Latin American Colonialcene: Tools and Strategies for 
Colonial Harm Reduction, 2026, Lucrecia Raquel Greco and Ana Gretel Echazú Böschemeier. In: Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51703-7_326-1

Synonyms 
Anthropocene; Capitalocene; Conquistalocene; 
Plantationocene; Settlerocene

Introduction 
The concept of colonialcene emerges as one of the 
critical interventions in the broader discussion of the Anthropocene, offering a political-ontological critique of anthropocentric paradigms. While the Anthropocene has gained traction across disciplines and political discourses—denoting a geological epoch in which human activity became a defining force on the planet’s climate, ecosystems, and geomorphology (Fujiyaki Lares 2020; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010)—the notion of the Colonialocene calls for a more precise attribution of responsibility. 

In contrast to generalized anthropogenic explanations, it highlights how colonialism and the enduring structures of coloniality have shaped the current planetary crisis. Similar to other critical framings such as the Capitalocene (Moore 2016) and the Settlerocene (Steele and Veracini 2025) or the conquistalocene (Machado Araoz in Milanez 2024), the Colonialocene interrogates 
which human activities, and whose histories, are implicated in the transformations attributed to the 
Anthropocene. Differently from the central idea of 
the Anthropocene, it decenters the figure of the 
human as a unified geological agent and foregrounds the historical responsibilities of specific social groups and political projects, particularly those arising from European colonial expansion, genocidal, ecocidal, andmass-extractivist regimes. In this sense, it offers a corrective to homogenizing accounts of humanity’s role in the planetary crisis. 
Colonialcene is centered in critics toward anthropocentrism and subject/object oppressive 
relationships. It involves shifting analytical focus 
away from the abstract, universalized figure of “the human” as a stable ontological category and instead foregrounding the specific historical, political, ontological, and epistemic conditions produced by colonialism. This move decenters Enlightenment humanism and its anthropocentric, eurocentered assumptions by exposing how the specific colonial category of the human was constructed through all the inequality and oppression processes deployed by colonization as racialization, dehumanization, and nature/culture binarisms.
Focusing in coloniality requires attending to the enduring structures of power, knowledge, and being that emerged from colonial encounters and continue to organize global life. Critics of colonialism and coloniality open up the space for ontologies and relational modes of existence, often found in Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, and other alternative subaltern cosmologies, which 
unsettle the Eurocentric distinction between nature and culture, subject and object, human and non-human.