Arturo ESCOBAR (UNC-CH) e Marisol DE LA CADENA (UC Davis)

Moderator: Gonçalo Santos (CIAS / Sci-Tech Asia / University of Coimbra)

Terricide, a label coined by Mapuche women, names the current epoch of the Earth: one in which some humans now have the capacity to destroy the world through their makings.  While related to scientific and feminist namings of the same epoch, the terricide explicitly foregrounds the actions of worlds that do not abide by the nature and human ontological divide in their defense against their destruction. The actors in the stories from what we call the “anthropo-not-seen” are neither human or nature but both together; they pluralize both “human” and “nature” making them not only such.  We propose pluriversal contact zones as analytics against terricide, one that enables political alliances across the same onto-epistemic divides that made the Anthropocene. ‘The rights of nature’ may be one such contact zone, an onto-epistemic site for alliances that may transform the current Anthropocenic-capitalocenic destruction of the planet—the terricide—into an opportunity to transition to what the Zapatistas call “a world of many worlds.”