While I resonate with many of the arguments posited in The Worm at the Core, I also find myself questioning the universality posed by authors Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. Their experiments, which largely have been performed on Americans, Canadians, and Israelis, have results which are then applied to humans as a whole, and without significant regard to class, race, and other differentiators. This is not to dismiss their conclusions, but rather to question whether every person has the same understandings and fears of death.

The movie Anthropocene as well, while helpful in showing the extent of climate crisis, at many points lacked an internationalist analysis and instead pointed to all humans as the cause of climate change. While somewhat different from universalizing fears of death, this is another example, in my opinion, of painting too broad a stroke with regards to climate and death. Specificity with regards to who/what has caused climate destruction allows for more accurate conclusions with regards to alleviating future destruction.

Creating the capitalocene: endless accumulation – CounterPunch.org

This specificity is exemplified in a shift from calling our current era the “anthropocene” toward names such as “capitalocene” and “plantationocene” (plantation including chattel slavery as well as other forms of agro-industrialization). I was first introduced to these terms by a friend last week, and truthfully I’ve done only the barest readings of either. Nonetheless, in this interview, Donna Haraway says that “the Anthropocene is […] an historical, situated set of conjunctures that are absolutely not a species act.” In the same series of articles, Sophie Sap Moore et. al. posit that the plantation was “produced through processes of land alienation, labor extraction, and racialized violence.”

This terminology correction seems valuable to me as a way to shift focus from “mankind” as the cause of climate crisis (which might lead to eugenicist and fascist solutions such as reducing births) and instead towards an understanding that global systems of imperialism and colonialism have exploited masses of people for the benefit of a few, moving everyone closer to climate catastrophe. This in itself does not pose a solution, and in all honesty I don’t have one. Just that a more thorough analysis of our circumstances will lead to a sharper understanding of our duties. 

Something less heavy—I’m slowly starting to curate a (limited and not at all cohesive) death/climate crisis playlist. Please add and listen! Or don’t!