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As a provocation, let me summarize my objections to the Anthropo-
cene as a tool, story, or epoch to think with: (1) The myth system asso-
ciated with the Anthropos is a setup, and the stories end badly. More to
the point, they end in double death; they are not about ongoingness. It
is hard to tell a good story with such a bad actor. Bad actors need a story,
but not the whole story. (2) Species Man does not make history. (3) Man
plus Tool does not make history. That is the story of History human
exceptionalists tell. (4) That History must give way to geostories, to Gaia
stories, to symchthonic stories; terrans do webbed, braided, and tentac-
ular living and dying in sympoietic multispecies string figures; they do
not do History. (5) The human social apparatus of the Anthropocene
tends to be top-heavy and bureaucracy prone. Revolt needs other forms
of action and other stories for solace, inspiration, and effectiveness. (6)
Despite its reliance on agile computer modeling and autopoietic systems
theories, the Anthropocene relies too much on what should be an “un-
thinkable” theory of relations, namely the old one of bounded utilitarian
individualism—preexisting units in competition relations that take up
all the air in the atmosphere (except, apparently, carbon dioxide). (7)
The sciences of the Anthropocene are too much contained within re-
strictive systems theories and within evolutionary theories called the
Modern Synthesis, which for all their extraordinary importance have
proven unable to think well about sympoiesis, symbiosis, symbiogene-
sis, development, webbed ecologies, and microbes. That’s a lot of trouble
for adequate evolutionary theory.(8) Anthropocene is a term most easily
meaningful and usable by intellectuals in wealthy classes and regions; it
is not an idiomatic term for climate, weather, land, care of country, or
much else in great swathes of the world, especially but not only among
indigenous peoples. (Haraway 2016:49)