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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plantationocene | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantationocene | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T07:11:57.333864+00:00 | kb-cron |
The Plantationocene refers to the globalization of a plantation economy, continuing into the modern day, which is characterized by unequal and unsustainable metabolic exchange and which includes factories and similar sites of non-agricultural production in addition to traditional plantations; It centers the history of colonialism and slavery as what led to modern globalization and to the socio-ecological injustices which are called out by the Anthropocene and Capitalocene; It analyzes geographical relations of power and consumption, emphasizing spatial relationships which recreate the plantation system such as how sites of production characterized by poor working conditions and/or ecological degradation are rarely the same place where products are consumed and wealth is accumulated; It indicates the existence of a "plantation politics", meaning global political systems which are characterized by uniformity and assimilation, by racial, gender, and other social hierarchies, and by exploitation of labour; It emphasizes disturbances to landscapes and reduction of biodiversity caused by plantations, highlighting non-human elements in analysis and critique of modern social-political-ecological organizations.
The non-human element addressed in aspect five is a particularly core feature in early discussions around the Plantationocene. Haraway et al. discuss how the enforcement of uniformity onto indigenous landscapes and the transportation of plants and animals (including humans) create alienation from the land and facilitate long-distance investments in private property, which in turn allows for land transformation and degradation. The uniformity of landscapes represented by the plantation is enforced by colonial forces with the aim of making land more familiar, controllable, and profitable. In the period of settler colonialism most commonly cited as beginning the Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Plantationocene, these colonial forces were white Europeans taking over the Americas, cutting down forests and otherwise transforming native landscapes in order to establish cash crop plantations of tobacco, sugar cane, cotton, etc. Ferdinand refers to this process as "colonial inhabitation", or making colonized lands inhabited from a settler-colonial perspective; colonizers did not perceive indigenous residents as capable of inhabiting a place due to their supposed lack of civilization, and in order to render lands inhabited it was thought they needed to be altered into a form which the colonizers could more easily navigate and live in. The concept of settler-colonialism transforming land to the detriment of native people and species is also prevalent in indigenous climate justice studies. These land transformations are said to be conducted through a process of taking over the land, clearing it of trees and other native plants, and eliminating the indigenous population to the greatest extend possible. The Plantationocene points to the ways that settler-colonial modes of ecological governance which emphasize uniformity and/or the absence of indigenous populations continue to impact the world today, in modern monocropping agricultural practices as well as in other sectors such as factory meat production, widespread use of chemical pesticides and herbicides, or the creation of uninhabited nature preserves. Plantationocene scholars take a multispecies perspective, considering the similarities between the organization of land for profit and the organization of people for profit and positing that these structures are the root cause of modern climate change. Another core feature of the Plantationocene is the way in which slavery was central to the development of capitalism, and the way the slavery system of colonial-era plantations in the Americas continues to impact social, political, and environmental structures. This aspect of Plantationocene scholarship is supported by a significant body of Black scholarship regarding modern echoes and recreations of the plantation which pre-dates Haraway's coining of the term. Plantations were run largely on the labour of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas, which some academics claim initiated an economic system based on violence and exploitation. This concept is also addressed by the Marxist idea of racial capitalism, but plantation scholarship specifically emphasizes the geographical organization of the plantation and the interactions with non-human life as central to past and modern economies. Authors have suggested that the organization of plantations as "towns" has influenced the geography of modern towns and cities. Additionally, some theorists write that the subjugation and control of racialized people for the purposes of making profit is inextricable from the current global economic system. Others point to the way that exploitation of people and land continue in plantation systems even when slavery is legally abolished. Sharecropping, ghettos or other impoverished and racialized urban environments, prison labour within the prison-industrial complex, etc. are all given as examples of how plantations are recreated in the modern era. However, the Plantationocene also sometimes models plantations as sites of resistance, proposing alternatives ways of navigating the world based on resistance and organizing by enslaved people, such as the alternative ecologies of slave gardens or the revolutionary character of maroon communities.