Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
This blog is written as part of the Thinking Activity assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad Sir on the article “Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future.” The article explores how postcolonial studies can respond to one of the most urgent problems of the contemporary world: the environmental crisis. It brings together postcolonial theory, climate change, environmentalism, globalization, and capitalism.
Here is the link to the professor's research article for background reading: Click here.
The Anthropocene Documentary: Visualizing Humanity's Impact on the Earth
The theoretical arguments of the article become more concrete when viewed alongside the documentary Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018). Directed by Jennifer Baichwal, Nicholas de Pencier, and Edward Burtynsky, the documentary examines the enormous scale at which human beings have transformed the Earth's physical and ecological systems. It is the third film in a trilogy that includes Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Watermark (2013). The film follows the work of the Anthropocene Working Group, whose research argues that human activity has produced changes significant enough to consider the emergence of a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.
The documentary does not explain environmental destruction only through conventional interviews or statistics. Instead, it makes the viewer see the scale of human intervention. The filmmakers travel across different parts of the world, presenting enormous mines, industrial landscapes, concrete structures, artificial environments, waste, resource extraction, damaged ecosystems, and other examples of human transformation of the planet. The official description of the film highlights locations including concrete seawalls in China, massive mining machinery in Germany, potash mines in Russia, the Great Barrier Reef, and lithium evaporation ponds in the Atacama Desert.
One of the most striking features of the documentary is its aerial cinematography. The camera frequently moves above landscapes, allowing the viewer to see patterns and transformations that would be impossible to understand from the perspective of an individual person. Mines, factories, roads, dams, artificial landscapes, and other structures appear almost abstract when viewed from above. The result is visually beautiful but simultaneously disturbing. The viewer realizes that landscapes that may initially look like paintings or abstract artworks are actually the consequences of industrial activity and resource extraction.
This visual contradiction is central to the documentary. The images are often beautiful and horrifying at the same time. The enormous scale of industrial landscapes can create a sense of wonder, but that beauty is produced by ecological destruction. The documentary therefore makes the viewer confront an uncomfortable question: Can destruction itself become aesthetically beautiful?
This is particularly significant because the documentary uses the visual style associated with Edward Burtynsky's photography. The landscapes of mines, industrial sites, and extraction become enormous visual compositions. The camera turns human environmental intervention into something almost sublime. In this sense, the documentary does not simply give information about the Anthropocene; it makes the viewer emotionally experience its scale.
Extraction as the Central Image of the Anthropocene
One of the strongest themes of the documentary is extraction. Modern civilization depends heavily on extracting materials from the Earth. Minerals, metals, fossil fuels, water, and other resources become the foundation of technological and economic development.
However, the documentary encourages us to look beyond the finished products of modern civilization. A technological object may appear clean and sophisticated, but its production can depend upon enormous mining operations and ecological transformation somewhere else.
The lithium-production sequences are particularly important in this regard. Lithium is associated with modern technologies and electric vehicles, which are often presented as part of a greener future. Yet the documentary shows that even supposedly sustainable technologies have material and environmental costs. This complicates the simple opposition between “polluting technology” and “green technology.” Every technological solution must also be examined in relation to the resources required to produce it.
This observation connects directly with the article “Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future.” The article encourages us to examine environmental problems through questions of power, capitalism, colonial history, and inequality. The documentary shows the physical scale of extraction; postcolonial theory allows us to ask who controls these resources, who benefits from them, and who experiences their consequences.
The Problem with the Word “Human”
Although Anthropocene: The Human Epoch powerfully visualizes ecological destruction, a postcolonial reading also requires us to critically examine the word “human.”
The documentary presents human beings as a planetary force. In one sense, this is accurate: industrial human activity has transformed the Earth on an enormous scale. But the word “humanity” can also conceal differences in responsibility.
Are a wealthy industrial society and a poor rural community equally responsible for climate change?
Are multinational corporations and local agricultural workers equally responsible for environmental destruction?
Do communities that depend directly upon forests and rivers have the same environmental impact as industries engaged in large-scale extraction?
These questions are crucial to a postcolonial interpretation.
Scholar Sara B. Pritchard argues that the documentary's repeated emphasis on a universal “human” can obscure the unequal distribution of environmental responsibility and suffering. Her criticism is important because the Anthropocene is not simply a story about humanity as a whole; it is also a story about industrialization, capitalism, resource extraction, colonial histories, and unequal power.
This criticism does not make the documentary less useful. Instead, it makes the documentary more productive for a postcolonial classroom discussion. We can appreciate its extraordinary visual representation of environmental destruction while also asking what its images leave outside the frame.
What the Documentary Shows—and What It Makes Us Ask
The documentary is particularly powerful because it makes environmental destruction visible on a planetary scale. However, a postcolonial reading asks us to go one step further.
When we see a gigantic mine, we should ask:
Who owns the mine?
When we see a transformed landscape, we should ask:
Who lived there before the transformation?
When we see minerals being extracted, we should ask:
Where do those minerals go, and who profits from them?
When we see environmental destruction, we should ask:
Who suffers its consequences most severely?
These questions move the discussion from environmental description to environmental politics.
The documentary shows us the scale of ecological transformation, while postcolonial theory helps us interpret the structures behind that transformation.
Connecting the Documentary with Colonialism
This is where the documentary becomes particularly relevant to the article assigned in class. Colonialism historically involved the extraction of resources from colonized territories for the benefit of imperial powers. Forests, minerals, agricultural products, and other resources were incorporated into economic systems that often disregarded the needs of local communities.
Contemporary resource extraction may operate within different political circumstances, but some patterns remain recognizable. Natural landscapes can still be treated primarily as sources of economic value, while communities living in those landscapes may have limited power over decisions concerning their resources.
Therefore, the Anthropocene can be read not only as an age of human influence but also as an age of unequal extraction and unequal environmental consequences.
This is why the concept of neo-colonialism becomes useful. Colonial rule may have formally ended, but economic relationships can reproduce forms of dependency and unequal power. The extraction of resources from poorer or formerly colonized regions for global markets can therefore be examined through a postcolonial framework.
From the Anthropocene Documentary to The Jengaburu Curse
This documentary provides a useful visual foundation for understanding The Jengaburu Curse. Both texts are concerned with the consequences of resource extraction, but they approach the subject differently.
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch presents the problem on a global scale. It moves across continents and shows the planetary consequences of industrialization and extraction.
The Jengaburu Curse, in contrast, localizes the environmental crisis through its narrative of Odisha, mining, indigenous communities, displacement, and economic power.
The documentary makes us see the planetary scale of environmental transformation.
The series makes us experience the human and political consequences of that transformation.
Together, they create a stronger understanding of the Anthropocene.
The documentary asks us to look at the Earth from above; The Jengaburu Curse asks us to look at what happens to people living on that land.
From “Humanity” to Environmental Justice
This distinction is essential for postcolonial environmental criticism. If we simply say that “human beings are destroying nature,” we risk making environmental responsibility appear equal. Postcolonial studies encourages us to identify the historical and contemporary structures that distribute environmental benefits and burdens unequally.
Therefore, the classroom screening of Anthropocene: The Human Epoch can be understood as the first stage of our environmental inquiry. It demonstrates what humans have done to the planet. The postcolonial framework then asks us to investigate why these transformations have occurred, who has benefited, who has suffered, and whose voices have been ignored.
Finally, The Jengaburu Curse gives these theoretical questions a narrative and regional form. Its representation of mining and tribal communities allows us to see that ecological destruction is not merely a problem concerning “nature.” It is a problem concerning land, identity, livelihood, culture, power, and justice.
Thus, the documentary and the series complement each other. One gives us a planetary vision of the Anthropocene; the other gives us a localized story of environmental conflict. Reading both through the postcolonial framework allows us to move from simply observing ecological destruction to critically examining the unequal political and economic structures behind it.
From Colonial Exploitation to Climate Injustice: A Postcolonial Reading of The Jengaburu Curse
Introduction: Why Read the Anthropocene through Postcolonial Studies?
The environmental crisis of the twenty-first century has transformed the way we think about humanity, nature, development, and global inequality. Climate change, deforestation, mining, loss of biodiversity, pollution, displacement, and the depletion of natural resources are no longer distant environmental concerns. They have become questions of survival and justice. However, the ecological crisis cannot be understood simply by saying that “human beings” have damaged the planet. Such a statement treats humanity as a single, equal group and hides the unequal histories of power, wealth, colonialism, and exploitation that have shaped the modern world.
This is where postcolonial studies becomes important to the study of the Anthropocene. The article “Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future” examines this intersection between postcolonial thought and environmental concerns. The article explores how postcolonial studies, traditionally concerned with colonialism, imperialism, identity, cultural domination, and resistance, can respond to the environmental crisis. It brings environmental issues into conversation with thinkers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty, while also discussing the ecological criticism of Vandana Shiva and other approaches to environmental justice.
The article's central significance lies in its questioning of the apparently universal idea of the Anthropocene. If the Anthropocene refers to a period in which human activities have become a major geological force, we must ask: Are all humans equally responsible for environmental destruction? And are all humans equally affected by it? A postcolonial approach reveals that the answer is no. Colonial powers historically extracted resources from colonized territories, and contemporary systems of capitalism and resource extraction continue to create unequal environmental consequences. The article therefore encourages us to connect ecological destruction with questions of history, economics, political power, and social justice.
To understand these arguments through a cinematic text, Nila Madhab Panda's The Jengaburu Curse provides a particularly relevant example. Released in 2023, the seven-episode series is presented as a climate-fiction thriller and is set largely against the background of mining and environmental exploitation in Odisha. The story connects natural-resource extraction with tribal displacement, corporate interests, political power, and ecological danger.
Therefore, this blog attempts to read The Jengaburu Curse through the theoretical concerns raised in “Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future.” Rather than treating the series simply as an environmental thriller, I read it as a narrative about environmental injustice, neo-colonial extraction, indigenous resistance, displacement, and the unequal distribution of ecological suffering.
Understanding the Anthropocene: Is “Humanity” Equally Responsible?
The term Anthropocene is generally used to describe a period in which human activity has become a powerful force capable of transforming the Earth's ecological systems. Industrialization, fossil-fuel consumption, large-scale extraction, urbanization, deforestation, and intensive development have profoundly altered the relationship between human societies and the natural world.
However, the word “Anthropocene” can create a problem. It can make it appear that all human beings are equally responsible for environmental destruction. A postcolonial perspective challenges this assumption.
Historically, industrial development was closely connected with colonial expansion. Colonized territories were treated as sources of raw materials and economic wealth. Forests, minerals, agricultural products, and other resources were extracted to serve imperial economic interests. Consequently, environmental destruction cannot be separated from the history of colonial power.
The article is important because it asks postcolonial studies to extend its field of inquiry. Colonialism did not only dominate languages, cultures, and political institutions; it also transformed relationships between human communities and the natural environment. The ecological consequences of those histories continue into the present.
This becomes particularly significant in formerly colonized countries such as India, where communities that have historically been marginalized can face intense pressure from mining, industrial projects, dams, deforestation, and other forms of development.
Thus, the Anthropocene should not simply be understood as “the age of humanity.” From a postcolonial perspective, it can also be understood as an age of unequal responsibility and unequal vulnerability.
Vandana Shiva and the Colonial Destruction of Ecological Diversity
One of the important intellectual figures discussed in the article is Vandana Shiva, whose environmental thought connects ecological destruction with colonialism, capitalism, and the commodification of nature.
Shiva's perspective is useful because it challenges the idea that nature exists simply as a collection of resources waiting to be exploited. Forests, mountains, rivers, and agricultural landscapes are not merely economic objects. For indigenous and local communities, they can represent livelihood, culture, identity, spirituality, memory, and collective existence.
The transformation of nature into a commodity therefore produces more than physical environmental damage. It can also produce cultural displacement.
This idea becomes particularly powerful in The Jengaburu Curse. The fictional Bondria community's relationship with the land is fundamentally different from the relationship of those who view the mountain primarily through its mineral value. The mountain is connected to the community's cultural and spiritual world, while the mining system sees the land as a source of economic profit.
The conflict is therefore not simply:
Nature versus industry
It is more accurately:
Community-centred ecological relationships versus profit-centred resource extraction.
This distinction allows the series to be read through the postcolonial environmental framework of the article.
From Colonialism to Neo-Colonial Resource Extraction
One of the strongest postcolonial dimensions of The Jengaburu Curse is its representation of mining.
The series is set around a fictional mountain region in Odisha where bauxite mining becomes central to the narrative. Priya Das, a financial analyst living in London, returns to Odisha after her father, Professor Das, goes missing. Her investigation gradually reveals connections between her father's activism, the indigenous Bondria community, mining interests, and a larger network of political and economic power.
The mining industry in the series represents more than economic activity. It becomes a symbol of a system in which the value of land is determined by the resources beneath it.
This recalls the colonial practice of viewing colonized territories primarily as sources of raw materials. Although the political context has changed, the logic of extraction can continue in contemporary forms through corporations, markets, state institutions, and global capital.
This can be understood through the concept of neo-colonialism. Formal colonial rule may have ended, but unequal structures of economic power can continue to determine who controls resources and who bears the consequences.
The question raised by the series is therefore not whether development is necessary. Development is important. The deeper question is:
Who defines development, who benefits from it, and who pays its environmental and social costs?
If minerals generate wealth for corporations and institutions while local communities lose their land, livelihood, cultural environment, and ecological security, then development becomes a question of environmental justice.
The Bondria Community and Environmental Injustice
The fictional Bondria tribe is at the centre of the environmental conflict. Their representation is important because the series does not separate ecological destruction from social marginalization.
The Bondria community experiences the environment not as an abstract landscape but as the foundation of collective life. The destruction of their land consequently threatens their identity and social existence.
This reflects a major principle of postcolonial environmental criticism: environmental injustice is also a form of social injustice.
A research discussion of The Jengaburu Curse similarly identifies the series' central concerns as corporate greed, vulnerable indigenous communities, forced displacement, mining, and the unequal role of the state.
This is significant because environmental destruction is often represented through statistics: temperatures rise, forests disappear, rivers become polluted, and minerals are depleted. But the series gives these abstract problems human consequences.
Behind every displaced community is a question of home.
Behind every destroyed forest is a question of livelihood.
Behind every mining project is a question of who owns the land and who has the right to decide its future.
Therefore, The Jengaburu Curse transforms environmental degradation from an abstract ecological issue into a political and ethical question.
Rob Nixon and the Idea of Slow Violence
The series can also be connected with Rob Nixon's concept of “slow violence.”
Slow violence refers to forms of environmental harm that develop gradually and often remain invisible because they do not always produce one dramatic moment of destruction. Pollution, displacement, ecological degradation, resource depletion, and climate change may take years to reveal their full consequences.
This concept is particularly relevant to communities living around extractive industries.
Mining may initially be presented as development and employment. However, its long-term consequences can include environmental degradation, disruption of local ecosystems, displacement, and loss of traditional livelihoods.
The Jengaburu Curse dramatizes this tension by showing how the consequences of resource extraction extend beyond the immediate economic benefits.
The mountain is not simply destroyed in one moment. Rather, a relationship between community and environment is gradually threatened.
This is precisely why the series works as climate fiction. Its environmental crisis is not presented merely as a future possibility. It is connected with present-day systems of extraction and human greed.
Director Nila Madhab Panda has described the series as a story about the consequences of humanity's increasing greed and the exploitation of natural resources. He has also emphasized the need to tell environmental stories because climate change already affects everyday life.
The Mountain as More Than a Resource
One of the most meaningful symbols in the series is the mountain.
For an extractive economy, the mountain contains valuable minerals. For the indigenous community, however, the mountain has cultural and spiritual meaning.
This difference represents two competing ways of understanding nature.
The first is instrumental thinking:
Nature has value because it provides resources.
The second is ecological and cultural thinking:
Nature has value because human communities exist within relationships with it.
The conflict between these perspectives is at the heart of the series.
Panda has explained that the story originates in a legend surrounding a mountain regarded as sacred, before the discovery of valuable material beneath it changes the relationship between people and the landscape.
The symbolic significance is clear: the moment nature becomes valuable only as a commodity, the cultural meaning of nature is threatened.
This is also where the article's engagement with ecological thought becomes important. A sustainable future requires us to move beyond the idea that nature exists solely for human consumption.
The State, Corporation, and the Question of Power
The series also complicates the relationship between the state, corporations, and marginalized communities.
Environmental conflicts rarely involve only individuals. They involve institutions: government agencies, corporations, bureaucracies, police, financial systems, and local communities.
In The Jengaburu Curse, the mining conflict becomes connected with larger political and economic structures. The Bondria community has significantly less institutional power than the organizations interested in controlling the region's resources.
This produces an important postcolonial question:
Whose knowledge and whose voice are considered legitimate?
The community's relationship with the land can easily be dismissed as traditional or backward, while corporate knowledge can be presented as scientific and progressive.
Postcolonial studies challenges such hierarchies of knowledge. It reminds us that marginalized communities possess forms of ecological knowledge developed through generations of interaction with their environment.
Thus, listening to indigenous communities is not simply an act of sympathy. It can also be an essential part of developing sustainable environmental practices.
Priya Das and the Question of Perspective
The character of Priya Das provides another interesting dimension to the series.
Priya returns to Odisha from London and enters a world that she had become geographically distant from. Her journey becomes a process of rediscovering her connection with her father, her homeland, the Bondria community, and the environmental conflict.
Her position is particularly interesting from a postcolonial perspective because she moves between two worlds: the globalized financial world represented by London and the local ecological world represented by Odisha.
This movement reflects a central contradiction of globalization.
Globalization connects people, markets, technologies, and economies across national borders. At the same time, the benefits of globalization can be distributed unequally. Capital can move across borders much more easily than displaced communities can rebuild their lives.
Priya's journey therefore allows the series to connect global capitalism with local environmental consequences.
A mountain in Odisha may become valuable because of global economic demand, but the consequences of extracting its resources are experienced most immediately by people living near that mountain.
Environmentalism Cannot Be Separated from Social Justice
The greatest strength of reading The Jengaburu Curse through postcolonial theory is that it prevents us from seeing environmentalism as merely the protection of trees, mountains, or animals.
Environmentalism is also about:
The article's postcolonial approach encourages us to see these issues as interconnected rather than separate.
A forest can be destroyed economically, ecologically, and culturally at the same time.
A mining project can produce economic development while simultaneously producing displacement.
A community can be legally recognized as a citizen while remaining politically powerless.
These contradictions demonstrate why environmental justice requires a broader understanding of power.
A Critical Reflection: Can Development Be Sustainable Without Justice?
The most important question raised by the article and the series is not simply whether mining is good or bad. The deeper question is whether development can be considered sustainable when the people most affected by development have little control over the decisions that shape their lives.
This is where the postcolonial perspective becomes particularly valuable.
Modern development often uses words such as “progress,” “growth,” “infrastructure,” and “economic development.” These concepts are not inherently negative. However, they become problematic when progress is measured only through economic production while environmental and social costs remain invisible.
The Jengaburu Curse exposes this contradiction.
The mineral beneath the mountain may have enormous economic value, but that value cannot be separated from the community living above it.
The series therefore encourages the viewer to rethink the meaning of wealth. Can a resource truly be called valuable if extracting it destroys the ecological and cultural conditions necessary for human life?
This question moves the discussion from environmental protection toward environmental ethics.
Postcolonial Studies in the Globalized World
The article's broader contribution is its insistence that postcolonial studies must continue evolving.
Postcolonial criticism initially developed largely around questions of empire, colonial identity, cultural representation, language, resistance, and nationhood. But the twenty-first century presents another urgent reality: ecological crisis.
Climate change does not respect national borders. Yet its consequences are unequal.
A powerful industrial economy may have greater technological and financial resources to respond to climate disasters, while marginalized communities may have fewer resources and greater dependence on natural environments.
This makes environmental justice an essential component of contemporary postcolonial thought.
The postcolonial question therefore changes from:
Who colonized whom?
to a broader set of questions:
Who controls natural resources?
Who benefits from extraction?
Who is displaced?
Whose environmental knowledge is recognized?
Who bears the consequences of climate change?
Who gets to decide what constitutes development?
These questions make postcolonial studies highly relevant to the Anthropocene.
Conclusion
The article “Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future” provides an important theoretical framework for understanding why environmental problems cannot be separated from colonial history, capitalism, inequality, and power. Its engagement with postcolonial and environmental thinkers demonstrates that the ecological crisis is not simply a universal human problem. It is also a problem of unequal responsibility, unequal vulnerability, and unequal access to resources and decision-making.
Nila Madhab Panda's The Jengaburu Curse makes these theoretical arguments visible through the story of mining, indigenous displacement, corporate interests, and ecological destruction in Odisha. The series transforms the mountain into a powerful symbol of the conflict between nature as commodity and nature as community. Its Bondria community reminds us that environmental destruction also destroys relationships, memories, livelihoods, and cultural identities.
The series ultimately suggests that the environmental crisis is not simply a crisis of nature; it is a crisis of human relationships with nature.
A postcolonial approach helps us recognize that the people who are most vulnerable to ecological destruction are often those who have historically possessed the least political and economic power. Therefore, a sustainable future cannot be created through technological development alone. It requires environmental justice, social justice, recognition of indigenous knowledge, responsible development, and a fundamental reconsideration of humanity's relationship with the natural world.
The most important lesson emerging from the article and the series is therefore simple but profound: we cannot protect the environment while ignoring the people whose lives are most deeply connected to it. Environmental justice must include justice for communities, cultures, and future generations.
Works Cited
Barad, Dilip. “Postcolonial Studies in the Anthropocene: Bridging Perspectives for a Sustainable Future.” ResearchGate, 2022.
The Jengaburu Curse. Created and directed by Nila Madhab Panda, SonyLIV, 2023.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.
Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. Zed Books, 1988.
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