ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines what she considers to be the boundedness and limitations of Anthropocene discourse as a political ecological strategy for the twenty-first century. The story of Anthropocene conceals the gendered, racialized, and exploitative global capitalist system that is driving ecological and climatological destruction and destabilizing the relative predictability of the planet's Holocene epoch. The Rio+20 'welcome to the party' video is upbeat and even celebratory about the human zeal, ingenuity, and progress symbolized by the Anthropocene. As one of the most recent framings of Universal Man, the construction of the neologism Anthropocene assumes that the Anthropos at the root of the term has no sex, gender, class, or race. Kolbert's choice of particular human protagonists in her story, once again, epitomizes the demographics of the (m)Anthropocene: the vast majority of scientific experts she visits and writes about on her fact-finding journey are Northern white men.
