The idea of the Anthropocene has been enormously generative and largely beneficial for academic discourse on human interactions with the environment. But, as is increasingly well understood, it also has significant problems. Perhaps the trickiest one is its implication of a species-wide agency. In his influential article ‘The Climate of History’ (2009), Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that traditional forms of cultural critique do not provide a sufficient framework for addressing climate change, which, after all, is a problem for humanity as a whole. He has since been taken to task, perhaps unfairly, by scholars who argue that the emphasis on ‘species being’, implied by the idea of the Anthropocene, effectively ignores the considerable economic, social and political inequalities that have created climate change and that are further fed by it. Like the casual invocation of ‘we’ in climate discourse, a key danger of the term ‘Anthropocene’ is that it distracts from understanding the history of anthropogenic environmental change as a history of carbon capitalism, for which a relatively small number of nations and multinationals have the bulk of responsibility. Crises such as global heating and biodiversity loss are inevitably intertwined with inequalities between individuals, classes and nations, and with imperialism, colonialism and their legacies. As noted in a 2015 Oxfam report on ‘Extreme Carbon Inequality’, the richest 10 per cent of the global population are responsible for 50 per cent of global emissions. Richer countries engage in a kind of neocolonialism by driving ecological destruction in the Global South, largely for their own benefit. The wealthier and more educated are disproportionately over-represented with respect to the discourse on climate change, despite being the most sheltered from its effects. This may explain the kind of binary thinking that produces apocalypticism, techno-utopianism and pure denialism: all the products of privilege that are less likely to attract people who are already having to make deep adaptations to climate change.

The climate emergency is of course unprecedented, but it is also the product of a long history of global inequality and therefore should be understood genealogically.