The settlers’ climate crisis: Bradley Steele, Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Should we consider the Settlerocene?’ Settler Colonial Studies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The settlers’ climate crisis: Bradley Steele, Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Should we consider the Settlerocene?’ Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

02Apr25

Abstract: The onset of a new geoclimatical era is an unavoidable marker of a novel global dispensation. Clarity about nomenclature and periodisation is needed in order to effectively adapt and mitigate. Several possibilities to describe the new era have been proposed; the ‘Anthropocene’, the ‘Capitalocene’, and the ‘Plantationocene’ have been most prominent. This article reviews these categories, their politics and evolution, and proposes yet another definition, the ‘Settlerocene’, which may also be considered in the context of this significant and fateful debate. The article focuses on the way in which settlers inhabit the lands they move to and conquer and highlights their approach to the climates they encounter and the environments they transform. This article suggests that the new era may have begun when settler colonists acquired the sovereign capability of systematically altering the Indigenous lands they were conquering.

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