3. Far Beyond the ‘Natural Environment’: Geography at the Crossroads of the Capitalocene

The ‘Anthropocene’ has become a fad: it is difficult these days, in the academic milieu, not to come across allusions to this new geological era in books, papers and conferences. However, as several authors have already acknowledged, it would be unfair and ideological to hold humanity as a whole (i.e. the anthropos) generally responsible for the ecological-social evils that the planet is increasingly suffering. It is necessary to recognise that capitalism, due to its very economic dynamics, is behind the ‘Great Acceleration’ in terms of consumption, the use of resources and environmental degradation that can be observed since the middle of the twentieth century. This is the reason why ‘Capitalocene’ has been suggested as a terminological alternative. As far as the crucial debate about the ‘Capitalocene’ and its challenges is concerned, geographers are still more ‘supporting actors’ than ‘protagonists.’ To a large extent, this has to do with the ‘epistemological purification’ strategy that many of us have pursued since the 1970s, in the wake of the discipline’s radical turn. The weakening of the discipline’s identity nucleus with regard to a commitment to the integration of natural and social knowledge led to a decrease in the ability to propose several types of reflections and research related to the ‘(ecological-)social metabolism,’ the planetary dilemmas and the contemporary ecosocial conflicts, as well as a whole series of specific issues and problems—all things that require, to a greater or lesser extent, the construction of hybrid epistemic objects. In the last fifteen years, the emergence of a certain environmental geography has increased the hope that many radical geographers have finally begun to understand that in order to preserve a high level of sophistication and coherence from the point of view of social research, it is not necessary to give up a genuine interest in geobiophysical knowledge.