Hegemonic modern politics was born with the European nation-state, the social contract, and the separation between nature and culture — all pillars of coloniality. In the Antropocênica, this politics proves insufficient: its institutions (parliaments, parties, elections) operate in the short term, whilst the Earth's cycles are long and irreversible. More gravely: institutional politics continues to treat land as a resource rather than as a relative, as a being with agency. A counter-colonial and ecosystemic mode of thinking proposes an expanded politics: not merely that of human citizens, but of the more-than-human (rivers, forests, oceans, mountains). Politics as the management of the commons rather than the administration of scarcity. In diasporic communities, for example, politics is also made in neighbourhood associations, in the everyday practices of language and memory, in the decisions to transmit or silence a cultural inheritance. This is a micropolitics of resistance to homogenisation. The Antropocênica thus demands a post-representative, situated, and feminist politics — one that distrusts progress, refuses extractivism, and learns from cosmologies that have never separated the person from their territory.
Odair Barros-Varela