Blog (and Book) by Jane Caputi

Reading up on the Anthropocene for Call Your “Mutha’”: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene, I encountered repeated pat phrases about humans (really Man in Wynter’s sense) now being “the dominant force of change on the planet.” Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen even averred: “It’s no longer us against “Nature.” Instead, it’s we who decide what nature is and what it will be.”

The COVID-19 virus is laughing all the way to the emergency room. Nature/Earth, the formidable and indomitable force whom I understand as the “Mutha’” is the actual decider. She/They is disrespected, foundationally, in the Anthropocenic world that Man is trying to (re)make in his own image. Climate change, extinctions, pandemics; these are neither the wrath of a mythic punitive deity or a rape-avenging femme fatale. All those empty shelves in the grocery story serve as a vivid metaphor for what really going on — the withdrawal of the “Mutha’” – the force/source upon whom all of us depend for absolutely everything.