The title of Naomi Klein’s acclaimed book on the politics of climate change well sums up the challenge of the Anthropocene. The arrival of the age when human activity has come to dominate and seriously compromise the stability of the Earth System poses fundamental questions for our professions, key cultural and social institutions, our communities, and our systems of governance. In Klein’s words, this changes everything.
The Anthropocene Transition Network Inc (ATN), an incorporated non-profit membership association. The ATN runs a program of face-to-face and online workshops, roundtables and public forums dealing with many aspects of living in the Anthropocene and preparing the transition to a future beyond social and environmental breakdown. The ATN runs an networking platform called the Anthropocene Transition Hub. The Hub is an online community of creative change-makers whose purpose is to promote mutually beneficial ways of relating to the planet and all its life forms – restoring the rich biodiversity of Earth and the best of our human cultural legacies, including the ancient wisdom of enduring indigenous cultures.
One Earth System
The concept of the Anthropocene draws together our thinking about specific aspects of Earth System disruption — like climate change or biodiversity loss or ocean acidification — to focus on their interconnections. It encourages us to see the Earth as a single socio-ecological system. It also helps us to broaden our view to include the cultural drivers of this disruption — deep conflict between the core values of a dominant global monoculture and the life support systems of Earth. Even as the magnitude of the Anthropocene challenge becomes clearer, in our everyday professional and social lives we continue to reproduce the status quo. We say business as usual is over, but business as usual remains very much the order of the day — perhaps with some “sustainable” trimmings at the margins. Shaping a Future
Shaping a Future We Want?
So what does the Anthropocene Transition mean for our communities of practice? Mitigating our dangerous disruption of the biosphere and adapting to profound changes we can no longer avoid are now urgent priorities for all humanity. But what we could call ‘Anthropocene thinking’ looks beyond mitigation and adaptation to consider the transformation of seriously dysfunctional human cultures. This is the central task of the Anthropocene Transition. It is a transition away from professional and social practices and cultural values fundamentally at odds with the continuing viability of our species and many others as well. Our ‘professional and social practices’ are all the activities, both paid and unpaid, in which specialised knowledge and skills are used to achieve socially and culturally valued outcomes. These activities are often collaborative in nature and usually involve some degree of critical reflection and collective learning. ‘Community of practice’ refers to the social and professional networks that link people involved in similar activities. It is through these activities and networks that most of us participate in both continuously reproducing and reinventing the institutions and values of our society. They are the ways in which we most directly contribute to shaping the future. History teaches us that periods of transition are characterised by great intellectual ferment and social conflict. But these times when the old order strains and fractures can also be ages of great creativity, of intellectual and spiritual breakthroughs, of new cultural syntheses. This is the challenge of the Anthropocene Transition — to equip our communities, our professions, and our institutions with new tools for thinking, doing and learning.
The objective of the Anthropocene Transition Network Inc is to inspire and inform new thinking and experimentation in the redesign our professional and social practices.
The main vehicles for the project in 2016 will be:
• Online platforms: The Age of Transition website and the Linkedin discussion group Preparing for the Anthropocene Transition.
These offer a transnational repository for relevant information, links to relevant research networks, and venues for discussion, analysis and the sharing of ideas.
• Networking between researchers and communities of practice.
The aim here is to link research networks with diverse areas of professional and social practice in order to stimulate, encourage, challenge and support new thinking and experimentation.
• Regular forums/workshops for network participants and an on-going series of roundtables, potentially in different institutional or community settings.
These gatherings will be the vehicle for co-learning, stretching our collective thinking, encouraging critical reflection, and building and maintaining networking processes.