PT Chevron Oil field Sumatra
“European opulence … was built on the backs of slaves, it fed on the blood of slaves, and owes it very existence to the soil and subsoil of the underdeveloped world” Frantz Fanon. The “racial” mythologies created out of differences in skin color and physical characteristics were among the prime tools of power used when white Europeans brought non-white Asian and African peoples under their control.
The Plantationocene is an epoch characterised by the emergence of a large-scale, monocropping production system across the surface of the Earth. No matter whether the Plantationocene is considered a part of the Anthropocene or of the Capitalocene, or left as an autonomous, interspecies assemblage or diagram, it joins Earth history and human history in an extractive and exploitative global system, through the “forced labor” of humans, plants, and other organisms.
The plantation apparatus entails radical simplification, radical substitution, transfers of wealth, and transport of laboring bodies. It has been integral to the global environmental transformation since the 15th century. To invoke the plantation is to contend with the intermeshing organization of the colonialist / imperialist, racialist, and capitalist dimensions of the world-system. Its historical roots go back to the initial exploitation of the new world, but it is still very present and is where modern concepts of race developed, and connection to place was lost.
For W.E.B. Du Bois racial-colonial capitalism incorporates the “dark and vast sea of human labor” beyond Europe to produce “the world’s raw material and luxury – cotton, wool, coffee, tea, cocoa, palm oil, fibers, spices, rubber, silks, lumber, copper, gold, diamonds, leather..” The Triangular Trade” between Africa, the new world, and Europe insured its ongoing operation.
The windfall profits from the plantation created the conditions for the industrialization of Europe. It provided a template for alienated labor including the model for the factory
The Triangular Trade: slaves, raw materials, and cheap manufactured goods.
The term Plantationocene was initially proposed by Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in a conference at the University of Aarhus in October, 2014 .(see publications of AURA: Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene ) While accepting the prevalence of the term “Anthropocene”, they promoted the multi-species and environmental dimensions of the plantationocene, that entailed not just the disciplining of people, but also of plants and animals, including the spread of pests and pathogens. The radical simplification of plants down to a monoculture provided a particularly fertile ground for the development of pathogens, for example candida auris — a fungus that has become endemic to healthcare facilities, and which was able to develop from the overuse of fungicides in industrial farming.
While plantations today cannot depend on the availability of slave labor, they can still count on poorly paid workers, often seasonal migrants. Even “independent” farmers in the industrial system, such as chicken farmers, are caught up in a highly restrictive system, dominated by a few agribusiness giants, with little actual freedom from debt, monoculture, and financial vulnerability.
The most iconic symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone but the Chicken McNugget.
Are chickens the ultimate symbol of the Anthropocene? There are more than 23 billion alive today, and the modern bird is now so changed from its ancestors, that its distinctive bones will undoubtedly become fossilised markers of the time when humans reigned the planet. The record of this human-engineered bird will be forever set in stone. Any intelligent species which arises in the far future will have a puzzle on their hands (or tentacles) in trying to figure out how and why millions of these rapidly-evolved bones lie mixed with the technofossil debris of the huge petrified dumpsites we will leave behind.
“The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, of how capitalism has colonized our minds. We look no further than the commodity itself. We refuse to understand the relationships that underlie the commodities that we use on a daily basis.” –Angela Davis
While industrial farming may not be uniformly global in scope, Anna Tsing proposes looking at “patchy” Anthropocene unequally distributed in space, while maintaining a global approach that promotes invasion, empire, capital, and acceleration .
former (farmer) chicken