Meanings
- uncommonThe current geological epoch, understood as having been created by the effects of large-scale monocropping.
While the Anthropocene is defined in connection with the fossil fuel era, the Plantationocene is an epoch characterised by the emergence of a large-scale, monocropping production system across the surface of the Earth.
2020, Noboru Ishikawa, “Into a New Epoch: Capitalist Nature in the Plantationocene”, in Noboru Ishikawa, Ryoji Soda, editors, Anthropogenic Tropical Forests: Human—Nature Interfaces on the Plantation Frontier, Springer, page 5902 more examples
People joined the bumptious fray early and dynamically, even before they/we were critters who were later named Homo sapiens. But I think the issues about naming relevant to the Anthropocene, Plantationocene, or Capitalocene have to do with scale, rate/speed, synchronicity, and complexity.
2015, Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin”, in Environmental Humanities, volume 6, page 159In this article, I argue that in addition to environmental humanities and Black geographies or southern studies, three fields—agrarian studies, critical development studies, and political ecology—help to provide us with a deeper understanding of the Plantationocene.
2021, Wendy Wolford, “The Plantationocene: A Lusotropical Contribution to the Theory”, in Annals of the American Association of Geographers, volume 111, number 6, →DOI, page 1624
Origin
Coined by American science and technology studies scholar Donna Haraway and others in 2014, from plantation + -cene.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
Plantationocene. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Plantationocene
“Plantationocene.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Plantationocene. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “Plantationocene,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/Plantationocene.
Source: Plantationocene on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.