Conceptual Dictionary of the Anthropocene: Vocabulary for Enhanced Contemporary Environmental Experience (Penultimate Part)
- Sérgio Luiz de Matteo
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Biocultural Memory
Definition: A set of knowledge, practices, narratives, beliefs, and institutions that connect human communities to their specific territories and ecosystems, transmitted through generations and continuously updated by lived experience with the environment. It is the dynamic intersection between biological and cultural diversity, where knowledge about nature is inseparable from ways of living and relating to it.
Gender: Feminine (F)
Perspectives:
Anthropology/Ethnobiology: Studies the relationship between cultures and biodiversity, documenting traditional knowledge and its importance.
Landscape Ecology/Conservation Biology: Recognizes the role of cultural practices in maintaining biodiversity and in sustainable ecosystem management.
Indigenous Studies: Values indigenous knowledge systems as vital sources for environmental understanding and conservation.
Example: Fishing peoples develop biocultural memory by accumulating knowledge about fish reproductive cycles, tidal patterns, natural signals of climate change, and sustainable fishing techniques, integrating popular scientific observation with ancestral traditions passed down through generations.
Social Metabolism
Definition: The flow of materials and energy between human societies and the environment, including processes of extraction (resources), transformation (production), consumption, and disposal (waste). A concept that reveals how social patterns of production and consumption translate into specific and large-scale ecological impacts, evidencing societies' material dependence on nature and the consequences of this interaction.
Gender: Masculine (M)
Perspectives:
Ecological Economics: Quantifies material and energy flows, analyzing resource use efficiency and ecological footprint.
Environmental Sociology: Studies how social structures, power relations, and lifestyles shape patterns of extraction, consumption, and disposal.
Industrial Ecology: Seeks to optimize material and energy flows in industrial systems to minimize impacts and promote circularity.
Example: The social metabolism of megacities like São Paulo processes millions of tons of materials daily (food, fuels, water) and generates enormous volumes of waste (sewage, solid waste), altering ecosystems at regional and global scales through resource extraction at distant locations and waste disposal.
Nature-Culture
Definition: A concept that dissolves the traditional dichotomy between "nature" and "culture," recognizing that both are mutually constituted through historical and ongoing processes of co-evolution and hybridization. It emphasizes that there is no "pure nature" untouched by human action nor "culture independent" of biophysical materiality—everything is an indissociable amalgamation of natural processes and human influences.
Gender: Feminine (F)
Perspectives:
Post-Structuralist Anthropology: Studies how cultures and environments are mutually constituted, challenging Eurocentric dualisms.
Environmental Philosophy/Post-humanism: Argues against Cartesian separation between mind/body, human/nature, proposing relational ontologies.
Environmental Studies: Analyzes the ubiquity of human impact across all ecosystems, from managed forests to urban landscapes, recognizing the hybrid character of all reality.
Example: Forests managed by traditional peoples exemplify nature-culture by combining ancestral knowledge with ecological dynamics, creating landscapes that are simultaneously natural (in their composition and cycles) and cultural (in their form and meaning), resulting from long-term interaction. Likewise, the Tijuca Forest in Rio de Janeiro, a forest replanted in the nineteenth century, is an exemplary "nature-culture hybrid."
Necro-Effect (Necrosystemic Effect)
Definition: The concept of "collateral damage" elevated to a permanent geological and ethical condition. It refers to the negative marks, often rendered invisible and externalized, left by production and consumption chains on vulnerable populations (human and non-human) and distant ecosystems. It is the externalization of death, disease, and degradation as an organizing principle of the modern economy, where costs are transferred to the weakest and most distant.
Gender: Masculine (M)
Perspectives:
Ethics/Philosophy: Questions the notion of consumer innocence by revealing chains of suffering and destruction embedded in banal commodities and global production processes.
Ecological Politics: Analyzes how power relations and colonial extractivism produce sacrifice zones and transfer negative impacts to the Global South.
Critical Urban Studies: Explores how economic and urban growth generates "shadows" of pollution and waste in marginalized areas.
Example: A smartphone battery contains lithium, whose extraction consumes millions of liters of water in arid regions of Chile, drying up local communities and ecosystems. The end user experiences the technology, while the necro-effect is suffered thousands of kilometers away by communities that do not benefit from production.
Necropolitan
Definition: Urban dynamics characterized by the concentration of activities and populations that systematically produce ecological and social death. It applies the concept of necropolitics (which refers to the power to decide who lives and who dies) to urbanism, analyzing how cities can be spatially organized to produce life for some and death (in its various forms of precariousness, disease, and environmental risk) for others, especially marginalized populations.
Gender: Feminine (F)
Perspectives:
Critical Urbanism/Urban Geography: Studies spatial segregation and the unequal distribution of environmental and social risks in cities.
Urban Political Ecology: Analyzes the power relations that structure the production of urban landscapes of death and sacrifice.
Environmental Public Health: Investigates correlations between urban conditions (pollution, access to services) and population health and life expectancy.
Example: Polluting industrial zones located near slums exemplify the necropolitan by concentrating environmental risks (air and water contamination, toxic waste) on vulnerable populations, creating urban landscapes structured by the systematic production of disease and death, where access to life is denied.
Planetary Obsolescence
Definition: A condition in which fundamental natural systems for life on Earth become "obsolete" or dysfunctional due to the speed and magnitude of anthropogenic transformations. It creates a mismatch between human timescales (fast, technological) and ecological timescales (slow, evolutionary), where the capacity for adaptation and regeneration of nature is exceeded, leading to collapse or loss of essential functions.
Gender: Feminine (F)
Perspectives:
Systems Ecology/Evolutionary Biology: Analyzes the resilience and adaptation capacity of living systems and rupture thresholds.
Philosophy of Time/Social Acceleration: Explores the dissonance between different temporal rhythms and their consequences for life on the planet.
Critical Theory: Questions the idea of linear progress and the incessant pursuit of novelty that leads to the disposability of Earth itself.
Example: Migratory species face planetary obsolescence when their ancestral routes become inadequate due to accelerated climate change (temperature alterations, flowers blooming out of season), with no evolutionary time for adaptation or to find new habitats, leading to their decline.
Perceptual Obsolescence
Definition: The loss of capacity to perceive and respond to subtle environmental signals or gradual changes due to life in artificial, technology-mediated environments disconnected from natural rhythms. It results in sensory disconnection from the living world and reduced sensitivity to ecological changes and environmental degradation, naturalizing loss and hindering reaction to crises.
Gender: Feminine (F)
Perspectives:
Environmental/Cognitive Psychology: Studies how urbanization and technology affect environmental perception and consciousness.
Urban Sociology/Anthropology of Sense: Analyzes how modern life shapes the senses and how we interact with the environment.
Philosophy of Perception: Explores how technology-mediated experience alters our direct relationship with the world.
Example: Children growing up in urban apartments may develop perceptual obsolescence by not recognizing signs of seasonal changes (such as the flowering of native trees), bird calls that indicate local species, or odors that signal air quality, losing sensory connection with the natural environment.
More-than-Human Kinship
Definition: Recognition of kinship relations that transcend the human species, including affective, ethical, spiritual, and practical bonds with animals, plants, places, rivers, mountains, and natural phenomena. It challenges the anthropocentrism of traditional family structures, proposing an expansion of the kinship community beyond human blood ties, grounding an ethic of mutual care and responsibility.
Gender: Masculine (M)
Perspectives:
Anthropology of Kinship/Indigenous Studies: Analyzes how many non-Western cultures already understand kinship in multispecies terms.
Post-humanist Philosophy/Environmental Ethics: Questions ontological boundaries between human and non-human and proposes a morality that includes all life.
Relational Ecology: Studies how ecological interactions can be understood as forms of kinship and interdependence.
Example: Rural communities that consider rivers as "grandmothers" and forests as "mothers" practice more-than-human kinship by structuring social relations and ethical responsibilities beyond human blood ties, protecting these "relatives" as if they were members of the extended family.
More-than-Human Politics
Definition: A political approach that includes non-human actors (animals, plants, ecosystems, technologies, rivers) as legitimate participants in decision-making processes, questioning the human monopoly over the definition of the political and governance. It seeks to develop mechanisms and institutions that give voice and representation to the interests of non-humans, recognizing their agency and their role in constructing social and ecological realities.
Gender: Feminine (F)
Perspectives:
Political Science/Democratic Theory: Challenges traditional conceptions of representation and participation, expanding them beyond humans.
Political Philosophy/Environmental Ethics: Grounds the extension of political consideration to non-human entities, recognizing their rights and agency.
Sociology of Technology/Science and Technology Studies (STS): Analyzes the role of objects and technologies as actors in the political arena.
Example: Environmental councils that include "representatives" of rivers, forests, and endangered species through specialized spokespersons (scientists, nature advocates, indigenous leaders) practice more-than-human politics by expanding the political community beyond humans, ensuring that ecosystem interests are considered.
Post-Nature
Definition: A concept that questions the traditional dichotomy between "nature" and "culture," arguing that in the Anthropocene, the idea of an untouched, pure, or wild nature is no longer viable. "Post-nature" recognizes that all ecosystems, landscapes, and even human biology are, in some way, shaped, influenced, or hybridized by human activity. It is not about denying the existence of the non-human world, but about understanding that the boundary between what is "natural" and what is "human/cultural" has become permeable and interconnected, requiring a reassessment of our relationship with the environment.
Perspectives:
Philosophy/Ontology: Challenges Cartesian dualism between nature and culture and illuminates new ontologies that see the world as a continuum of interactions.
Anthropology: Explores how societies co-produce their environments and meanings, and how human intervention has become ubiquitous.
Environmental Studies: Analyzes the ubiquity of human impact across all ecosystems, from managed forests to urban landscapes, recognizing that even the most "wild" places have a history of human interaction.
Example: The Tijuca Forest in Rio de Janeiro, often viewed as an exuberant "natural forest," is actually a vast forest replanted in the nineteenth century to combat deforestation and protect the city's water sources. It is an exemplary "nature-culture hybrid," a landscape that, though apparently wild, is the direct result of human intervention to restore ecological functions. Understanding Tijuca as post-nature leads us to question what it truly means to "preserve" or "restore" in the Anthropocene.
Queer Ecology
Definition: A perspective that questions and destabilizes norms of gender, sexuality, and reproduction through observation of the diversity and fluidity of reproductive and social behaviors in nature. It challenges arguments about the "naturalness" of heteronormative human social arrangements, celebrating diversity (sexual, gender, species) as a fundamental ecological principle and a force for resilience, and connecting the oppression of sexual minorities with the domination of nature.
Perspectives:
Queer Theory/Gender Studies: Deconstructs binary categories and hierarchies of gender and sexuality, revealing their artificiality.
Biology/Zoology: Documents the vast range of reproductive, sexual, and social behaviors (homosexuality, asexuality, transgenderness, etc.) in the animal and plant kingdoms.
Environmental Philosophy/Ecofeminism: Connects the domination of nature with forms of social oppression, including homophobia and transphobia.
Example: The existence of more than 1,500 documented animal species exhibiting homosexual behaviors (such as penguins, dolphins, and primates) supports queer ecology arguments about the naturalness and ecological value of sexual and gender diversity, dismantling the idea of a heteronormative "nature."
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