This article uses a Himalayan Buddhist lens to critically interrogate a fundamental premise of ‘the Anthropocene’—that the epoch commemorates a ‘newfound’ capacity of humans to mobilise Earth forces.
Rather, Himalayan Buddhism has long held that humans wield geological agency, mobilised through relationships with territorial landscape deities, which inflict severe weather in retaliation for human moral infractions.
Offering an alternative model of anthropogenic climate change, Buddhist and Indigenous lifeworlds challenge Western convictions that ‘the Anthropocene’ is a novel planetary epoch.
Since the term has gained a vibrant discursive life beyond geology, its cultural assumptions—rather than biophysical thresholds—are primarily evaluated, revealing an extension of Eurocentric colon...