Conceptual Dictionary of the Anthropocene: Vocabulary for the Enhanced Contemporary Environmental Experience (Part 2)
- Sérgio Luiz de Matteo
- Oct 12
- 7 min read
Systemic Damage
Definition: Harm that transcends its immediate and local effects, propagating through interconnected systems in a non-linear and often irreversible manner. It differs from "collateral damage" due to its systemic nature and the impossibility of containment within specific borders, affecting multiple spheres of life and distant, interconnected ecosystems.
Gender: Masculine (M)
Perspectives:
Systems Ecology: Analyzes how the disturbance of one component can trigger a cascade of impacts throughout the entire system.
Ecological Economics: Quantifies the invisible costs and negative externalities that spread beyond the damage's point of origin.
International Environmental Law: Challenges the limitation of liability to national borders, recognizing the transboundary nature of environmental damage.
Example: The deforestation of the Amazon constitutes systemic damage because it alters continental rainfall patterns, affects global biodiversity, intensifies global warming, and compromises planetary climate stability, impacting areas far beyond its physical borders.
Ontological Decolonization
Definition: The process of questioning, subverting, and transforming the fundamental categories (being, nature, person, agency, time) imposed by the coloniality of power and knowledge, recovering and valuing other ways of understanding and relating to the world, especially those derived from non-Western and indigenous cosmologies. It seeks to deconstruct the hegemony of modern ontology that hierarchizes and objectifies.
Gender: Feminine (F)
Perspectives:
Postcolonial Studies: Analyzes how colonialism not only dominated territories and peoples but also imposed specific ways of being and knowing.
Philosophical Anthropology: Explores the different ways cultures define reality, life, and the interrelationship between beings.
Political Ecology: Links ontological domination to environmental and social exploitation, showing how the Western view of nature as a resource justifies its appropriation.
Example: Indigenous movements promote ontological decolonization by insisting that rivers and mountains are beings with their own rights, challenging the modern ontology that reduces them to "natural resources" susceptible to exploitation, and proposing a relationship of kinship.
Historical Carbon Debt
Definition: A concept that quantifies and politicizes the unequal responsibility for climate crises. It refers to the debt accumulated by industrialized countries, resulting from their disproportionate historical share of greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution. It challenges global power relations, environmental injustice, and demands climate justice and reparations for the most vulnerable nations and communities.
Gender: Feminine (F)
Perspectives:
International Politics/Environmental Economics: Underpins demands for climate financing, technology transfer, and reparations from Global North countries to Global South countries, recognizing past responsibilities.
Sociology/Environmental Justice: Exposes how the benefits of industrial development were concentrated in some regions, while the costs (floods, droughts, sea-level rise) are borne most cruelly by the least responsible and historically marginalized populations.
Intergenerational Ethics: Argues for the responsibility of present generations to pay the accumulated ecological debt and ensure a future for coming generations.
Example: An island nation like Tuvalu, which contributes a minimal fraction of global emissions, faces the risk of disappearing due to rising sea levels. Its political struggle is a direct appeal for the largest debtors of historical carbon debt to act and compensate, with investments in adaptation and mitigation infrastructure.
Ecological Debt
Definition: A concept that seeks to quantify and hold countries or human groups in the Global North (or economic elites) responsible for the disproportionate exploitation of natural resources and the appropriation of environmental "sinks" (pollution absorption capacity) of Global South countries and communities, without adequate compensation. It refers to the historical legacy of environmental degradation and the negative externalities imposed on more vulnerable populations, resulting from unsustainable development models and predatory consumption patterns, and the demand for restoration and reparation.
Gender: Feminine (F)
Perspectives:
Ecological Economics: Accounts for uninternalized environmental costs, the transfer of burdens, and the unequal appropriation of Earth's carrying capacity.
Sociology/Political Science: Analyzes power relations, extractive colonialism, and global environmental injustice, identifying beneficiaries and those harmed.
Ethics/Justice: Questions the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, demanding reparation, compensation, and recognition of the right to environmental self-determination.
Example: The historical greenhouse gas emissions by industrialized nations, which have contributed disproportionately to climate change, severely impacting small island states and coastal communities in the Global South through sea-level rise and extreme weather events. The "ecological debt" implies that these industrialized nations have a historical and moral responsibility to provide financial and technological support for adaptation and mitigation to the most affected nations.
Eco-anxiety
Definition: A psychological state characterized by chronic worry, anguish, fear, and sadness related to environmental changes (such as global warming, biodiversity loss, natural disasters) and uncertainty about the planet's ecological future. It can manifest through physical symptoms (insomnia, palpitations), sleep disturbances, feelings of existential helplessness, and pessimism regarding humanity's ability to reverse the situation.
Gender: Feminine (F)
Perspectives:
Environmental Psychology: Investigates individuals' and communities' emotional and cognitive responses to environmental threats.
Mental Health: Recognizes eco-anxiety as a condition requiring clinical attention and coping strategies.
Sociology of Emotion: Analyzes how emotions related to the environment are mediated by social, cultural, and political factors.
Example: University students develop eco-anxiety when studying scientific reports on global warming, experiencing a conflict between the need to act and a sense of individual insignificance in the face of the problem's magnitude, leading to a feeling of paralysis.
Ecocide
Definition: The massive and systematic destruction of the environment, of such magnitude that it compromises an ecosystem's capacity to regenerate and sustain life. The concept proposes elevating environmental devastation to the level of an international crime, similar to genocide, aiming to hold individuals and corporations accountable for acts that cause severe and long-term environmental damage. This implies recognizing "Earth" or "ecosystems" as potential victims and subjects of rights.
Gender: Masculine (M)
Perspectives:
Law/Judiciary: Challenges existing legal frameworks, proposing a new category of crime against planetary peace and security, with the aim of punishing and preventing ecological destruction.
Environmental Ethics/Philosophy: Extends moral consideration beyond humans, seeking justice for the non-human world and future generations, and an intrinsic recognition of nature's value.
Ecology: Provides the scientific basis for quantifying and qualifying the extent of damage, identifying irreversibility thresholds and impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Example: An oil spill from an offshore platform devastating extensive coastal areas, annihilating marine ecosystems, mangroves, and associated wildlife, irreversibly impacting the livelihoods of fishing communities. If recognized as ecocide, those responsible would not merely be fined, but could be criminally prosecuted by an international court, demonstrating that irresponsible exploitation has consequences that transcend borders and generations.
Biospheric Entanglement
Definition: Recognition that all living (and many non-living) systems are fundamentally interconnected through continuous and dynamic flows of matter, energy, and information. It transcends traditional divisions between species, ecosystems, and temporal scales, revealing a deep web of interdependence that sustains life on the planet.
Gender: Masculine (M)
Perspectives:
Biology/Ecology: Studies the biogeochemical cycles, food chains, and interspecific relationships that form the biosphere.
Philosophy of Nature: Addresses interconnectivity as an ontological characteristic of life, challenging fragmented views of the world.
Systems Theory: Uses models to understand how different components of the biosphere interact and influence each other.
Example: The carbon cycle demonstrates biospheric entanglement by connecting human respiration (CO2 release) with plant photosynthesis (CO2 absorption and O2 release), microbial decomposition in soil and oceans, and global climate patterns, revealing an intricate dance of exchanges that permeates all life.
Epistemology of the Ground
Definition: A form of knowledge that emerges from direct, prolonged, and sensory contact with specific territories, valuing embodied, sensory, and relational knowledge developed through dwelling, care, practice, and attentive observation of concrete places. It contrasts with hegemonic Western epistemology, which tends to abstract and universalize knowledge.
Gender: Feminine (F)
Perspectives:
Indigenous Studies/Anthropology of Knowledge: Rescues and values traditional and local knowledge, showing its relevance for sustainability.
Human Geography/Phenomenology: Explores the relationship between the body, place, and the production of meaning, demonstrating how experience shapes knowledge.
Environmental Education: Proposes pedagogies that promote immersion and direct experience with the environment as a form of learning.
Example: Traditional healers (Benzedeiras and Rezadeiras) develop an epistemology of the ground by accumulating knowledge about local medicinal plants through decades of observation, experimentation, oral transmission, and deep interaction with the forest or countryside in their territories, understanding the properties of plants in their ecological context.
Corporeal Scale of Ecological Trauma
Definition: Refers to the manifestation of environmental trauma and climate change not only at a psychic level (solastalgia, eco-anxiety), social, or planetary level, but also on a deeply embodied and biological plane. It recognizes that pollution, environmental degradation, and extreme climatic events have direct and visceral impacts on human and non-human bodies, altering health, well-being, and the capacity to inhabit the world. This concept seeks to recover the materiality of environmental experience, highlighting how the crisis is lived in the flesh and in the nervous system, often without the possibility of full awareness or immediate cognitive processing.
Gender: Feminine (F)
Perspectives:
Neuroscience/Psychology: Addresses the neurobiological impacts of chronic stress, environmental toxicity, and collective trauma, analyzing how the body records experience.
Philosophy of the Body/Phenomenology: Explores how the body is the primary locus of experience and how environmental degradation affects our embodied existence and perception of the world.
Environmental Medicine/Public Health: Investigates correlations between pollutants, climate change, and chronic or acute diseases, as well as inequalities in exposure to these risks.
Example: Children in communities exposed to industrial pollution suffering from chronic asthma or neurodevelopmental problems. Or the experience of survivors of extreme climate disasters (such as major floods or wildfires) who, in addition to material loss and grief, face complex post-traumatic stress syndromes and persistent physical pain. In these cases, "collateral damage" is not only economic or landscape-related but is inscribed directly into the bodies.
Ecological Specter
Definition: The phantom presence of extinct or threatened ecosystems, species, and landscapes that haunt contemporary experience. It refers to how environmental loss, even when not physically present, remains psychologically, culturally, and materially active, evoking memories of a lost ecological past or the imminence of a future loss, creating a sense of haunting.
Gender: Feminine (F)
Perspectives:
Philosophy (Hauntology): Inspired by Derrida's concept to explore the persistence of the absent and how the past (or a future that will not be) haunts the present.
Environmental Psychology: Addresses the impact of invisible loss on the human psyche and the difficulty of dealing with what is "almost there" or "was there."
Cultural Studies/Literature: Analyzes how art and narrative represent this absent presence, evoking grief and the memory of lost worlds.
Example: Residents of urban areas feel ecological specter when walking through streets where canalized rivers once existed, retaining a bodily memory of landscapes they did not directly experience, but which are part of the place's history, or when seeing photos of extinct animals.
Etnobotânica Urbana
Definition: The study of relationships between people and plants in urban contexts, including medicinal, food, ritual, and ornamental uses of species that resist, adapt, or are introduced into city environments. It analyzes how traditional and cultural knowledge about plants persists, transforms, and is recreated in the complexity of urban space.
Gender: Feminine (F)
Perspectives:
Urban Anthropology: Investigates how urban communities maintain or reinvent their relationships with the plant world.
Urban Ecology: Studies urban flora, the interactions between plants and humans, and the role of vegetation in city resilience.
Botany/Pharmacology: Analyzes the properties of used plants and the persistence of traditional knowledge.
Example: Immigrants who cultivate plants from their home countries in urban backyards or pots practice urban ethnobotany by maintaining cultural and medicinal ties to their traditions through gardening, transforming urban space into a place of memory and cultural resistance.
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