of these candidates for a viable post-Anthropocene is their presumed universality: from the Neocene to the Ecozoic to the Ecological Era, each presumes an authority to name something that would be named for all, in a world and on a planet where the “all” has never existed except as a project of power (colonial-plus-religious-plus-scientific power, in the case of the last 500 years).
The question for me is whether there is a way to proceed forward without naming one future for all. Is the “ecotopian” terminology open enough to be able to graft itself onto more specific futures — Indigenous futures of one kind or another, Afro-futures, local and regional futures of various kinds — without subsuming them into itself, but with mutual benefit to both in the many relations that might be possible? Is the “eco,” with its twin roots in science and in the Hellenic etymology of home and household, a viable partner to the pluriversal future imaginaries that appear outside of the ecological, scientific, modernist, Anthropocenic, and ostensibly “universal” (which are never universal)?
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson’s and Brent Ryan Bellamy’s rendition of the ecotopian (read the book if you have not) suggests that it is or at least could be, and I look forward to further articulations of it in other forms.
In any case, at a time when bleakness reigns, it’s helpful to reignite our capacity for imagining better futures. Other terminological suggestions are welcome!
*Note: The definition of mass extinctions was added after the original publication of this article. The five known mass extinction events are indicated in the graph below. While the current extinction crisis is on course toward that kind of level, it is a long way from having reached it yet.
