During the last decade, the concept of the Anthropocene has been widely adopted throughout the social sciences and humanities to capture the role of societal processes in the transformation of the earth system and in the genesis of contemporary planetary environmental emergencies, including global heating, biodiversity loss, and ocean acidification, among others. While questions of periodization remain intensely contested in the Anthropocene literature, considerable emphasis has been placed on the “Great Acceleration,” a period of dramatically intensified energy and resource use after World War II that has also witnessed a massive escalation of global carbon emissions, pollution, deforestation, species extinctions, and other leading indicators of planetary environmental disorder.

Building upon the research team members’ previous and ongoing work in several interconnected fields of critical environmental studies related to these themes and extending it through a two-year collaborative initiative in intensive dialogue with other scholars working in parallel directions, this project seeks to develop an alternative analysis of the Great Acceleration as a conjuncture of geohistorical transformation and environmental crisis intensification. This entails, first, developing a systematic critique of the Great Acceleration narrative due to its problematic conceptualization and periodization of historical and contemporary socioenvironmental change. Second, our work will elaborate an alternative account of the historical genealogy, infrastructural anatomy, and metabolic underpinnings of today’s socioecological tipping points in the planetary biosphere.

Our investigations will explore what we will term the “hidden abodes” of the Great Acceleration—veiled yet essential historical-geographical dynamics associated with capitalism’s relentless appropriation of unpaid reproductive and regenerative work to support the profit-driven, productivity-oriented, and infrastructurally intensive dynamic of accumulation. These hidden abodes of appropriation are constitutive of capital’s constantly intensifying yet chronically unstable metabolism of labor, energy, food, and raw materials; they underpin each wave of productivity growth, embodied in the expansion of fixed capital outlays, during the geohistory of capitalism. Against this theoretical background, which is largely derived from co-applicant Jason W. Moore’s approach to capitalist world-ecology and the Capitalocene, our project aims to investigate the historically and geographically specific dynamics of appropriation and capitalization, closely associated with the generalization of a fossil-fuel based metabolic regime and large-scale, planet-encompassing infrastructural systems, during the post-1870s period up through the present. We hypothesize that the latter laid the foundations for the consequent Great Acceleration of the so-called “Golden Age” of postwar capitalist expansion, and thus have also figured crucially in the climate and nature emergencies of our time.

Through discussions and investigations among the core team members, a series of internal seminars and workshops with several scholars who are developing closely allied research agendas, and a concluding public symposium, this project will illuminate the dramatic global socioenvironmental transformations of the last half-century in a longue durée geohistorical context. We also aim to develop a useful theoretical and historical perspective from which to decipher the cascading climate and nature emergencies of the early twenty-first century and the prospects for counteracting them in ways that support social and environmental justice, and the flourishing of both human and non-human life.