Review of Donna Haraway: Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.

Donna Haraway reflects on climate change and how the government responds to it. Haraway divides this in three different time frames: Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Chthulucene. Anthropocene is rather cynical term seen as the time frame when humans significantly started impacting the earth’s ecosystem leading to the current climate crisis and more importantly, damage which is irreversible . According to Haraway the term Capitalocene would suit this crisis better, since that would focus it more on the problem itself: big corporations, and capitalism as a whole.

As this film may strike as an ordinary documentary where Donna Haraway is the main the subject being interviewed, this film has little surprises, throwing the viewer off. All these surprising bits fit Donna Haraway’s way of thinking what she refers to as ‘tentacular thinking’. The cartoon about the cows for example, the cows being a metaphor for the humans makes the viewer watch it in a ‘outside/3rd person’ view. It could be that humans are better in spotting a system in which they do not participate in, so humans themselves are oblivious of how the systems work they use and live in.

Family is also such a system, a system which has barely changed in centuries. Having biological children is in a lot of societies a norm and an obvious choice, but is having biological children the best for us and our planet? It is known for a fact that having children is one of the worst negative ecological footprint one can leave on the earth. This system is still being motivated on a social and especially religious levels. Similar to buying a bred dog, often sick and mutated while millions of healthy dogs are in need of someone to take care of them. It’s this selfishness which created the climate crisis where we currently find ourselves in. Perhaps instead of sending people from our overcrowded world to Mars, we should make less babies.