The Anthropocene as Epistemic Crisis: The EU Green Deal From the Perspective of Latin American Decolonial Critique

Mainstream theoretical-conceptual categories of the social sciences do not only convey coloniality and eurocentrism: they also reveal themselves insufficient to account for the current environmental devastation. The decentering of fundamental modern categories demands questioning Eurocentric anthropocentric assumptions, as formulated by critiques of the Anthropocene, and call for alternative epistemologies. The paper explores efforts towards this direction inspired by emancipatory, critical, decolonial approaches from Latin America that both challenge and pose alternatives to those assumptions. These are discussed against the background of some current critique of the EU Green Deal (EGD).