At a roundtable discussion on a recent documentary about the 1960s Yugoslav art group OHO, aligned with ecological thinking and American land art, in many ways genuine “new agers”, it was striking to hear that they had, at some point, called off the “new age”. The term, they felt, had become manipulated and used in derogatory ways, no longer matching their line of thought. Calling off a new age may sound simple, yet the momentum persists. New ages appear constantly, simultaneously overlapping, collectively produced through time, dispersing any single focal point (not necessarily to its detriment). In the following article, we outline several such contemporary epochal currents which, in a kind of singularity of collapse, may converge in what has been termed the Homogenocene, “a label for the modern world, characterized by unprecedented, and accelerating, flows of people, pests, crops, and forms of political domination”, as Charles Mann describes it, tracing its origins to 1493.
Pleistocene, Holocene > Anthropocene
The Pleistocene was a geological epoch lasting from approximately 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, characterised by repeated “ice age” conditions with alternating glacial and warmer interglacial periods driven largely by changes in Earth’s orbit and axial tilt. During this time, Earth experienced major climate fluctuations, the evolution and expansion of several human species (Homo habilis, Homo erectus and eventually Homo sapiens), and the development of more sophisticated tools and the control of fire. The epoch was home to large mammals such as woolly mammoths, giant ground sloths and sabre-toothed cats, many of which became extinct toward its end. This late Pleistocene mass extinction is still debated, with proposed causes including rapid climatic change, human hunting pressure, or a combination of both. The Pleistocene ended with the conclusion of the last glacial period, the Younger Dryas stadial, marking the transition to the current interglacial epoch.
Technically, we are in the Holocene, characterised by relatively stable climatic conditions compared with the fluctuations of the Pleistocene, providing the basis for the expansion of human populations and the development of agriculture, sedentary settlements and increasingly complex social structures. The name “Holocene” comes from Ancient Greek hólos, meaning “whole”, and kainós, meaning “new, recent”, referring to this epoch as “entirely new”. It correlates with the last maximum axial tilt towards the Sun (see Milankovitch cycles in kiloyears). Besides the ongoing Holocene extinction, the epoch is characterised by a sea level rise of 65 metres due to ice melt. Depressions created by the glaciers’ weight allowed for incursions, hence marine fossils can be found in landlocked regions. Many things happened before the Anthropocene. For example, the 8.2-ka event was “the most prominent climatic event occurring in the Holocene Epoch”, when the global temperatures dropped drastically around 8,200 years ago, with a reported decrease from around 1 to 5 °C. The event was caused by the collapse of an ice dam over Hudson Bay, releasing cold water into the ocean, changing the thermohaline circulation of the Atlantic. About the time when the rapid domestication of plants and animals allowed for sedentary human cultures.
In light of the 8.2 kiloyear event, which was only discovered by scientists in 1997, missing the 1,5°C temperature rise limit set at the Paris Agreement, poses a serious threat to (any)(national) security. The 2002 Pentagon investigation into geopolitical scenarios caused by potential abrupt climate change (at best?) inspired the 2004 movie The Day After Tomorrow. While the perfect “coincidence” of the melting glaciers producing cooling off and global warming due to rising greenhouse gas emissions has been overturned in What’s After the Day After Tomorrow?, models of rapid climate change produce scenarios that point towards famine, scarcity, population’ die off and migration.
Anthropocene
As there are alternative names for the human species, Homo, so alternative names for the epochs shaped by human activity appear with similar ease. Even with proposals to use the atomic age and its measurable radioactive signatures as a global marker, defining the Anthropocene is almost as difficult as declaring a new nation-state. Although not formally recognised as a geological epoch, the Anthropocene remains a useful framework for studying and describing human impact on Earth’s systems (lithosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere, biosphere). Etymologically, the term should signal a “new human”, who is nowhere to be seen, while a new Earth, Gaiacene is being (co)created. It comes as no surprise, the neologism has already been coined, while Chthonocene (chtonic, in Ancient Greek ‘earth’ or ‘soil’) is rather obscurely than widely used, probably because of the similarity to Haraway’s Chthulucene. The popularisation of the term Anthropocene by Paul J. Crutzen in the early 2000s generated extensive debate, critique and a proliferation of sub-categories seeking to specify or contest what this “new epoch” is taken to represent.
Anthropocene Lineage
In The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (2016), Bonneuil and Fressoz identify several historical strands that converge in the present condition. They describe the political history of energy and CO₂ as the Thermocene, the history of the military’s role as the Thanatocene, and the rise of consumer society as the Phagocene. The Phronocene refers to the history of environmental knowledge, warnings and “environmental grammars”, while the Agnotocene examines the “intellectual constructions that enabled these warnings to be ignored or marginalised” and planetary limits denied. The Capitalocene traces the joint history of capitalism and the Anthropocene, and the Polemocene covers the history of socioecological struggles and resistance to the damages of industrialism.
Capitalocene, Econocene, Fire and Cheap Nature
For Richard B. Norgaard, the mechanistic understanding of nature combined with the rise of market-oriented economic organisation enabled a threefold increase in human population and a fiftyfold expansion of market activity during the twentieth century. He argues that economic growth is the primary force behind this planetary transformation, suggesting that the present might be more accurately described as the Econocene. The Capitalocene, a more (geo)poetic than economic term, coined by Andreas Malm in 2009, offers a related but distinct framing: it situates the origins of the Anthropocene in the history of fossil capital and the CO₂ emissions released by its expansion. Some scholars trace the trajectory further back, linking the Anthropocene to humanity’s early use and mastery of fire, and to its contemporary loss of control over it, captured in the Pyrocene, a term introduced by Stephen Pyne in 2015.
Jason W. Moore extends the Capitalocene thesis by arguing that capitalism’s dependence on the appropriation of “Cheap Nature”, food, raw materials, energy and labour, predates the fossil-fuel era. This long history of extraction and externalisation forms what he calls the capitalist world-ecology, the broader foundation of the Capitalocene.
Technocene
In The Technocene: Reflections on Bodies, Minds, and Markets (2018), Hermínio Martins argues that the Anthropocene could just as well be named the Technocene, since the rise in atmospheric CO₂ emissions from the mid-eighteenth century onwards is driven more directly by technological systems than by any “psychophysiological make-up of Homo sapiens sapiens”. For Martins, the Anthropocene is therefore a subset within a much broader Technocene, in which technological agency and market-driven technification shape human and planetary trajectories. Yet the Anthropocene retains multiple, divergent points of departure, geological, historical, chemical, political, making it far more difficult to reduce to a single interpretive frame or to subsume neatly under a technologically determined epoch.
Chthulucene, Plantationocene, Symbiocene
As a counterpoint to the Anthropocene, Donna Haraway, one of the central figures in ecofeminism, proposes in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016) a deliberate shift away from human-centred narratives toward multispecies connections, sympoiesis, and grounded ecological co-becoming. In parallel, and as an alternative framing, the term Plantationocene was introduced by Haraway and colleagues in 2014. Its genealogy highlights the recognition that plantations, although organised around monocrop extraction, function as multispecies assemblages structured by entanglement, forced labour, displacement and enduring political relations. The Plantationocene has become a framework linking ecological degradation with social inequality, stressing that any viable future politics must address relations among humans, nonhumans and the infrastructures that bind them.
Although the Chthulucene echoes H. P. Lovecraft’s cosmic entity character “Cthulhu”, Haraway redirects the term from cosmic horror to earthly, muddy, compost-centred becoming, using the Pimoa cthulu spider as an anchor for thinking tentacular interdependencies. Her proposal substitutes compost for posthumanism and humusities for humanities, promoting the kinds of weird ecologies described by Morton and engaging with studies of nonhuman monstrosity. Haraway calls these assemblages “oddkin”, a way of dislodging reductionist views that deny agency to the more-than-human world and narrowing the distance between creaturely life and world-making processes.
In this broader constellation, the Symbiocene, proposed by Glenn Albrecht in 2016, names a prospective epoch organised not around extraction or domination but around mutually supportive relationships among species. Its political system is sumbiocracy, a “political rule or governance committed to the types and totality of mutually beneficial or benign relationships in a given socio-biological system at all scales (mutualism)”. Symbiomimicry, Albrecht argues, is more than biomimicry. Instead of mimicking “shapes and forms of life”, symbiomimicry connects these forms to life’s processes in order to produce “mutually beneficial associations between different life forms strong and healthy”. Extending E. O. Wilson’s concept of biophilia, he introduces “sumbiophilia”, the love of living together, stemming from a historically evolved socio-ecological matrix.
Homogenocene and Processes of Bio-Cultural Elimination
In addition to the scientific markers produced by human activity, Conversi and Posocco bring cultural dimensions into the discussion in their 2024 article Homogenocene: Defining the Age of Bio-cultural Devastation (1493–Present). They argue that one of the paradoxes of the Anthropocene discourse is that “humans are being ‘ejected from history’ just as geology enriches itself with a human-centered eponym”. Rather than attributing responsibility to an undifferentiated humanity, they trace historical shifts “from consumption to overconsumption and from exploitation to overexploitation”, which have left a permanent imprint on the Earth’s stratigraphy. The term Homogenocene was coined in 1999 but gained clearer definition with Charles Mann’s 2011 description of it as “a label for the modern world, characterized by unprecedented, and accelerating, flows of people, pests, crops, and forms of political domination”, placing emphasis on the loss of bio-cultural diversity beginning with the European “great explorations”.
The earliest phase of the Homogenocene corresponds to Columbus and the devastation of the Americas. The second phase is marked by the Industrial Revolution, nationalism and large-scale homogenization, in which citizens were bound into increasingly uniform national bodies and recruited into industrial hierarchies. As the authors put it, “a colorful world enriched by a patchwork of small local and regional communities mutated into a gray, homogenized world made up of just a few bigger ones”.
The next phase, “More Than Industry: The Birth of Mass Consumerism”, emerges from the Fordist model, Taylorism and the rise of advertising, followed after 1945 by what the authors describe as the “Destruction of Everyone”. While Elias’s The Civilizing Process shows that imitation and emulation of elites long predate the twentieth century, mass consumerism consolidated these dynamics at unprecedented scale, intensifying the Anthropocene through an “acceleration of the acceleration”, “from empire to emporium”. Resistance to homogenization appears, they write (following Barber B. R.) in forms such as “Jihad”, a category used to encompass broader tendencies toward tribalism, nationalism and religious orthodoxy, but also in more peaceful assertions of local autonomy resisting the pressures of McWorld. They note the growing convergence between West and East, with parts of Asia becoming “a mesmerized replica of the West, engaging in happy self-destruction”, bringing plant and animal worlds into the pattern of extinction.
Telocene <
The Homogenocene seeks firmer ground for the Anthropocene by linking cultural and climatic change and by drawing together markers that support the consolidation of concepts like the Capitalocene, Technocene and others. While Haraway, Albrecht and many others propose alternative modes of thinking, their practical adoption as a way out of crisis is not on the horizon and, realistically, will not occur at the scale required. The explosion of epochs produces an inverse reaction. At this point, the question of irreversibility becomes unavoidable. Without diversity there is nothing left to differentiate, and while it may be far-fetched thinking that final homogenisation means the end of any end, apart from the collapse of Anthropocene into itself. That, in effect, would be the Telocene, the “new end”. And, you have guessed right, it already exists.
