Following up: #Capitalocene reading (with thanks to Dr MD)

Better late than never?

A follow-up here to my Anthropocene reading “Top Five” list, by way of Dr Michael Dorsey, a member of the Environmental Studies faculty at Dartmouth College, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the 2010 Global Sustainability Summer School (hosted that year by the Santa Fe Institute). After seeing my suggested titles, Dr Dorsey offered a kind of counterpoint Top Five of his own.

To paraphrase his note: don’t keep calling this age the Anthropocene if what you really mean is “the Capitalocene.”

You oatmeal connoisseurs out there might find the following analogy helpful. If my list was quik-oats, Dr Dorsey’s list is straight steel-cut. So put some water on to boil and settle in – this content needs slow cooking.

But it’s good for you.

• Das Kapital (Karl Marx)
• Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (Paul Robbins)
• Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (David Harvey)
• Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Arturo Escobar)
• Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale (Maria Mies)

And on a related note: I recommend this Marxist critique of ecosystem services (and here’s to the ecological workers of the world).

Happy reading, all. That’s my summer sorted out for me.