Capitalocene & Planetary Justice
Capitalocene & Planetary Justice
Article cover for "Capitalocene & Planetary Justice" by Jason W. Moore, alongside the Eutierria Therapy badge
Author: Jason W. Moore
A foundational text exploring the Capitalocene vs. Anthropocene framework, offering practical ways to dismantle the isolated self and step into the collective identity of land custodianship.
Core Premise
Jason W. Moore's article "Capitalocene & Planetary Justice" challenges the standard "Anthropocene" narrative that blames all of humanity equally for ecological destruction. Instead, it argues that our current environmental crisis is capitalogenic—produced specifically by an extractive capitalist world-ecology that relies on cheapening land, labor, and non-human life. The text reframes planetary crisis not as a failure of human nature, but as the inevitable implosion of a system designed around endless exploitation.
Connection to Eutierria Therapy
This article is a cornerstone for Scute 13: Dismantling the Colonial Gaze. Standard therapy often individualizes distress, leading clients to believe their eco-anxiety, burnout, or grief is a personal failure to adapt. Moore’s framework provides the intellectual ground to dismantle this internal blame. By understanding that our psychological exhaustion stems directly from a historical "Architecture of Exhaustion" (the Capitalocene), we shift the narrative from "I am a broken individual" to "My body is rightly protesting an extractive system". This structural shift frees the participant’s psyche from colonial isolation, clearing a path toward radical belonging and land-based identity.
Read our full Eutierria Philosophy here.
Key Takeaways & Application
• For the Embodied Self: Recognize that your personal exhaustion and ecological grief are natural somatic responses to an extractive system. Practice "civilizational de-cheapening" in your daily life—treat your time, body, rest, and local ecosystem as sacred, non-commodified relations.
• For the Practitioner: Use this text in session to validate systemic burnout and eco-anxiety without pathologizing the participant. Help participants map where they have internalized "civilizational fetishism" (treating themselves and nature as objects of labor/value). Guide them to reframe their symptomology as a healthy, protective impulse against an unhealthy world-ecology.
