Gardening out of the Anthropocene: Creating Different Relations between Humans and Edible Plants in Sydney

Abstract

One way to critique the kind of technocratic development signified in the term ‘Anthropocene’, to challenge the problematic anthropocentrism of the concept, and also to maintain a cogent response to the environmental crisis at the same time, is to imagine how society could leave a different kind of trace in the fossil record. Donna Haraway has called for the Anthropocene, or ‘Capitalocene,’ to be as thin a layer as possible — what stratigraphers call a “boundary event” rather than an epoch. Following her, scholars are trying to theorize what it would mean and what it would take to make a qualitatively different earthen layer. How to dig ourselves out of this mess? Natasha Myers proposes the idea of the ‘Planthroposcene,’ not as a new epoch <i>per se</i>, but as a new methodology for living with plants.