Reconceptualizing the ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene:
Integrating the social sciences and humanities in global
environmental change research
Gisli Palsson a,
*, Bronislaw Szerszynski b
, Sverker So¨rlin c
, John Marks d
, Bernard Avril e
,
Carole Crumley f
, Heide Hackmann g
, Poul Holm h
, John Ingram i
, Alan Kirman j
,
Mercedes Pardo Buendı´a k
, Rifka Weehuizen l
a
Department of Anthropology, University of Iceland, Iceland
b
Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
c
Division of History of Science, Technology, and Environment, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
d
(Formerly) European Science Foundation, Strasbourg, France
e
IMBER International Project Office, Institute of Marine Research, Bergen, Norway
f
Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm, Sweden
g
International Social Science Council, Paris, France
h
Department of History, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
i
Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University, United Kingdom
j
l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, University of Marseille, France
k
Department of Sociology, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
l
Institute for Advanced Study, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France
Currently, there is a general understanding that humans are
faced with a critical and narrowing window of opportunity –
if we do not act very soon, it will be too late to halt or reverse
some of the key indicators involved in the environmental
crisis. Not only is there this growing recognition, but there
are also increasing demands for the rethinking and reshuffling
of disciplines, in order to craft an academe suitable for
the gigantic task ahead. In his book A World of Becoming,
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 2 8 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 3 – 1 3
a r t i c l e i n f o
Published on line 28 December 2012
Keywords:
Anthropocene societies
Earth system
Environmental humanities
Environmental social sciences
Transdisciplinarity
Global environmental change
a b s t r a c t
There is growing recognition that humans are faced with a critical and narrowing window of
opportunity to halt or reverse some of the key indicators involved in the environmental crisis.
Given human activities’ scale and impact, as well as the overly narrow perspectives of
environmental research’s dominant natural sciences, a major effort is necessary to place
the perspectives and insights of thehumanities’ and social sciences’ perspectives and insights
at the forefront. Such effort will require developing integrated approaches, projects, and
institutions that truly do so. This article’s goal is to help mobilize the social sciences and the
humanities on the topic of sustainability transitions, but also call for a meaningful research
agenda to acknowledge the profound implications of the advent of the Anthropocene epoch.
We formulate the need for an innovative research agenda based on a careful consideration of
the changing human condition as linked to globalenvironmental change. Thehumanities and
social sciences will need to change and adapt to this pressing, historic task.
# 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: gpals@hi.is (G. Palsson).
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/envsci
1462-9011/$ – see front matter # 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2012.11.004
William E. Connolly (2011: p. 150) outlines some of the
challenges involved:
It is pertinent to see that in a world of becoming this or that
force-field can go through a long period of relative
equilibrium, or even gradual progression as defined by
standards extrapolated from that equilibrium. Much of
social thought and political theory takes such periods as
the base from which to define time and progress themselves,
making the practitioners all the more disorientated
when a surprising turn occurs, that is, when a period of
intense disequilibrium issues in a new plateau that
scrambles the old sense of progress and regress in this
or that way. . . . It is now time to modify old extrapolations
of possibility and desirability (2011: 150).
This timely call is the culmination of a gradual, growing
awareness of the extent to which human beings have been
altering the global environment. One milestone was George P.
Marsh’s Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by
Human Action; ‘The earth’, Marsh wrote ‘is fast becoming an
unfit home for its noblest inhabitant. . .’ (1864: p. 44). The idea
that the ‘noblest inhabitant’ (presumably Marsh was referring
to humanity, with or without irony) might need to refashion
its unfit home came still later. In 1948, Osborn Jr. suggested: ‘It
is man’s earth now. One wonders what obligations may
accompany this infinite possession’ (1948: p. 66).
When the general awareness of our ecological predicament
started to emerge in the early twentieth century, the human
sciences contributed significantly. However, in line with
modernist theories about technology and progress, the postwar
framing of the environment fatefully reduced it to an
object of natural science. It is becoming increasingly clear that
this framing is itself part of the environmental problem. We
argue that, because what currently counts as ‘environmental’
is also social (or, in some accounts, ‘biosocial’ or ‘naturalcultural’)
(see Ingold and Palsson, 2013), humanity’s knowledge
enterprise needs to return its attention to social theory
and the humanities.
The International Council of Science-led ‘Earth System
Science for Global Sustainability’ visioning process (ICSU,
2010), with the involvement of the International Social Science
Council (ISSC) and the ‘Belmont Challenge’ (Belmont, 2012),
emphasized the important contributions required from the
social sciences and humanities. This article discusses the
human and societal challenges posed by global environmental
change, emphasizing the humanities and social sciences’
potential contributions and the need for those scholarly
communities to step up to the challenges involved, given that
the context within which we are currently embedded is
increasingly and globally the result of human activities. The
humanities and social sciences will need to change, adapting
to this pressing, historic task.
Our goal is to reframe current understandings of the
environment in a way that acknowledges the global system’s
emergent character and the profound implications of human
activities. This will help mobilize social sciences and the
humanities to contribute their knowledge for achieving
sustainability transitions. Furthermore, we formulate a
meaningful research agenda based on a careful consideration
of the changing human condition that is linked to global
environmental change. We suggest that the new era,
characterized by measurable global human impact – the socalled
Anthropocene – does not just imply conflation of the
natural and the social, but also a ‘radical’ change in
perspective and action in terms of human awareness of and
responsibility for a vulnerable earth – a ‘new human
condition,’ to paraphrase Arendt (1958). The need for
humanities and social sciences research communities to
mobilize their efforts and articulate a specific priority research
agenda for this field of research is emphasized. We will
identify five specific challenges in this respect.
We thus encourage social scientists and humanities
researchers to become further involved in one of the most
challenging issues for humans, individually and collectively,
in our present time. This call for involvement is both a ‘call to
arms’ to the mainstream social sciences and humanities and a
call for intensive cooperation with natural scientists in this
endeavor, starting with a joint framing of the key research
questions. A series of recent works in social sciences and
humanities (e.g. Hackmann and St. Clair, 2012) have usefully
identified many of the global environmental issues to which
these fields can meaningfully contribute, given the current
state of affairs in these fields, the tool kits and visions that
might be draw upon, highlighting at the same time potential
avenues for reorganizing academic communities, funding,
and institutions. The larger conceptual task remains to
reframe Anthropos for the modern context. This will mean
reorganizing our own house in a radical sense, expanding our
tools and visions beyond ‘business-as-usual’ – a task that has
just begun in several fields of scholarship. Our attempt in this
vein is, thus, by definition, exploratory and programmatic.
1. Human dimensions and the human
sciences: a call to arms
Together with such ‘natural’ phenomena as solar forcing,
volcanic activity, and natural selection, human activity must
now be considered a ‘driver’ of global environmental change.
Some authors have therefore suggested that this emerging
epoch in planetary history should be called the ‘Anthropocene’
(Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000; Steffen et al., 2011), a successor to
the last interglacial epoch, the ‘Holocene.’ Most of the writings
related to the Anthropocene suggest that it started in the late
eighteenth century, when the rapidly growing combustion of
fossil fuels began to change the global atmosphere’s global
composition (Tickell, 2011). Since then, the impact of human
activity has begun to equal that of geological forces in both
speed and intensity. It has created a completely novel situation
that poses fundamentally new research questions and requires
new ways of thinking and acting.
While the insight that humans have become one of the
dominant factors in shaping the globe is not new, the
Anthropocene concept is one of the latest and most influential
concepts attempting to capture this insight. Previous concepts
range from Stoppani’s ‘anthropozoic era’ (1873), Vernadsky, Le
Roy, and Teilhard de Chardin’s ‘noo¨sphere’ (1922), Catton’s
‘Homo colossus’ (1980), Revkin’s ‘anthrocene’ (1992), and Samways’s
‘homogenocene’ (1999), to the more recent ‘Great
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 2 8 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 3 – 1 34
Acceleration’ (Schimel et al., 2007). The growing acceptance of
the Anthropocene idea is the recognition of a gradual but
accelerating switch from a nature-dominated to a humandominated
global environmental system (Costanza et al.,
2007). In a rapidly evolving environmental context, the human
condition is more unique than ever before – the environment
is the result of human ‘environing’ activities that form the
environment (So¨rlin and Warde, 2009). The Anthropocene
‘strata’ form part of our surrounding environment because we,
for example, live in and drive on anthropocenic ‘rock’
constructions that we call houses and roads.
Despite the recognition of human activity’s growing influence
on environmental change, major social science and
humanities funding agencies have generally been absent in
funding global change research. Nevertheless, virtually all
social sciences and humanities disciplines have at some point
taken an interest in human–environment interactions. The
canon of these disciplines contains many intellectual resources
that could be helpful with ‘thinking the Anthropocene.’
Generally, however, organized disciplinary and interdisciplinary
initiatives focused on the systematic interrogation of
environmental issues only started to emerge from the 1970s
onward. Anthropology responded to the challenge early, which
led toaseries ofcompeting approaches tostudyinghumansand
the environment. These approaches include cultural ecology
(1950s), ecological anthropology (1960s), and historical ecology
(1990s) (Crumley, 2007). In the remaining human sciences,
ecological economics and environmental sociology emerged in
the 1970s and ecolinguistics in the 1990s.
In general, the humanities show a similar trajectory, with
environmental history, environmental philosophy (particularly
ethics and esthetics), and literary ecocriticism all emerging in
the 1970s. More recently, the more inclusive term ‘environmental
humanities’ has been gaining ground. Recent manifestations
of this term include programmes at several universities
across the world; a new journal based in Sydney; a programme
for the humanities and social sciences at the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton; the Environmental Humanities
Laboratory at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm;
and the Environmental Humanities Project at Stanford Univer-
sity.1
This rapidly growing interest in environmental issues
reflects the full range of human disciplines’ increasing
awareness that something essential needs to be done (Chakrabarty,
2009; So¨rlin, this issue).
Yet, despite this rich and diverse set of approaches to the
relationship between humans and the environment, contributions
to global change research by the social sciences and the
humanities have been relatively marginal. So far there are no
‘planetary humanities.’ This state of affairs is graphically
illustrated by the unspecified box for ‘human activities’
included in the 1988 natural science diagram of the ‘earth’s
system’ – the so-called ‘Bretherton diagram’ (see Fig. 1) which
reduced the scope of the human sciences to an unspecified box
of ‘human activities’ within a natural-science diagram of the
earth system. The 2001 Open Science Conference – Challenges of
a Changing Earth: Global Change – which adopted a declaration2
recognizingtheincreasingrole ofhumansinchanging the earth
system, was a welcome change. It called for a new system of
global environmental research that would draw strongly on a
wider disciplinary research base and integrate issues beyond
the various disciplines as well as across academic and
practitioner approaches to the environment and development.
The humanities and social sciences should, indeed, make
essential contributions to issues such as understanding the
drivers of and barriers in societal organizations and human
behavior, as well as the role of cultures in resilience capability.
Another sign of positive change was Fig. 2 diagram in the
International Human Dimensions Programme on Global
Environmental Change (2010). This diagram implies that the
social sciences (in a broad sense) are as important as the
natural sciences and are assumed to take greater responsibility
for dealing with responses to global environmental change.
This is in marked contrast to the marginal or over-simplified,
Fig. 1 – The Bretherton diagram (simplified version).
1
http://ehp.stanford.edu/.
2
www.essp.org/index.php?id=41.
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 2 8 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 3 – 1 3 5
mechanistic role of human activities in the Bretherton
diagram.
Nevertheless, Fig. 2 only represents partial progress. It still
seems to assume an autonomous, reified social world, with
inputs and outputs, whose causal mechanisms can be
understood from outside, much as the natural sciences might
represent natural systems. This figure might encourage the
framing of the social sciences as a subordinate research
partner by separating the social and natural worlds, and
confining the relevance of social sciences to the former: there
is no place for ‘environment’ among the social sciences. This
fails to recognize that the environmental is already part of
what the social sciences and humanities encompass as a
relevant part of their knowledge.
Fig. 2 also fails to recognize the important role that the
humanities and social sciences can play in understanding the
character and status of the natural scientific knowledge of
nature. Global environmental research, the (implicit) assumptions
and approaches embedded in it, as well as the
formulation of problems and solutions, should be more
important social and humanities research topics. Such
research must go beyond the sterile polarization characteristic
of the 1990s’ ‘science wars’: social sciences and the humanities’
disciplines can surely take up the ‘meta-responsibility’ of
analyzing and reflecting on the nature of global environmental
change research in general. This requires that it be framed in a
way that moves it beyond a confinement to the domain of the
‘natural’ in academic and public discussions and also fully
integrates the humanities and social sciences.
CHALLENGE 1: The environment must be understood as a
social category and efforts must be made to integrate the
humanities and social sciences more fully into our understanding
of the environmental. Simultaneously, it is important
to further encourage the ongoing ‘environmental turn’ in
the humanities and social sciences. These ambitions should
be supported with concerted efforts to articulate plans and
programmes for long-term research that will give them
substance.
2. Limits and boundaries: human as much as
natural
The discourse on the human species’ increasing power over
nature has been in creative tension with a discourse on natural
limits and boundaries. The global public discourse on resource
constraints and scarcity is more than 200 years old; however, it
has become more pronounced and empirically grounded. The
Limits to Growth report of the Club of Rome (Meadows et al.,
1972) stated that resources were finite and that increased per
capita use and growing demographic numbers were far
stronger drivers than the technological innovation that might
increase resource efficiency. Limits were considered dangerous
and compelling because reaching them would ignite a
competition for resources, leading to starvation and potentially
civilizational collapse.
The current discourse on limits has been fundamentally
changed and brought more into line with the Anthropocene’s
emphasis on the coupling of human society and earth
systems. One of its recent manifestations is the ‘planetary
boundaries’ article by Rockstro¨m et al. (2009), which investigates
effects of human actions on various planetary systems,
in order to identify ‘a safe operating space for humanity’. The
absoluteness of resource limits has been relativized in
recognition of improving economies and lower rates of
starvation and malnutrition. The ‘new’ planetary boundaries
are the problems caused by human action: the effects on the
oceans, the atmosphere, species, and soil. Humanity is still
overstretching the planet, not primarily by reaching the limits
of resource availability, but rather by approaching or even
transgressing the limits of anthropogenic disturbance absorption
and ecological resilience – what the planet can absorb.
Approaches such as these serve to clarify the broader terms
of reference of human–earth interactions (Richardson et al.,
2011). However, people, citizens, and societies should get a
much more prominent place in the scientific description of the
state of the planet and the world. In increasing detail, we get to
Fig. 2 – Beyond the Bretherton diagram.
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 2 8 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 3 – 1 36
know ever more of the transgression of the limits of natural
‘systems,’ although the environmental effects on humans do
not seem to belong in these equations. This omission is
probably because scientific language lacks the nuances to
appropriately explain these effects. Some of the most
promising research in the humanities and social sciences
specifically addresses how environmental degradation and
the deliberate translocation of dirty industries to poor nations,
or poor regions of rich nations, affect the citizens of these
regions. This is more than evenly distributed side effects from
environmental stress; it is a political geography of equity and
justice, implying lives and life qualities that invite comparisons
between countries such as the United States and India
and, in more general terms, comparisons between those with
full stomachs and the empty-bellied. Perfectly possible acts
that are legal, and sometimes even virtuous, under the current
economic system, because of their contribution to jobcreation
and economic growth, have flip sides that, if they
were registered as instantaneous acts, would be criminal.
Instead, they impose on the global South a ‘slow violence’ of
lower life expectancies, declining health and increased
inequalities that rarely register in the media (Nixon, 2011).
‘Humanist’ and social science research needs to be drawn
upon in order to complement natural science approaches to
planetary limits and boundaries (e.g., Clark et al., 2001; Pardo
et al., 2003). Although the rise of ‘ecosystem thinking’ and
‘resilience thinking’ (e.g., Nowotny et al., 2001; Walker and
Salt, 2006; Fazey, 2010) represented an important advance for
the natural sciences, this is sometimes seen as too restrictive
for social sciences and the humanities. Social sciences and
humanities generally view systemic boundaries as suitable
constructs for a mechanistic world created by humans for
analytical purposes and projected onto reality, rather than as
an intrinsic property of the observed world. While this may
also be true for much systems thinking in the natural sciences,
systemic descriptions used tentatively for heuristic purposes
can often ‘take on a life of their own’ and act as barriers to new
thinking and alternative approaches.
It is important to historicize and contextualize claims
about limits and boundaries. Their rationale includes Earth
system functioning, but they are also human-centered. The
boundaries are based on reasonable global average figures
over the last ten millennia, with the argument that this was
the period that saw humanity flourish. However, this masks
both quantitative and qualitative differences in the human
impacts on the planetary systems and differences in the
consequences of these for human society, let alone for other
species. There is a need to pay more attention to the social
distribution of the planetary impacts, which are not always
easily quantifiable. The imbalance in fresh-water availability,
for instance, can hardly be resolved by global redistribution,
which poses particular governance problems. ‘A safe operating
space for humanity’ might be a useful tool on the global
scale, but is a fiction on smaller scales.
The notions of ‘ecological debt’ and ‘climate debt’ have
been used to try to capture how the global North’s excessive
historic use of the atmosphere’s absorptive capacity has
closed off similar development routes for the global South
(e.g., Martı´nez-Alier, 2002). The very language and metrics
used in climate policies and negotiations can mask such issues
(Roberts and Parks, 2007). In this context, social scientists and
humanities scholars should not just provide knowledge about
the drivers, barriers, incentives, and rewards that might
enable ‘successful’ negotiations and behavior change, but
should also work with movements from the global South.
Together they can develop frameworks for thinking about
ways of ensuring that humanity lives within natural limits
that do not implicitly reproduce notions of human-nature
relations that we already know are harmful to nature or
humans, or perpetuate structural and historical global
inequalities.
CHALLENGE 2: The notions of planetary limits and
boundaries need to be sensitive to human experience and
the nature constructed by humans, embedded in a scientific
framework that includes issues of distribution, geography and
equity as well as environmental effects on humans.
3. Anthropocene society
The notion of the Anthropocene, highlighting as it does the
exceptional role of humans in the refashioning of life on earth,
could be seen as an anthropocentric construct. After all, there
are good grounds for speaking of distributive agency, which
emphasizes that the Anthropocene is not the result of Homo
sapiens acting in isolation, but is only made possible through a
diverse network of technological, cultural, organic, and
geological entities (Connolly, 2011). Nevertheless, the assumption
that the history of the earth has now entered a new epoch
is a highly useful one with important implications. The earlier
history of humans (e.g., since the appearance of Homo sapiens
approximately 200,000 years ago) is defined by the type and
level of knowledge and technology and includes a certain type
of relationship between humans and their environmental
resources and services. Just as previous historical epochs had,
for instance, Stone Age societies, we now live in Anthropocene
societies, although no-one has yet tried to articulate the full
implications of this (however, see Dalby, 2007).
The sciences have long offered compelling evidence and
concepts that speak to the new realities of global environmental
change. Together with the ‘Anthropocene,’ we now
understand the human dominance of the planet with
concepts such as ‘the great acceleration,’ ‘thresholds,’ and
‘tipping points.’ These concepts help frame the contemporary
mind. At the same time, it is remarkable how little these
concepts tell us about the process, the driving forces, and the
social consequences of the changes they imply. There is an
increasing need for concepts and narratives from the
humanities and social sciences that can address this shortcoming.
There is also a growing literature that deals with the
issue and tries to articulate what the new human condition in
the Anthropocene might be in ethical, historical, and
philosophical terms (Zalasiewicz et al., 2011).
Perhaps the most pressing task involves addressing the
short-term and medium-term question of how to navigate the
transition to a fully Anthropocene society during a period in
which the prevailing social values and institutions are still
those of an earlier epoch. In the current time, the emerging
awareness of the anthropogenic environmental change coexists
with a disconnect between insight and action. This is a
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 2 8 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 3 – 1 3 7
huge and interesting challenge to the humanites and social
sciences. Isn’t in fact a concept such as ‘Anthropocene
sustainability’ a contradictio in adjecto? How could we regard
human-led planetary transformation as a sustainable project?
Hernes (2012) has recently argued that our time is one of a
growing sense of despair about a political system that
constantly tries to prove itself through its capacity to deliver
growth, but seems largely incapable of dealing with obvious
and undeniable environmental threats. The future is simultaneously
becoming increasingly hollow, filled with worry,
concern, and even fear as we become aware of national and
global politics’ lack of capabilities. Political initiatives around
sustainability often amount to little more than simulacral
politics, providing the illusion of a transition to sustainability
while sanctioning the continued profligate use of natural
resources (Blu¨ hdorn and Welsh, 2008).
However, simplistic ideas of the ‘greening’ of the modern
world are likely to be misleading. On its own, a shift in global
consciousness would not turn material practices around
among the soon-to-be ten billion inhabitants of the earth
and re-establish more sustainable relationships of humanity
with the planet. Some of the influential sustainability
paradigms assume smooth adaptation, primarily through
improved technologies, but rarely discuss global power
relations, the functional aspects of the economic systems,
or the fundamental issues of value formation. This is a grave
underestimation of the problem. Our suggestion is that,
instead of one-sidedly stressing smoothness and continuity,
we should draw on the growing work in all fields of science
that suggests the fundamentally disruptive and discontinuous
character of our current phase of societal and planetary
development.
It is likely that the culture and social institutions of future
societies in the Anthropocene epoch will take novel – and
probably highly diverse – forms. The mental and civic
infrastructures of societies – principles of morality, duty,
and responsibility; criteria of success; ideas about where
society is going – have changed dramatically over time and
also differ widely across present cultures. There is no reason
why this should not be the case in the future as well.
Anthropocene societies, especially if they are to become
sustainable societies, may differ greatly from not only Stone
Age or Medieval societies, but also from current capitalist
societies. The social sciences and humanities need to
analyze emerging societies in order to determine the extent
to which and the way in which they appear anthropocenic in
their values, culture, institutions, and cosmologies, in ways
that distinguish them from past societies. For example, one
important dimension of Anthropocene societies is likely to
be their relationship with technology. Scholars such as Beck,
Lash, and Giddens have argued that most of the current
environmental risks are directly or indirectly man-made;
furthermore, the societal structures developed for managing
and reducing human-induced risks have become the
source of further environmental and social risks (e.g., Beck
et al., 1994). Anthropocene societies could thus be characterized
as involving humans being basically in conflict with
themselves through the structures and systems that they
have themselves created in order to improve their lifestyles
and well-being.
But surely the most striking feature of the Anthropocene is
that it is the first geological epoch in which a defining
geological force is actively conscious of its geological role. The
Anthropocene therefore really commences when humans
become aware of their global role in shaping the earth and,
consequently, when this awareness shapes their relationship
with the natural environment. This is thus not just a new
geological epoch; it also potentially changes the very nature of
the geological by clearly marking it as a domain that includes
intentionality and meaning. Conversely, it also marks a
transformative moment in the history of humanity as an
agent, comparable perhaps to the development of technology
and agriculture. Accounts of the Anthropocene are dominated
by the natural sciences’ struggle to accommodate such
insights. This struggle recalls Foucault’s (1970) account of
the inability of seventeenth century science’s ‘classical’
epistemology to represent the act of representation itself, so
that humans only appeared as objects rather than subjects.
The task of understanding Anthropocene societies will involve
the development of ways of theorizing about such complex
changes in the nature of the earth system.
CHALLENGE 3: It is now time for us to articulate the culture
of emerging Anthropocene societies by drawing upon natural
scientists, humanities scholars, and social scientists, emphasizing
the new fusion of the natural and the ideational. In
regard to the transition to fully Anthropocene societies,
adapted to the new human condition, how can the contemporary
syndromes of anxiety, drift, and self-delusion be
transformed into a more positive task of building a culture
of sustainability?
4. The new human condition: moving beyond
dualisms
One of the pressing tasks on the environmental agenda is to
identify the novelty of the current condition for humanity as a
species. One source of insight is Hannah Arendt’s The Human
Condition (1958), a treatise of political philosophy on the
various forms of human activity that relate humans to one
another and to the material world. Arendt suggested that
humans’ being-in-the-world had been disrupted in the
modern age, resulting in alienation from the common,
artifactual human world and from nature. She used this
analysis to think about the changing character of politics,
science, freedom, and thinking itself (Szerszynski, 2003). A key
challenge for social sciences and the humanities is thus to
explore the extent to which the human condition, as analyzed
by Arendt, has changed in the Anthropocene era and the
nature of this change. This presents a real challenge to the
humanities and social sciences: does our conception of the
human have to change?
Several scholars have seized upon the moment of climate
crisis to articulate how the sense of time and the direction of
history are changing. The very nature of the historical
enterprise may also be altering as the age-old humanist
distinction between natural history and human history
becomes less and less tenable (Chakrabarty, 2009). More
broadly, humanities and social science scholars have drawn
attention to the importance of developing an approach that
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 2 8 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 3 – 1 38
synthesizes environmental and social theories (e.g., Cronon,
1996; Descola and Palsson, 1996; Biersack and Greenberg,
2006). Nature has often been presented as one half of a pair –
nature/culture, natural/social, and so on. This is still echoed in
some earth-system notions that are fundamentally dualistic,
‘linking,’ ‘connecting,’ and ‘coupling’ the two systems of the
earth and humans as if they were different realities. But
recently, environmental discourse has increasingly emphasized
the need to move beyond the stark dualism of the natural
and the social (e.g., Palsson, 2006; Ingold, 2011).
Some of the main contemporary driving forces against
dualism relate to empirical findings. For instance, it is now
patently clear that the ‘natural’ climate of the globe has a lot to
do with ‘artificial’ tangible and intangible human services and
goods. Some Arctic volcanic eruptions might even be
attributed to human activities; a recent study on Iceland’s
Vatnajo¨kull ice cap suggests that melting glaciers can increase
volcanic activity over timeframes that are relevant to humans
(Pagli and Sigmundsson, 2008). Similarly, social scientists and
humanities scholars increasingly address issues such as
health threats, food availability, local pollution, weather
extremes, climate change, and related mitigation or adaptation
technologies and strategies, including those linked to bioengineering
and geo-engineering (e.g., Crate and Nuttall, 2007;
Szerszynski and Urry, 2010).
The recent transdisciplinary effort to address questions
related to the environment has undoubtedly been partly
informed by the growing problems of late modernity. These
problems include those posed by rapidly expanding human
populations, ever more efficient technologies of extraction
and exploitation of natural resources, and the near collapse of
entire ecosystems and animal populations. Consequently,
political theory has been busily zooming out, emphasizing the
interconnected world of Gaia and detrimental anthropocenic
signatures globally. In the process, our world of concern has
been vastly expanded. Human activities are altering not just
the climate of the globe and the conditions in outer space, but
also the structures of bodies and genomes.
Indeed, there are good grounds for conflating the notion of
‘environment,’ the key term in the current discussion, and the
notion of the individual organism. Organisms are partly
regulated by a host of environmental forces that leaves their
mark on their genomes. The results of a number of recent
studies suggest that early environments – particularly
nutritional environments (the kind and quantity of food) –
condition the possibility for gene expression in humans and
other animals. These environments thus potentially affect our
health and well-being. Such ‘epigenetic’ regulation seems to
be prevalent in the human genome. In other words, the lives of
our parents and ancestors, as well as their communities’
traditions and conditions in all their complexities – from
dietary factors and exposure to toxic substances to behavioral
habits – are embodied and memorized in our genomes. They
turn on some genes and silence others, leaving a lasting
embodied impact – in a somewhat neo-Lamarckian fashion.
Although food has always been seen as an important part of
the environment within which humans dwell (Ingram et al.,
2010), Landecker emphasizes that ‘our moment is a historically
specific one in which food is being understood, studied,
depicted, engineered and ingested as a set of molecules, which
exist in a cloud around us, and over which we often have
limited individual control’ (2011: p. 190). Human intervention
seems to be practically everywhere and the products of nature
– of ‘nature’s handiwork’ in the classic sense – seem to be
largely the same as the products of humans. This is the
Anthropocene on a nano-scale.
CHALLENGE 4: The new ‘human condition’ characterized
by rapidly growing human impact in both the environment
and life itself represents unprecedented conceptual and
political challenges. Thus, traditions of Western thought are
repeatedly confronted with their internal limits and intellectual
tipping points. This is illustrated by the dualism of nature
and society central to many disciplines. How can their
flexibility be enhanced and adapted to the Anthropocene?
Could we benefit from applying the same theoretical frameworks
to both the nano-world of bodies, cells, and genes and
the giga-world of the globe?
5. Managing in the Anthropocene: core
challenges for the social sciences and humanities
The complex and somewhat chaotic implications of anthropogenic
environmental change undermine our capacity to
respond along the lines of the modernist ‘management’ of
the past, emphasizing human mastery and control. Unfortunately,
the social and political change that is needed for
sustainability is poorly understood. Thanks partly to developments
in several academic fields, including ecological economics,
the academic and political debates on environmental and
societal governance have increasingly emphasized the limits of
the neoliberal market for adequately and sustainably dealing
with the major environmental threats we face. Consequently, a
concerted social science and humanities effort is essential to
analyze the complexities of the real world and the different
institutions and social arrangements involved, and to explore
alternatives and potential avenues for mobilization. The works
of Ostrom (e.g., 2005) have carved out an important transdisciplinary
research domain in this respect.
The capacity of states to govern authoritatively on their own
has been significantly reduced, particularly in the environmental
context. The patterns of communication that connect states,
scientific institutions, and publics have also been altered
dramatically in the recent past. The nation or state has become
intensely connected and informationalized, creating new ways
of ordering society, but also new vulnerabilities and dependencies.
The emergence of networked communication technologies
has created new ways of doing science and has granted
minority voices and ‘citizen experts’ a new salience in research
and decision-making. In this changing context, solutions for
today’s pressing problems cannot always be found within
political institutions or dominating scientific disciplines.
Instead, we see the rise of transnational, polycentric networks
of governance, new citizen-actors, and strikingly hybrid
scientific enterprises such as normal research (e.g., Funtowicz
and Ravetz, 1993), action research (e.g., Stringer, 1999), and
mode-2 research (Nowotny et al., 2001).
At the same time, the authority of science has been
changed. Politicians have long relied on science as a steering
device and legitimizing resource for policy decisions (Ezrahi,
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 2 8 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 3 – 1 3 9
1990). However, the ‘staging’ of science is now done in new
ways and tensions inherent to science must be mediated in
and across new settings. New forms of openness and exposure
(such as ‘Climategate’ and WikiLeaks) are emerging, as are
new forms of participation and engagement (e.g., citizen
science, user-led innovation, participatory sensing, and
crowdsourcing). While ‘Climategate,’ which started in 2009,
is a limited affair in the broad scheme of things, it is
nevertheless an important example, because it illustrates
the potential problems of mistrust between science and the
larger community (Skrydstrup, this issue), as well as the
influence of the media and their political shackles. Given that
science is in many ways the product and instrument of
humans’ wish or will to help control and exploit nature, it is
desirable to have a system of multiple sources of knowledge
and legitimacy (e.g., Orlove et al., 2008). An overly powerful
science may not be a solution but part of the problem in our
‘post-modern’ societies (Greenberg, 2001). Thanks to a
potentially powerful tool such as the Internet, we have now
entered an era of, at least potential, ‘knowledge democracy.’
Not only have the agents and the measure for environmental
change been redefined, the goals themselves and
indexes have changed. Our growing awareness of the planet’s
vulnerability has to compete with the desire for and the
omnipresent discourse on economic growth (as represented
by the GDP index). More than three dozen new, multidimensional
indexes and indicators have been proposed in the last
decades (e.g., the Human Development Index, Happy Planet
Index, Global Innovation Index, and the Genuine Progress
Indicator). These indexes are more salient, credible, and
legitimate than GDP because they relate to the social and
environmental pillars of sustainable development (Brundtland
et al., 2012). To date, none of these has received
widespread attention. We should – among others – be
considering the future two generations ahead and be realizing
that it is perfectly possible, and absolutely necessary, for the
basic measuring tools of sustainable societies to improve. We
must stop using evaluation and reward systems that are, in
practice, counter-incentives for sustainability. Recently, however,
the call for more inclusive wealth indicators, including
built, financial, social, human and natural capital, is gaining
momentum; see, for example, the Declaration of the 2012
Planet under Pressure Conference.3
Currently, there is increasing awareness that the concepts
and tools of economics do not simply measure
economies but perform them, constituting and shaping them
profoundly (Callon, 1998). This means that social scientists
and humanities scholars need to turn their attention back to
themselves. One step would be to massively research the
roots of the social measurements of success, the roles and
functions of reward systems, to investigate and critique
their methodologies and tacit and explicit assumptions, and
to analyze their implementation politics. Just as we think of
stem cell medicine and genetics research as the foundation
of a New Medicine, and we regard nanotechnology as the
dawn of a New Technology, our work should be guided by the
possibility of social sciences and humanities research as the
intellectual input for a New Political Economics that can
discard the most dysfunctional elements of the present. This
is particularly important in our time and day as we have been
living in a period that has emphatically neglected the need
for fundamental change. In fact, since the demise of Sovietstyle
communism, it has been touted as a metaphysical
truth that the current system of western capitalism should
be spread wholesale and that this ‘globalization of the
inevitable’ is also the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1992). Less
than a generation later, this way of thinking has proven
unfounded. The history of sustainability has barely begun,
and our mission is to organize social thought and social
reflection that are on par with the magnitude of the issues.
Whilst doing this, we should also take responsibility for and
question the desirability of possible future societies as well as
question the directionality of the change we will inevitably get. In
a set of important papers, Stirling has observed (e.g. 2009) how
little effort the contemporary race for ‘innovation’ has expended
to question the direction of this innovation and the economic
growth it purports to stimulate. It is as if growth itself is now the
common good we seek; by contrast, growth was initially
considered simply as a means to achieve what was valuable
and could one day even be enough; it would at that point cease
and leave us in a benign stationary state (Mill, 1848, book IV, ch.
VI, esp. p. 753).The mismatch between the rhetoric of innovation
and the need to articulate the properties of future sustainable
Anthropocene societies in which we strive to live is glaring.
CHALLENGE 5: To remedy the lack of understanding of the
Anthropocene, it is essential to enhance and intensify the
social sciences and humanities’ work on how directionality
could be articulated, democratically anchored, and implemented
in the search for new technologies, medical knowledge,
economic paradigms, and forms of social organization.
The understanding and facilitating of our world’s transition
toward sustainability is, to borrow a conventional phrase, a
‘core challenge’ to which social sciences and the humanities
should make a marked contribution.
6. Conclusion
Our discussion has broadly identified the terrain of new
research priorities in social sciences and the humanities
pertaining to global environmental change in the Anthropocene.
We suggest that it is essential to fundamentally rethink
the environment-humanity relationship. To characterize the
Anthropocene by means of quantitative data is one thing; to
describe and understand how it perceives human interaction,
culture, institutions, and societies – indeed, the meaning of
being human – is truly another and a major challenge for the
scholarly, literary, artistic, practitioner, and policy communities.
We suggest that a massive effort is needed to further
develop and implement a grand research scheme broadly along
the lines discussed above: What now matters more than
anything is our capacity to respond rapidly and efficiently to
linked societal and environmental challenges.
Given that the causes and impacts of environmental
change are increasingly related to human activity, it is vitally
important to study human behavior, social arrangements, and
human–environmental interactions on a much grander scale
3
http://www.planetunderpressure2012.net/pdf/state_of_
planet_declaration.pdf.
e n v i r o n m e n t a l s c i e n c e & p o l i c y 2 8 ( 2 0 1 3 ) 3 – 1 310
than ever before. Unfortunately, in most institutional and
cultural contexts, research budgets still tend to reflect the old
idea of relegating humans and their impact to the margin of
the grand scheme of things. Much depends on the ability of the
social science and humanities to demonstrate bold, creative
thinking in the environmental domain, so as to provide
intellectual and social rationale for the investment that is
required.
In the preceding discussion, we identified five specific
challenges relating to the Anthropocene, the humanities, and
social sciences:
(1) Efforts must be made to integrate the humanities and
social sciences more fully into transdisciplinary environmental
change research programmes and to further
encourage the ongoing ‘environmental turn’ in the
humanities and social sciences.
(2) Planetary limits and boundaries ideas need to incorporate
human experience and must be sensitive to context and to
the nature constructed by humans, embedded in a
framework that includes issues of equity and environmental
effects on humans.
(3) It is time now to articulate the culture of emerging
Anthropocene societies, drawing upon natural scientists,
humanities scholars, and social scientists to emphasize
the new fusion of the natural and the ideational,
transforming the contemporary syndromes of anxiety,
drift, and self-delusion into a more positive task of building
a culture of sustainability.
(4) We must explore how Western thought traditions, hitherto
heavily dependent on the dualism of nature and society,
can confront their internal limits and intellectual tipping
points. Their flexibility needs to be enhanced and adapted
to the human condition of the Anthropocene.
(5) To remedy the lack of understanding of how to steer society
in the Anthropocene, it is essential to further develop social
sciences and the humanities work on how directionality
could be articulated, democratically anchored, and implemented
in the search for new technologies, medical
knowledge, and ideas of economic and social organization.
If our species and our societies are to continue to thrive, it is
of utmost importance that we identify the ideas and practices
that nurture both our species, our societies, and the planet. Our
best laboratory for this is the past, where long-term, mediumterm,
and short-term variables can be identified and their roles
evaluated. Arguably, however, we simply must experiment
more, e.g., as the climate becomes more chaotic (Clark, 2010).
Thus integrating our understanding of human history with that
of the earth system is a timely and urgent task. The outlining of
some of the earth-system components central to the metabolisms
and maintenance of human bodies and the security of
communities is very important. However, our constructs,
understanding, and actions are necessarily situated in biological
and social relations and, furthermore, embedded in culture.
Because culture is fundamental to human life, it cannot be
separated from its biophysical environment. We are only part
of a complex network of elements and relations that make up
planet earth, but we are the only part that can be held
responsible. Not only has this enormous ecosystem within
which we live been influenced by events and conditions far
away but, as we have seen, it literally reaches into the depths
of our bodies. Recently, feminist theory has addressed what
we have identified, following Arendt’s lead, as the ‘new
human condition’ of the Anthropocene, outlining what it
means for the sociality and responsibility of humans. GibsonGraham
(2011) suggest in this vein that what is needed is both
a new ethics of care, relating to the global world as one does to
a family, and a new form of regional development. Can we
extend our solidarity, they ask, to the more-than-human, to
other life forms and life in general? ‘If we can,’ they conclude,
‘that would certainly usher in a new mode of humanity and a
new form of belonging’ (2011: 17).
The ‘earth system’ may be an effective key metaphor for
the interconnectedness of our bodies within the biosphere, but
for such a metaphorical association to make sense the system
will have to allow a central role for humans – for the Anthropos
– in what the Greeks called the ‘household’ (Oikos) of life. As
Connolly indicates in the quote we began with, the modern
academe is ‘disoriented’ when confronting the continuing
surprises of this household; it is indeed ‘time to modify old
extrapolations of possibility and desirability’ (2011: p. 150).
Overall, the ‘naı¨ve’ belief in human ‘mastery’ of the forces of
nature must be tempered by responsibility and humility, by
respect for other agents, cultural differences, and other
disciplines. This is the crux of Anthropocene society, the
new human condition.
Acknowledgements
This article was developed as part of the RESCUE initiative
(Responses to Environmental and Societal Challenges for our Unstable
Earth, www.esf.org/rescue). RESCUE is a joint Frontiers of Science
foresight initiative of the European Science Foundation (ESF,
www.esf.org) and the European Cooperation in Science and
Technology (COST, www.cost.eu). The authors represent the
Task Force that was established in the course of the RESCUE
project to address special neglected issues, in particular the role
of social sciences and the humanities in global environmental
change discussions. We thank the anonymous reviewers of a
draft for their candid, critical, and constructive observations
and suggestions. We also thank Ilse Evertse and Johan Emerson
Grobler for their skillful language editing.
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