A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

Kathryn Yusoff’s short, demanding book intervenes in the origin story of the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch in which human activity has become a planetary force. Accounts that say “humanity” changed the Earth can make responsibility sound universal and evenly shared. Yusoff asks what disappears when conquest, plantation slavery, mining, and racial capitalism are treated as background events rather than as technologies that made planetary extraction possible.

Her claim that “no geology is neutral” does not mean rocks possess a political intention. It means geology developed as a discipline within histories of empire, property, and classification, and its categories helped distinguish valued human subjects from matter imagined as inert, ownerless, and available. A supposedly descriptive grammar can therefore carry a political history even when contemporary practitioners do not endorse that history.

The book’s most unsettling move is to read the extraction of mineral matter beside the racial production of Black people as fungible, measurable, and disposable under slavery. Yusoff does not simply equate people with rocks. She shows how an “inhuman” status was imposed on Black bodies so that both land and labor could be converted into units of value, while whiteness claimed the position of the universal human who observes and owns.

Drawing Black feminist thought into conversation with geography and Earth science, Yusoff changes both the subject and the archive of environmental history. The plantation, slave ship, mine, ledger, and geological survey become evidence of how material worlds and racial categories were made together. Deep time is no longer an innocent distance from politics: the afterlives of slavery persist in the landscapes, institutions, and exposure to harm through which the present is organized.

This reframing also challenges debates about where to place the Anthropocene’s geological “golden spike.” Whether scholars emphasize industrialization, colonial exchange, nuclear fallout, or another marker, a single date can compress many unequal histories into one human timeline. The title’s “billion Black Anthropocenes” refuses that compression, insisting on countless racialized endings and transformations that preceded the crisis being newly announced to privileged populations.

For feminist environmental politics, the book matters because bodies, labor, reproduction, and materiality cannot be separated from planetary change. It asks who has been cast as a resource, whose injury is registered as evidence only after extraction, and who gets to represent “the human” in climate policy. Intersectionality here is not a checklist added to geology; it alters the causal story of how ecological crisis was produced.

The argument is intentionally compressed and speculative. At 130 pages, it is not a comprehensive history of geology, slavery, or climate science, and its theoretical density can make historical transitions appear faster than a specialist account would permit. Nor should its account of anti-Blackness be generalized into a single formula for every colonial or Indigenous history. Its value lies in opening a problem that must then be tested and extended through more situated scholarship.

Read A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None slowly, with attention to its notes and to the difference between metaphor and historical claim. Pair it with a conventional account of the Anthropocene, a history of slavery or mining in a specific place, and work by Black or Indigenous environmental scholars from that place. The productive question is not merely when the Anthropocene began, but whose prior worlds had to end before one version of “humanity” could recognize a planetary emergency.