Can We Envision Greentopia in the Anthropocene?

This contribution discusses the concept of the Anthropocene, a recent term of multidisciplinary interest in environmental literature, together with the concept of greentopia, the latter envisioning a pleasing and desirable society where human and other-than-human conditions are at their best for an indefinite time. The former concept seems to impose essential ontological and conceptual boundaries on the possibility of envisioning a greentopia, both in descriptive and normative terms. Science informs us that a sixth, human-induced major extinction event is ongoing; that humans are profoundly altering the functioning of the Earth System, and that the remnants of the human enterprise will be left in stratigraphic records for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years to come. This evidence requires forms of normative thinking that expand the semantics of the Anthropocene beyond the mere recollection and description of facts, acknowledge the plurality in which the dawn of this epoch manifests itself, and deconstruct the all-encompassing image of one anthropos. To envision a greentopia, or to envision a brighter future for humanity, requires tackling the challenges posed by the Anthropocene both as a descriptive and as a normative concept.