Colonialism in the Anthropocene: the political ecology of the money-energy-technology complex

This article sketches a transdisciplinary theoretical framework for understanding the so-called Anthropocene in terms of global inequalities. The concept of the Anthropocene has several profound implications that challenge central aspects of the modern worldview. Its relation to issues of global justice requires a cataclysmic reconceptualization of conventional notions of development, economic growth, and technological progress. The article refers to the asymmetric global flows of resources that were a prerequisite to the British Industrial Revolution to illustrate how technological systems and so-called energy transitions are not just politically innocent revelations of nature, but thoroughly societal strategies of appropriation. Contemporary observations regarding environmental justice, climate justice, and energy justice can be theorized in terms of the modern inclination to think of the economy as detached from nature, and of technology as detached from world society.