Alfred Döblin’s 1904/05 novella Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (The Murder of a Buttercup) offers a surprising tale of destruction, survival, and entanglement with the non-human world, displaying human hubris and blindness in the Anthropocene. While scholars have focused on the story’s pioneering Expressionist style delivered in stark imagery and piercing colors, its innovative narrative form, and its underlying gender dynamics, my ecocritical reading focuses on the growing disruptions between social and natural systems that expose both the fallacies of fossil capitalism and opportunities for ecological resilience that come with human and non-human interactions. As Döblin’s blindsided protagonist victimizes his natural environment, he presumes the natural processes to be linear and reversible, but ultimately falls victim to their violent agency. In contrast to most existing interpretations, I suggest such multidirectional violence is not the result of an individual pathology, but symptomatic of the relationship between humans and their environment in Western industrialized societies.