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Climate breakdown is inextricably linked to the prevailing economic structures and ideologies. Naomi Klein clearly makes this point in This Changes Everything, which traces the intersection of global capitalism with ecological collapse. “The triumph of market logic,” she writes, “with its ethos of domination and fierce competition, is paralyzing all serious efforts to respond to climate change.”¹Naomi Klein. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (London: Penguin, 2015), p. 23. Given the global dominance of corporate capitalism—a particularly exploitative and uneven ‘progress’-driven economic model—some scholars including Jason Moore and Andreas Malm suggest naming the current era Capitalocene, emphasising the culpability of specifically capitalist actions in climate change.²Jason W. Moore. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016); Andreas Malm. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2015). The implication is clear: in order to maintain any hope of addressing climate breakdown, a wholesale reformulation of the assumptions and norms of mainstream economics is required. This starts with a reconsideration of issues of value, metrics, and growth, and their relationship to spatial practice. 

Mainstream economics defines values, and metrics for measuring them, according to a neoclassical model that tasks society with facilitating endless growth and consumption, irrespective of nature’s limits.³Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind. Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023). The metric of gross domestic product (GDP), measures a nation’s wealth in a metric that, despite its bluntness, has dominated mainstream economics since the mid-20^th century. GDP counts economic activity regardless of its social or ecological value (or damage). Crises such as oil spills, earthquakes, and wars raise the GDP because of the expensive rescue and reparation projects they entail. Meanwhile, the unpaid labour of raising children or caring for sick and elderly people counts for nothing—as activists including Silvia Federici and Marilyn Waring have demonstrated.⁴Silvia Federici. Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975); Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). What is valued economically has always been determined by white, patriarchal, colonial power—such that the economic system mostly rewards the kinds of work done by white men in the Global North, and ignores other forms of work that support or enable it. Increasing GDP is not necessarily accompanied by a decrease in social inequality, despite the political rhetoric of a rising tide lifting all boats. Likewise, keeping oil and trees in the ground, rivers clean, and the air unpolluted is fundamental for planetary wellbeing, yet is worth zero according to GDP. 

Amidst climate breakdown and mass extinction, re-evaluating what values today is paramount. Such a reconsideration follows a long history of movements campaigning for shared wealth, led by agrarian revolutionaries, romantic poets, socialists, ecofeminists, and more. In the 1970s, the economist Herman Daly proposed steady-state economics to better align ideas of prosperity with ecological principles. Daly envisioned a steady-state economy as a square, placed within a circular whole that represents planetary limits.⁵Herman E. Daly. Steady-State Economics (Washington, D.C: Island Press, 1977). See also Herman E. Daly. Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). This diagram influenced Kate Raworth’s prominent “doughnut economics” model, where a socially and ecologically viable economy sits within an outer circle of environmental limits and an inner circle of social wellbeing indicators.⁶Kate Raworth. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (London: Penguin, 2017). In both diagrams, social and ecological considerations are inseparable. As the environmental activist and scientist Vandana Shiva has pointed out, such inseparability is illustrated in issues such as soil health that concern both people and planet. According to Shiva’s holistic view, GDP measurements of economic growth are “anti-life”.⁷Vandana Shiva, ‘How Economic Growth Has Become Anti-Life’, Common Dreams, 1 November 2013 <https://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/11/01/how-economic-growth-has-become-anti-life> [accessed 7 June 2023]. Substances such as soil and seeds are sources (resources) of real value in their potential to sustain life and biodiversity. ‘Growth’ for Shiva, Raworth, Daly, and others, requires diverse metrics to properly account for a resurgence in wildlife and biodiversity, for example, or a proliferation of cultural engagement, a flourishing of communal greenspace, and increased ecological and political literacy. 

Without diversifying growth metrics, and with a continued reliance on GDP, a cold logic of financialisation prevails, assessing anything and everything for its potential for extracting profit. And, as Jason Moore has pointed out, such a system undervalues natural resources and labour power so that it can exploit and profit from them.⁸Jason Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature”, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (Binghampton, NY: PM Press, 2016), pp. 78–115. The geographer Kathryn Yusoff writes that extractivism is motivated by a desire for inhuman properties, with slavery, Indigenous genocide, and settler colonialism evidencing “total submission to the principle of extraction” under capitalist expansion.⁹Kathryn Yusoff. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Janae Davis et al., “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises”, Geography Compass 13, no. 5 (2019), p. 16. In the US, the Red Deal exemplifies a recent initiative to take racism, the afterlives of colonialism, and disparities of experience between the Global North and South into account when designing economic reforms in the face of climate breakdown.¹⁰Perspectives on a Global Green New Deal, ed. by Harpreet Kaur Paul and Dalia Gebrial (London: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2021) <https://global-gnd.com/book/> [accessed 24 January 2022].

While some economists have proposed strategies inspired by economic reforms and employment programmes in the United States during the Great Depression, others have forwarded arguments for de-growth to curb consumption and waste.¹¹Ann Pettifor. The Case for the Green New Deal (London: Verso, 2019); Tim Jackson. Post Growth: Life after Capitalism, 1st edition (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2021). For example, Jason Hickel’s book Less is More, makes the argument that modern society’s addiction to growth must be challenged in order to fundamentally address climate breakdown.¹²Hickel. Reducing current fossil fuel dependency is paramount (so long as it resists the “carbon colonial” outsourcing of polluting production to the Global South). Alongside this lies a possibility for other economic and social models that make space for other forms of growth—one such example is the Latin American concept of buen vivir, a coalition of Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, ecologists, ecofeminists, and activists nurturing relations of human and more-than-human value.¹³Alberto Acosta and Mateo Martínez Abarca, “Buen Vivir: An Alternative Perspective From The Peoples Of The Global South To The Crisis Of Capitalist Modernity”, in The Climate Crisis: South African and Global Democratic Eco-Socialist Alternatives, ed. by Vishwas Satgar (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2018).

Buen vivir’s emphasis on growth as a flourishing of social and ecological relations is also foundational to alternative economies based on community and ‘common good’ values, including those proposed by the feminist economic geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson, who use the collaborative pen-name J. K. Gibson-Graham. Spatial configurations of community economies are important to their success, with situated social and environmental contexts determining the kinds of organising and volunteering involved, as well as shaping circular models of production and exchange, self-managed infrastructures, and practices of reuse with existing buildings or materials.¹⁴Fitz and Krasny, p. 14. Having founded a Community Economies Collective in the 1990s, Gibson-Graham have focused on ”identifying, gathering, and amplifying ethical economic practices that already exist” and exemplified “the world we want to live in.”¹⁵J. K. Gibson-Graham, “Cultivating Community Economies”, in The New Systems Reader, ed. by James Gustave Speth and Kathleen Courrier (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 410–32, p. 411. Research on commoning practices of sharing space and resources has coincided with many grassroots initiatives such as housing co-ops, credit unions, community food banks, and Community Land Trusts (CLT), often working in manners inspired by Henry George in the 19^th century, reducing the unfair concentration of asset wealth in property and land speculation.¹⁶See, for example, Elinor Ostrom. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Peter Linebaugh. Stop, Thief! : The Commons, Enclosures, And Resistance (Oakland: PM Press, 2014); Silvia Federici. Re-Enchanting the World Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018).

Spatial practice is bound to the economic structures within which it operates. The production of the built environment has become increasingly tied into the expectations and norms of financialisation and market systems, and with it, architecture is identified as a marker of a certain type of neo-liberal growth and value system. It follows that economic systems based on revised interpretations of growth and value will thus be accompanied by re-formed spatial relations.

Annotated bibliography

Herman E Daly. Steady-State Economics (Washington, D.C: Island Press, 1977).

Herman Daly worked for the World Bank, gaining insight into how classic economics ignores planetary boundaries. This book argues for a human economy that operates within a finite, fragile ecosystem, and against processes of extracting limited resources and exporting waste. In other words, he proposes a steady-state economy rather than an economic model based on unlimited financial growth. Daly was amongst others who proposed different metrics for measuring wealth, developing an Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, an economic indicator intended to replace the gross domestic product (GDP).

Silvia Federici. Re-Enchanting the World Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018).

The theorist, historian, and activist Silvia Federici connects forms of enclosure occurring during early capitalism to the destruction of the commons within recent phases of global capitalist accumulation. Considering the commons from a feminist perspective, Federici describes the commons as autonomous spaces where the capitalist organisation of life and labour meet fundamental challenges and can be re-thought along principles of mutual aid.

J. K. Gibson-Graham. The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

Writing under a pen name in a collective collaboration that anticipates the core idea of their work, the feminist economic geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson argue that capitalist globalisation is neither healthy nor inevitable, and instead propose methods for developing ecologically and socially responsible economies based on community practices of mutual aid and sharing.

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind. Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023).

This history of the idea of scarcity traces five hundred years of European thought and its contribution to climate crisis. Its authors emphasise the fact that scarcity and its persuasion vocabulary of limitless growth and material desire are historical and therefore mutable concepts, created at the same time as colonial (neo-classical) capitalist politics, and frequently challenged by counter-movements throughout history, from agrarian radicals to ecofeminists and contemporary de-growth economists. 

Naomi Klein. This Changes Everything (London: Penguin, 2015).

Klein’s magisterial account of the intertwining of capitalism and climate breakdown is one of the most influential texts on climate of recent years, not least because it explains the crisis through immediately accessible language and examples. While trenchant in its critique and analysis, the book also holds up hope through its examples of political activism and collaborative action.

Kate Raworth. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (London: Penguin, 2017).

The economist Kate Raworth has developed a model she calls “doughnut economics” to propose a socially and ecologically viable economy that sits within an outer circle of planetary limits and an inner circle of social wellbeing. The model, inspired by environmental economies proposed by Herman Daly and the sustainable development methods of Bill Sharpe, seeks a form of flourishing that does not rely on financialised growth and GDP metrics.

Notes

• 1
  Naomi Klein. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (London: Penguin, 2015), p. 23.
• 2
  Jason W. Moore. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016); Andreas Malm. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2015).
• 3
  Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Carl Wennerlind. Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023).
• 4
  Silvia Federici. Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975); Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
• 5
  Herman E. Daly. Steady-State Economics (Washington, D.C: Island Press, 1977). See also Herman E. Daly. Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
• 6
  Kate Raworth. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist (London: Penguin, 2017).
• 7
  Vandana Shiva, ‘How Economic Growth Has Become Anti-Life’, Common Dreams, 1 November 2013 <https://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/11/01/how-economic-growth-has-become-anti-life> [accessed 7 June 2023].
• 8
  Jason Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature”, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (Binghampton, NY: PM Press, 2016), pp. 78–115.
• 9
  Kathryn Yusoff. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Janae Davis et al., “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises”, Geography Compass 13, no. 5 (2019), p. 16.
• 10
  Perspectives on a Global Green New Deal, ed. by Harpreet Kaur Paul and Dalia Gebrial (London: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2021) <https://global-gnd.com/book/> [accessed 24 January 2022].
• 11
  Ann Pettifor. The Case for the Green New Deal (London: Verso, 2019); Tim Jackson. Post Growth: Life after Capitalism, 1st edition (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2021).
• 12
  Hickel.
• 13
  Alberto Acosta and Mateo Martínez Abarca, “Buen Vivir: An Alternative Perspective From The Peoples Of The Global South To The Crisis Of Capitalist Modernity”, in The Climate Crisis: South African and Global Democratic Eco-Socialist Alternatives, ed. by Vishwas Satgar (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2018).
• 14
  Fitz and Krasny, p. 14.
• 15
  J. K. Gibson-Graham, “Cultivating Community Economies”, in The New Systems Reader, ed. by James Gustave Speth and Kathleen Courrier (New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 410–32, p. 411.
• 16
  See, for example, Elinor Ostrom. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Peter Linebaugh. Stop, Thief! : The Commons, Enclosures, And Resistance (Oakland: PM Press, 2014); Silvia Federici. Re-Enchanting the World Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2018).

Amidst unprecedented global warming, an international refugee crisis, and rising far-right populism and fascism, it is clear that a globalised capitalist economy running on extractivist industries and rooted in patriarchal and white supremacist ideologies is harming women and the planet and that these harms are connected. Climate breakdown disproportionately harms women, especially poor women, women of colour, and women from Indigenous Nations.¹United Nations and Balgis Osman-Elasha, ‘Women…In The Shadow of Climate Change’, United Nations (United Nations, n.d.) <https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/womenin-shadow-climate-change> [accessed 11 May 2023].

In many ways, this current context of gendered domination resembles what the author and activist Francoise d’Eaubonne decried: Feminism or death. That was the choice d’Eaubonne presented in her book of the same title, published in 1974, which identified the global environmental crisis as the product of patriarchy and emphasised the tight connection between climate justice and social justice, calling for “ecofeminism” as a combined approach to both.²Françoise d’Eaubonne. Le Féminisme Ou La Mort (Paris: P. Horay, 1974).

D’Eaubonne was not alone. Ecofeminist ideas were developed in activist and political theory contexts across the world from the late 1960s, demanding feminist and environmentalist solidarity, learning from civil rights and women’s liberation movements. These include the work of the scientist Rachel Carson and the writer Ariyoshi Sawako’s critiques of industrial pollution, published in 1962 and 1974 respectively, the philosopher Val Plumwood’s 1993 account of the relationship between women and nature, the feminist Ivone Gebara’s 1997 work on the entwinement between environmental breakdown and poverty, and many more.³Rachel Carson. Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962); Sawako Ariyoshi. Fukugō Osen (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1975); Val Plumwood. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993); Ivone Gebara. Intuiciones Ecofeministas: Ensayos Para Repensar El Conocimiento y La Religión (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2000).

D’Eaubonne and several of these others argued that the historic development of agricultural technologies created a male-oriented social structure in various parts of the world, in which men appropriated women’s bodies and labour at the same time as exploiting nature through increasingly intensive agriculture and industrialisation.⁴d’Eaubonne. As crops were intensively planted and fertilised to maximise yield frequency on the plantations, women’s reproductive capacities were also exploited as what Toni Morrison describes as “property that reproduced itself without cost”.⁵Toni Morrison. Beloved (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 228. Such technologies served a narrow genre of humankind, a category of person the writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter calls overrepresented man, or homo economicus, a white male pursuing wealth for his own interest.⁶Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument”, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3.3 (2003), pp. 257–337 (p. 317) <https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015>.

Spatial practices, including architecture and urban planning, have often been designed by and for this exclusive and exclusionary genre of human. In resistance, the foregrounding of accessibility in the provision of public space has characterised much feminist design and theory, with studies by feminist scholars Leslie Kern and Caroline Criado-Perez highlighting the importance of gender-disaggregated data in ensuring socially and environmentally responsible design.⁷Caroline Criado Perez. Invisible Women (London: Vintage, 2020); Leslie Kern. Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (New York: Verso, 2020).

Today, many feminist architects contend that gendered systems of oppression underpin a man-made industrial world which is concretised in environmentally damaging buildings and is complicit in environmental breakdown. The architect Gabu Heindl, for example, shapes her philosophy around a rejection of “chauvinist, racist or discriminating architecture, exploitative project proposals, suburbanising single-family homes or speculation ventures”.⁸‘Philosophie – GABU Heindl Architektur’ <http://www.gabuheindl.at/en/about/philosophy.html> [accessed 11 May 2023]. This approach to understanding space and society as interlinked power structures, intimately bound with climate, speaks to much recent work in queer theory, environmental justice organising, and anti-colonial feminism. All of these identify the violence of white, patriarchal modernity, and search for critical and caring alternatives.⁹Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, ed. by Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019). Vital in such a shift in the understanding and usage of space is a concept of justice that posits architectural practice in an interrelation of careful dependency and creative alliance with other disciplines.¹⁰Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, 1st edition (Abingdon, Oxon England ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2011). To borrow from the feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway, such alliances “stay with the trouble” of climate breakdown and social injustice with the recognition that “we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations”.¹¹Haraway, p. 4. Similarly, in fields of architectural theory, writers including Hélène Frichot and Peg Rawes have drawn attention to the importance of relational ecologies of care in challenging patriarchal design norms for being fundamentally anti-social and un-environmental.¹²Hélène Frichot, Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Peg Rawes, “Architectural Ecologies of Care’, in Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity, ed. by Peg Rawes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 40–55.

The political scientist Joan Tronto describes how both care work and the built environment are shaped by relations of power and, as such, have the potential to be transformed into relations of care.¹³In Fitz and Krasny, p. 26. Combined with numerous other ecological and decolonial approaches, these feminist approaches make a critical intervention into spatial theories and productions, proposing social, economic, cultural, and ecological principles of cooperation.¹⁴María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Cadena; Haraway.

Common to these approaches is an understanding that humanity’s relationship with the planet must disengage from extractive and alienating activities that perpetuate patriarchal domination. In the words of the former New Zealand Member of Parliament and goat farmer Marilyn Waring, within conventional systems of economics and governance, “safe drinking water counts for nothing. A pollution-free environment counts for nothing. Even some people – namely women – count for nothing”.¹⁵Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. What Waring points to is a complete reconsideration of how we value things and ecologies. Eco-feminism has a critical role to play in forming alliances between those human and more-than-human aspects of the world that have been overlooked, exploited, and dominated by patriarchal systems. Only with such a realignment of forces can climate justice be accompanied by social justice.

Annotated bibliography

Rachel Carson. Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

Writing despite intimidation from the chemical industry, the scientist Rachel Carson raised public awareness of environmental matters which led to changes in government and the banning of harmful pesticides such as DDT in the US and several other countries. A major source of inspiration and information for environmentalists around the world, Silent Spring combined scientific rigour with lyrical prose in its calls for reform. Carson faced misogynistic rebuttals from climate sceptics, but was championed by women’s movements for public health and environmental justice. These latter groups understood the value of her work in connecting ecological concerns with issues of gender, race, and socioeconomic justice. 

Hélène Frichot. Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2019).

In this creative book of design research, the architect and philosopher Hélène Frichot explores other ways of doing architecture as alternatives to designing and critiquing iconic buildings and canonical styles. Frichot draws from feminist theories of care to call for architecture’s reconfiguration as a network of diverse concerns within wider communities and environments. Her emphasis on relational ecologies fundamentally challenges tenets of design that protect anthropocentric, patriarchal individualism, and profit-based short-term thinking. 

Matrix. Making Space: Women and the Women and the Man Made Environment (London New York: Verso, 2022).

First published in 1984, this book challenges the built environment over its impact on women’s lives. Written by women engaged in building work, teaching and research, several of whom worked in the London-based Matrix Feminist Architects’ collective, the book exposes the sexist assumptions that shape architecture and urban planning. Matrix worked on design projects including community, children’s, and women’s centres, proposing socially inclusive alternatives to the patriarchal built environment in domestic and public contexts. 

Val Plumwood. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993).

In this foundational text for ecofeminism, philosopher Val Plumwood brings feminist and postcolonial thinking to bear on issues of environmental degradation and white patriarchal oppression, revealing enduring connections between women and nature in western capitalist society. Plumwood identifies a damaging form of dualism at the heart of Western capitalism whereby humanity is separated from nature to legitimise man’s right to plunder natural resources. Tracing the extension of such binary logic in the exploitation of raced, classed, and gendered subjects, Plumwood provides a compelling argument for eco-intersectional solidarity.

Joan Tronto. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993).

Tackling the unfair apportioning of care duties to women, the American political scientist Joan Tronto suggests that essentialised associations between women and caring duties are both historically inaccurate and ethically wrong. Unpicking care’s ideological bindings, Tronto demonstrates how other members of unprivileged groups in the Global North, such as the working classes and people of colour, also undertake disproportionate amounts of caring for little or no pay. If we continue to undervalue care work, Tronto cautions, we degrade a fundamental social activity and perpetuate white patriarchal privilege. 

Marilyn Waring. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).

In this polemical study of economics, environmentalism, and gender justice, the former New Zealand Member of Parliament and goat farmer Marilyn Waring criticises the conventional metric of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as an inaccurate and harmful measure of worth. Within conventional systems of economics and governance, where a nation’s GDP supposedly indicates its wellbeing, “safe drinking water counts for nothing. A pollution-free environment counts for nothing. Even some people – namely women – count for nothing”. Reconsidering metrics for measuring value so that they account for reproductive labour and environmental assets is vital, Waring argues, for protecting the planet and recognising the contributions of women.

Notes

• 1
  United Nations and Balgis Osman-Elasha, ‘Women…In The Shadow of Climate Change’, United Nations (United Nations, n.d.) <https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/womenin-shadow-climate-change> [accessed 11 May 2023].
• 2
  Françoise d’Eaubonne. Le Féminisme Ou La Mort (Paris: P. Horay, 1974).
• 3
  Rachel Carson. Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962); Sawako Ariyoshi. Fukugō Osen (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1975); Val Plumwood. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993); Ivone Gebara. Intuiciones Ecofeministas: Ensayos Para Repensar El Conocimiento y La Religión (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2000).
• 4
  d’Eaubonne.
• 5
  Toni Morrison. Beloved (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 228.
• 6
  Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument”, CR: The New Centennial Review, 3.3 (2003), pp. 257–337 (p. 317) <https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015>.
• 7
  Caroline Criado Perez. Invisible Women (London: Vintage, 2020); Leslie Kern. Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World (New York: Verso, 2020).
• 8
  ‘Philosophie – GABU Heindl Architektur’ <http://www.gabuheindl.at/en/about/philosophy.html> [accessed 11 May 2023].
• 9
  Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, ed. by Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019).
• 10
  Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009); Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, and Jeremy Till, Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture, 1st edition (Abingdon, Oxon England ; New York, NY: Routledge, 2011).
• 11
  Haraway, p. 4.
• 12
  Hélène Frichot, Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); Peg Rawes, “Architectural Ecologies of Care’, in Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity, ed. by Peg Rawes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 40–55.
• 13
  In Fitz and Krasny, p. 26.
• 14
  María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Cadena; Haraway.
• 15
  Marilyn Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

The term Anthropocene rose to prominence around 2000 in the works of the ecologist Eugene Stoermer and the chemist Paul Crutzen, to describe our current geological era.¹Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. The term denotes the period during which humans have had a dominant impact on the planet, and its climate and ecologies. Architecture is implicated with Anthropocenic changes to the climate because the built environment is a construction with social, spatial, material, and ecological consequences. As the architectural theorist Hélène Frichot explains, the Anthropocene describes a long period of entanglement between “ecologies, economies and technologies in an all-pervasive capitalist economic logic.”²Hélène Frichot, Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 9.
Exactly when the Anthropocene era began has been the subject of debate. Some theorists have located its emergence in the development of agriculture, while others have pinpointed the growth of colonial plantation systems from the 15^th century as a pivotal shift (and so suggested the terms Capitalocene and Plantationocene to emphasise the fact that not all humans are responsible for climate breakdown, but only those driving capitalist projects for extractive and exploitative profit).³Kathryn Yusoff. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Janae Davis et al., “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises”, Geography Compass 13, no. 5 (2019); Gregg Mitman, “Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing”, <https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/>. Will Steffen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney, and Cornelia Ludwig, “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration”, The Anthropocene Review, 2015 <https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019614564785>; Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene”, Nature, 519.7542 (2015), 171–80 <https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258> Others have suggested 19th century industrialism, or an even later mid-20^th century moment of great acceleration in fossil fuel use, petrochemical production, and plastic pollution.⁴J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016). Whatever the date of its inception, the Anthropocene implicates human activities in climatic changes, particularly, human activities that depend on separating a determined category of ‘human’ from the rest of nature.⁵Katherine McKittrick, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014); Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

The Anthropocene’s narratives of causes and effects, and of dates of origin, suggest a particular relationship to time that is based on linear models of past, present, and future. Much current thinking around climate and the built environment is based on such linear thinking, with the future simply seen as a progressive step up from the present in a manner that ignores the violations of the past. Terms such as climate emergency and crisis, while important in emphasising urgency, can obscure the long, slow, and unfinished history of climate devastations wrought by colonial and capitalist extractivism and exploitation.⁶Kyle Whyte, “Against Crisis Epistemology”, in Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, ed. by Brendan Hokowhitu et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020); Rob Nixon. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Emergency terms also remain wedded to a conception of time that drives a linear path towards progress or into apocalyptic decline.⁷Elaine Scarry. Thinking in an Emergency (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011). Linearity, however, is not the only way to think about time. The concept of revolution illustrates this through the word’s different uses. Agricultural, industrial, or political revolutions are commonly associated with an idea of a rupture that breaks from the past in pursuit of the new. The word revolution, however, also signifies turning, as in the revolution of a wheel.⁸David Harvey. Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). Revolution thus carries the suggestion of return, repetition, or circularity, and belongs to a conception of time based on a relation of integration with pasts that are not past. The concept also suggests a movement that does not occur as a gigantic bang, but as gradual change.

This non-linear and longer-term conception of time occurs in many cultures, knowledges, and traditions. Black critiques of empire and capitalism, for example, bridge histories of New World slavery to contemporary racial capitalism, exploring alternative practices of time and history as forms of resistance and world-making rooted in inheritance and intergenerational relations.⁹Katherine McKittrick, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); La Marr Jurelle Bruce. How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Joshua Myers. Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition, 1st edition (Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA: Polity, 2021). Andean traditions of pachakuti, meanwhile, understand time as a recurrent act of balancing that involves human and other beings, and the climate itself. Pachakuti derives from the Quechua ‘pacha’ (meaning time and space, or the world), and ‘kuti’ (meaning revolution), and understands the necessity to re-balance the world through a turn of events that has the potential for renewal. Pachakuti characterises the Latin American practice of buen vivir, with its investment in maintaining forms of ancestral knowledge, including expertise on medicine and low-impact agriculture. Engaging the past in an ongoing and future-oriented practice of situated, localised knowledges ensures that technologies and methods tested over thousands of years remain used and useful.¹⁰Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies 14, 3 (1988): 575–99, <https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066>. This contrasts with the dominance of technocratic thinking in current architecture, in which climate breakdown is seen as a problem to be ‘solved’ through technical fixes.

Learning from the past in such a way, and transmitting its lessons for the future, invites a wider consideration of epistemology—that is, how knowledges are produced, shared, and put to work. Learning from a deep past can refuse hierarchies of knowledges in which modern science and technology marginalise anything deemed traditional or dated. Working with contingency can also play a part here, allowing different routes to emerge from a situated context rather than imposing universal, linear, rules.¹¹The idea of contingency is explored in Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

Without such reflection, the production of knowledges, spaces, and societies risks repeating past inequities in a rush to innovate through new discoveries, buildings, and technologies. Better to stay with the trouble, as the philosopher and environmentalist Donna Haraway puts it; to make unexpected alliances in the ruins of capitalism, in the words of the anthropologist Anna Tsing. Or, as the geographer Stephanie Wakefield writes, to find alternative modes of living in the back-loop that opens when time is freed from linearity, and the past comes to productively bear on the present.¹² Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015); Stephanie Wakefield. Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space (London: Open Humanities Press, 2020). From entangled spaces and deep, back-looping time, we might repair estranged planetary social groups (human and otherwise).¹³Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski. Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Polity, 2020). The term climate breakdown is an invitation to break open calcified ways of knowing and doing. Emergency is now seen not as something needing an urgent fix, but as a setting containing possibilities for emergence.

Annotated bibliography

Karen Barad. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

In this book by the theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad, the idea of entanglement creates an account of the world as one whole, rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms. Drawing on research in quantum physics, Barad reworks understandings of space, time, matter, and causality, to emphasise the constitutive agency of intra-activity between different elements.

Bruno Latour. We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

According to the social scientist Bruno Latour, modernity’s hallowed distinctions between nature and society, and between human and thing, would have struck our ancestors as nonsensical. Moreover, modernity itself fails to achieve such distinctions. In this book, Latour maps connections between nature and culture to emphasise humanity’s continued entanglement with more than itself, creating a compelling argument for us to rethink modernity. If we understand the reality of our interconnected existence, Latour argues, then epistemologies of other cultures, past and present, including those of our so-called primitive, premodern ancestors, suddenly yield new insight on living an integrated social and planetary life.

Jason W. Moore. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016).

This edited volume gathers different scholars’ approaches to questioning the idea that we are living in the Anthropocene, literally the “Age of Man,” by arguing that the term Capitalocene better describes the causality of contemporary climate change, by placing it in the age of capital. Challenging conventional practices of dividing nature and society, the book offers a connective view within the biosphere, or in the words of Jason Moore, “the web of life”.

Kyle Whyte. “Is It Colonial Déjà Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Injustice”. In Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice, edited by Joni Adamson and Michael Davis (Oxford: Earthscan, 2016), 88-104. 

In this essay, the Potawatomi Nation philosopher and environmental activist Kyle Whyte calls for a longer historical account of climate change that accounts for colonial violence inflicted against Indigenous peoples over the past centuries. His argument makes an important intervention into climate breakdown discourses rooted in the contemporary and vocabularies of emergency, as well as Anthropocene debates about the origins of climate change. In continued contexts of resource extraction, Whyte writes, “climate injustice, for Indigenous peoples, is less about the spectre of a new future and more like the experience of déjà vu”.

Notes

• 1
  Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18.
• 2
  Hélène Frichot, Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 9.
• 3
  Kathryn Yusoff. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Janae Davis et al., “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises”, Geography Compass 13, no. 5 (2019); Gregg Mitman, “Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing”, <https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/>. Will Steffen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney, and Cornelia Ludwig, “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration”, The Anthropocene Review, 2015 <https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019614564785>; Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene”, Nature, 519.7542 (2015), 171–80 <https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258>
• 4
  J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016).
• 5
  Katherine McKittrick, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014); Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
• 6
  Kyle Whyte, “Against Crisis Epistemology”, in Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, ed. by Brendan Hokowhitu et al. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020); Rob Nixon. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
• 7
  Elaine Scarry. Thinking in an Emergency (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011).
• 8
  David Harvey. Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
• 9
  Katherine McKittrick, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); La Marr Jurelle Bruce. How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020); Joshua Myers. Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition, 1st edition (Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA: Polity, 2021).
• 10
  Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies 14, 3 (1988): 575–99, <https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066>.
• 11
  The idea of contingency is explored in Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
• 12
   Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015); Stephanie Wakefield. Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in Unsafe Operating Space (London: Open Humanities Press, 2020).
• 13
  Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski. Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Polity, 2020).

Ecology is the study of relations between organisms and environments and, like ‘economy’, derives from the Greek for house. Ecology considers the planet as a house and explores its building blocks, from the smallest microbe to the largest cryosphere, and the interrelationships between the parts and the whole. Ecology is inherently political because it encompasses multiple scales, focuses on interactions, and describes human relations with each other and the rest of nature; how something over here affects something over there, across communities and ecosystems; and whether living beings behave in cooperative, competitive, or predatory ways. What or who causes an icecap to melt or hunts a species to extinction is at once an ecological and a political question, as more and more climate reportage makes clear.

Long before climate occupied the news, ecological ideas influenced structures of the political economy and vice versa. In the mid-19^th century, the anarchist and geographer Pyotr Kropotkin found examples of mutual aid in evolutionary aspects of the natural world which resonated with his own anarchist communism. An ecological understanding of interdependencies between the human and more-than-human worlds remains central to how climate breakdown might be faced. Karl Marx, meanwhile, was studying ecology as he theorised capital, drawing from Charles Darwin’s research on natural selection to understand economic competition, and on Justus von Liebig’s soil science to develop a critique of intensive industrialism. Marx suggested that industrial agriculture was driving a “metabolic rift” between humanity and the rest of nature, simultaneously exhausting “the soil and the worker”.¹Karl Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), i, pp. 637–38; Karl Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. III (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), iii, p. 949; John Bellamy Foster. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), pp. 153–56; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011). His work thus anticipated contemporary readings of climate breakdown in terms of capitalism.

Rachel Carson’s influential 1962 book, Silent Spring, demonstrates the catastrophic extent to which industry has damaged ecosystems during what has subsequently become known as the Anthropocene age, an era dominated and shaped by humans. Carson’s integrated approach to humanmade industry and more-than-human ecosystems also characterises the work of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. In his 1972 essay collection, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson combined approaches to anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, cybernetics, and epistemology to propose a new way of understanding interactions between human behaviour and the more-than-human world.²Gregory Bateson. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, New edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Bateson argued that the fundamental unit of evolution was not the organism, but an organism plus its environment.³Jon Goodbun, “Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics – an Addendum to Urban Political Ecology”, Field, 4.1 (2011), pp. 35–46.

Although more recent, the term ‘extractivism’ is useful for describing the exploitative mechanisms that Marx, Carson, and Bateson identified in modern industry. Today, extractivism encompasses many kinds of industries, from open-pit mining to data harvesting, seeing the world as a set of resources to be extricated from their original state and converted into something for human use and consumption. The effects of this extractivist mindset, which reduces the lively ecology of the natural world to inert commodities, are inextricably linked to climate breakdown. Anthropologists including Marisol de la Cadena and Anna Tsing have traced extractivism and its accompanying climate devastations to colonial plantation systems and identified their current continuation in powerful global agribusinesses.⁴Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015); Marisol de la Cadena, “Uncommoning Nature”, E-Flux, May 2015, <https://www.e-flux.com/journal/65/336365/uncommoning-nature/>; A World of Many Worlds, ed. by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). Numerous contemporary geographers, cultural theorists, and philosophers of science including Kathryn Yusoff, Isabel Stengers, and Donna Haraway have proposed older origins for the Anthropocene, citing earlier forms of capitalism, including plantation economies, as grounds for later industrialisation and climate damage.⁵Kathryn Yusoff. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Isabelle Stengers. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. by Andrew Goffey (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015); Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Gregg Mitman, “Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing”, Edge Effects, 18 June 2019 <https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/>.

This expansion has significant implications for spatial practices. First in suggesting that people exist in relation to the wider ecosystems they inhabit, and then by implication understanding buildings and the wider built environment not as autonomous objects but as part of a complex set of human and more-than-human relationships. In this way spatial relations, social relations, and ecological relations are all interlinked.

Annotated Bibliography 

Gregory Bateson. Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972). 

In this essay collection, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson combines approaches to anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, cybernetics, and epistemology to propose a radically holistic understanding of life which emphasises interactions between human behaviour and the more-than-human world. Arguing that the fundamental unit of evolution is not the organism, but the organism plus its environment, Bateson’s work had widespread implications for numerous disciplines, from architecture to philosophy, in suggesting that people exist in symbiotic relation to the wider ecosystems they inhabit. 

Barnabas Calder. Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency (London: Pelican, 2021).

This is a history of architecture written for the present and future. Calder uses a global array of buildings to illustrate humans’ dependencies on different sources of energy at different times. He argues that architecture is shaped by its creators’ access to energy— be that fire, farming, or fossil fuels. From the Parthenon to a Victorian terraced house, form follows energy, often at the cost of social and environmental care. Today, around 40% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the building and construction sector. In addressing energy consumption, Calder invites an essential re-reading of the canons, damages, and potentials of architecture in the context of climate breakdown.

Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

Staying with the trouble of biodiversity loss and climate breakdown, the feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway argues for the importance of caring for other living beings in an approach she describes as “making kin” in unexpected collaborations and combinations. Drawing on a broad range of examples for how humans are entangled with animal, biological and technical systems, Haraway makes a case for abandoning categories of separation between humans, species, and orders, in favour of an expanded ontology of complex and considerate interaction. 

Isabelle Stengers. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Translated by Andrew Goffey (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015).

Addressing current senses of political impasse and climate emergency, the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers critiques contemporary elites of bureaucratic governance for maintaining a status quo of socioeconomic inequality that threatens to push the planet and its populations into barbaric unrest and upheaval. Against such catastrophic governance, Stengers proposes an array of tactical interventions including scientific knowledge-sharing, aimed at facing environmental and socio-technical issues as political questions and opportunities for radical change.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

What manages to live in the ruins of our capitalist present? Answering this question takes the American anthropologist Anna Tsing across the world in pursuit of an unlikely protagonist: an edible mushroom called matsutake. A weed, a delicacy, and an ecological salve, matsutake’s multiple functions help Tsing tell a multifaceted tale of commodity chains, traditional cultures, and the more-than-human worlds of forests and fungi. Matsutake, she argues, lives within and despite capitalist extractivism, exemplifying the vital possibility of collaborative and multispecies survival.

Notes

• 1
  Karl Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), i, pp. 637–38; Karl Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. III (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), iii, p. 949; John Bellamy Foster. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), pp. 153–56; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011).
• 2
  Gregory Bateson. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, New edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
• 3
  Jon Goodbun, “Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics – an Addendum to Urban Political Ecology”, Field, 4.1 (2011), pp. 35–46.
• 4
  Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton University Press, 2015); Marisol de la Cadena, “Uncommoning Nature”, E-Flux, May 2015, <https://www.e-flux.com/journal/65/336365/uncommoning-nature/>; A World of Many Worlds, ed. by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
• 5
  Kathryn Yusoff. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Isabelle Stengers. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. by Andrew Goffey (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015); Donna Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Gregg Mitman, “Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing”, Edge Effects, 18 June 2019 <https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/>.

Many commentators have linked the operations and ideologies of colonisation to climate breakdown. Amitav Ghosh argues that the mindset that led to the violent exploitation of Indigenous knowledge, land, labour, and resources was also a way of thinking that defined nature as an inert reservoir existing to be emptied. “These elite orthodoxies,” he writes, “were the product not just of the subjugation of human ‘brutes and savages’, but also of an entire range of nonhuman beings – trees, animals, and landscapes.”¹Amitav Ghosh. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (London: John Murray, 2021), p. 38. This logic of extraction has damaged lands and peoples since at least 1492, when white European cultural, political, and monetary elites began to systematically devastate the Americas, and extended across vast swathes of the world.²Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene”, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16.4 (2017), pp. 761–80; Kyle Whyte, “Is It Colonial Déjà Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Injustice”, in Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice, ed. by Joni Adamson and Michael Davis (Earthscan, 2016), pp. 88–104; The Wretched of the Earth, ‘An Open Letter to Extinction Rebellion’, Redpepper.Org, 2019 <https://www.redpepper.org.uk/environment-climate/climate-change/open-letter-to-extinction-rebellion/> [accessed 15 June 2022].

Driving divisions across land, natural resources, species, gender, ethnicity, and race, with the goal of generating and maximising profit, colonialism is at once a social and spatial technique. Colonialism employs architecture and infrastructures as an instrument of dispossession, accumulation, and control. Spatial practices have long reinforced colonial power relations: designing enclosures, castles, stowage, barracoons, plantations, segregated cities, offshored factories, autonomous trade zones, and detention centres, as well as places of privilege that all disavow their unjust construction.³Michel Foucault. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, ed. by Arnold I. Davidson, trans. by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Saidiya Hartman. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); “WEAPONIZED ARCHITECTURE: The Slave Ship Is Architecture”, THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE, 24 March 2014; Keller Easterling. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014). To design such spaces, architects have specified and used materials and labour from plundered lands, entailing devastation on local and planetary scales. 

Climate injustice and climate breakdown share three interlocking causes— colonialism, industrialism, and capitalism— and architecture has served all three. As the theorist and member of the Potawatomi Nation, Kyle Whyte argues, these causes recur like déjà-vu as successive generations of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples lose lands, livelihoods, and lives to so-called development and its devastations to climate.⁴Kyle Whyte, “Is It Colonial Déjà Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Injustice”, p. 100. Echoing Whyte’s long view of injustice, many people have criticised a universalising tendency to describe environmental change as a humanmade problem (the Anthropocene) without specifying which humans (which Anthropos) exploit other humans, species, and ecosystems, and when such violence began. In this spirit, Kathryn Yusoff shifts the perspective. Instead of humans, she uses the spatial practice of plantations to define this era, thereby identifying continuities between early modes of imperial violence and present environmental injustice.⁵Davis and Todd, p. 764; Yusoff; Janae Davis, Alex Moulton, Levi Van Sant, and Brian Williams, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises”, Geography Compass, 13.5 (2019).

Colonisation, and its direct impact on climate, persists to this day under various guises. In addition to the continued expropriation of indigenous lands and resources by global capital and nation states (as well as international waters, Antarctica, the moon…), a growing decarbonisation industry brokers deals whereby the Global North offsets its emissions by planting monoculture forests to absorb carbon dioxide in the Global South, at the cost of biodiversity and indigenous land rights.⁶ulia Dehm, “Carbon Colonialism or Climate Justice? Interrogating the Internationa Climate Regime from a Twail Perspective”, Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice, 33 (2017), 129; Jennifer Johnson, ‘Conservation without Colonialism’, Red Pepper, 6 September 2020.[/footnote As the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel puts it, “energy privilege” presides unchallenged in such carbon colonialism.⁶Jason Hickel and Aljosa Slamersak, “Existing Climate Mitigation Scenarios Perpetuate Colonial Inequalities”, The Lancet Planetary Health, 6.7 (2022), e628–31 <https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00092-4>. To make matters worse, many countries only consider domestic production in their emissions data but import many products from overseas, thereby outsourcing carbon responsibility.⁷Nicolai Baumert, Astrid Kander, Magnus Jiborn, Viktoras Kulionis, and Tobias Nielsen, “Global Outsourcing of Carbon Emissions 1995–2009: A Reassessment”, Environmental Science & Policy, 92 (2019), pp. 228–36 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2018.10.010>. The construction sector offshores much of its intensive industrial processes to poorer regions with fewer environmental and labour protections.⁸Charles Gillott, “We Have Reusable Cups, Bags and Bottles: So Why Are Our Buildings Still Single Use?” The Conversation, 11 November 2021. Meanwhile, electric vehicles – celebrated in the Global North for their low emissions – depend on extracting lithium, cobalt, and other rare minerals from vulnerable lands using(often child) labour in regions such as Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, and China. Given such injustices, considering colonial histories and contemporary racial justice in discussions of architecture and climate breakdown is paramount. 

This expanded understanding of climate builds upon anti-colonial environmentalism within African, Caribbean, and Pacific-region liberation movements. Working in Portuguese-controlled Guinea in the 1950s, the agronomist Amílcar Cabral drew from Marxism to develop a revolutionary anti-colonial project that understood imperialism as a combined attack on ecosystems and communities.⁹Filipa César, “Meteorisations: Reading Amílcar Cabral’s Agronomy of Liberation”, Third Text, 32.2–3 (2018), pp. 254–72. Such initiatives powerfully recuperated the word ‘colony’, recalling its etymology in farm and cultivation, by caring for soil and myriad other habitats and homes. 

Cultivating spaces and societies care-fully challenges Euro-Western definitions of humanity which, as the theorist Sylvia Wynter writes, exclude all but homo economicus, or profit-driven man.¹⁰Wynter. It also challenges human exceptionalism’s binary logic that separates nature from human for profit.¹¹Cadena. According to physicist and activist Vandana Shiva, in nature’s economy the currency is not money, it is life.¹²Vandana Shiva. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (London: Zed Books, 2005). Cultivating places whose material construction and social uses enable this inclusive sense of vitality is what the anthropologist Arturo Escobar calls designing for transformative environmental justice.¹³Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 224.  

Anti-colonial environmental movements have similarly cautioned against understanding climate breakdown only in the present tense, emphasising the afterlife of 500 years of settler and exploitation colonialism.¹⁴See for example Idle no More, The Red Deal, and Wretched of the Earth Coalition. The scholar Christina Sharpe writes that “wake work”— a labour of mourning and struggle— characterises contemporary life “in the wake” of slavery and its infamous ships, where “the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present”.¹⁵Christina Sharpe. In the Wake: On Blackness And Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 9. Facing climate breakdown in ways geared for climate justice, it follows, requires countering a climate of antiblackness,¹⁶Sharpe, p. 104. which is one of the reasons why decarbonisation has to be developed hand in hand with decolonisation. 

Annotated bibliography

Amitav Ghosh. Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (London: John Murray, 2021).

This is a brilliant tracing of the intersection of colonial domination with climate breakdown. Starting with the tale of the Dutch East India Company’s ruthless exploitation of Indonesian nutmeg, with accompanying genocide and ecocide, Ghosh weaves a rich history of how Eurocentric attitudes lead to viewing nature, planetary resources, and Indigenous communities through a violently extractive lens. Drawing on his experience as a fiction writer, Ghosh calls for indigenous voices and the stories of the beyond-human to be recovered if we are to avoid planetary catastrophe. 

Katherine McKittrick, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2014).

This compendium of writings by and about the cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter gathers important insights into her theories for the interlinked workings of race, place, and time that make up what it means to be human. Drawing from science, history, literature, and Black studies, Wynter unpicks how colonialism created an exclusive category of man that denied Black membership and drove Black dispossession. The book includes a dialogue between its editor, Katherine McKittrick, and Wynter that explores the influence of writers such as Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and Aimé Césaire on Wynter’s anti-colonial thinking.

Walter Rodney. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Verso, 2018).

First published in 1972, the historian of colonialism and Black Power and Pan-African activist Walter Rodney’s political, economic, and historical analysis of colonialism and its afterlives provides a damning indictment of Europe’s exploitation of Africa under the guise of development. Meticulously researched and powerfully argued, the book lays out how Europe strategically kept Africa economically dependent as a method for extracting African labour and natural resources to profit European metropoles. The book has informed scholarship and activism worldwide, fighting global inequality. Just eight years after publishing this book, and shortly after founding the Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, Rodney was assassinated. He was only 38.

Vandana Shiva. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic, 2005).

In this book, the scientist and activist Vandana Shiva defines Earth Democracy as a set of practices based on principles of inclusion, nonviolence, reclaiming the commons, and freely sharing the earth’s resources. She tracks such practices in recent feminist and decolonial environmental movements, celebrating their strength in the face of fundamentalism, racism, femicide, and climate breakdown — all of which are symptoms, she argues, of predatory capitalism. Tracing capitalism’s practices of privatisation to 16^th century enclosures of the British commons, Shiva demonstrates how shared lands and resources, and the people who care for them, are imperilled without democratic and earth-based solidarities.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

In As We Have Always Done, the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explores Indigenous theorising, writing, organising, and thinking as a powerful form of resistance against extractive capitalism and its settler colonial mindset. In the ongoing contexts of tar sands drilling and the pipeline construction at Standing Rock, Simpson argues that assimilation within a cultural melting-pot is no longer viable when so many lands and lives are at stake. Her book foregrounds Indigenous ways of knowing and living as a fundamental alternative to the destructive operations of settler colonialist states and their capitalist, heteropatriarchal, white supremacist logics.  

Kathryn Yusoff. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).In this powerful book of barely 100 pages, the geographer Kathryn Yusoff argues that “no geology is neutral” but instead reveals traces of extractive processes driving capitalism, industrialism, and colonialism. Whereas some thinkers have dated our Anthropocene age to the beginning Industrial Revolution, or even later, to accelerations of consumption in the 1960s, Yusoff follows decolonial and black feminist scholars in tracing its origins to colonialism and slavery. It was colonialism, she argues, that developed an inhumane grammar separating some humans from others, and from nature itself, in the name of capital. Facing climate breakdown today, therefore, requires facing up to its colonial causes.

Notes

• 1
  Amitav Ghosh. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (London: John Murray, 2021), p. 38.
• 2
  Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene”, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16.4 (2017), pp. 761–80; Kyle Whyte, “Is It Colonial Déjà Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Injustice”, in Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice, ed. by Joni Adamson and Michael Davis (Earthscan, 2016), pp. 88–104; The Wretched of the Earth, ‘An Open Letter to Extinction Rebellion’, Redpepper.Org, 2019 <https://www.redpepper.org.uk/environment-climate/climate-change/open-letter-to-extinction-rebellion/> [accessed 15 June 2022].
• 3
  Michel Foucault. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, ed. by Arnold I. Davidson, trans. by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Saidiya Hartman. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007); “WEAPONIZED ARCHITECTURE: The Slave Ship Is Architecture”, THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE, 24 March 2014; Keller Easterling. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso, 2014).
• 4
  Kyle Whyte, “Is It Colonial Déjà Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Injustice”, p. 100.
• 5
  Davis and Todd, p. 764; Yusoff; Janae Davis, Alex Moulton, Levi Van Sant, and Brian Williams, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, … Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises”, Geography Compass, 13.5 (2019).
• 6
  ulia Dehm, “Carbon Colonialism or Climate Justice? Interrogating the Internationa Climate Regime from a Twail Perspective”, Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice, 33 (2017), 129; Jennifer Johnson, ‘Conservation without Colonialism’, Red Pepper, 6 September 2020.[/footnote As the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel puts it, “energy privilege” presides unchallenged in such carbon colonialism.⁶Jason Hickel and Aljosa Slamersak, “Existing Climate Mitigation Scenarios Perpetuate Colonial Inequalities”, The Lancet Planetary Health, 6.7 (2022), e628–31 <https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(22)00092-4>.
• 7
  Nicolai Baumert, Astrid Kander, Magnus Jiborn, Viktoras Kulionis, and Tobias Nielsen, “Global Outsourcing of Carbon Emissions 1995–2009: A Reassessment”, Environmental Science & Policy, 92 (2019), pp. 228–36 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2018.10.010>.
• 8
  Charles Gillott, “We Have Reusable Cups, Bags and Bottles: So Why Are Our Buildings Still Single Use?” The Conversation, 11 November 2021.
• 9
  Filipa César, “Meteorisations: Reading Amílcar Cabral’s Agronomy of Liberation”, Third Text, 32.2–3 (2018), pp. 254–72.
• 10
  Wynter.
• 11
  Cadena.
• 12
  Vandana Shiva. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (London: Zed Books, 2005).
• 13
  Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 224.
• 14
  See for example Idle no More, The Red Deal, and Wretched of the Earth Coalition.
• 15
  Christina Sharpe. In the Wake: On Blackness And Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 9.
• 16
  Sharpe, p. 104.