Our Approach

A historical complex of interactions generating planetary transformations
We understand the Anthropocene as the historical complex of human interactions with other species and environments that are generating planetary transformations at multiple levels, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, oceans, and living organisms. The idea of the Anthropocene directs us to consider how social, political, economic and destructive environmental changes are fundamentally entangled. The Anthropocene is the name for a proposed geological epoch, but it also marks a series of emergencies and unpredictable events.

Rethinking our disciplines and forms of knowledge
We believe that we need a wide range of forms of knowledge to address these multifaceted questions raised by the idea of Anthropocene. Recognizing the complementary insights that different disciplines bring, the Anthropocene questions the academy’s usual division of labour between the social and natural sciences. It also raises profound questions about the proper valuing of indigenous knowledge and non-scientific and artistic forms of practice. We are interested both in the challenges that the Anthropocene sets academic disciplines as well as how research and practice challenges the concept of the Anthropocene. UCL Anthropocene is a workshop for rethinking our disciplines, and their constitutive relations in response to a concrete and urgent set of questions.

Anthropogenic effects cross species and time
Comprehending the Anthropocene involves studying  past climates and historical change over the long-term. Accounts of the Anthropocene need to address the ‘great acceleration’ of environmental change of the past fifty years, but must be equally concerned with longer histories of capitalism and industrialization, colonialism and imperialism, collective violence and resource extraction. Moreover, as COVID-19 reminds us, the organic and the ecological matters as much as the geological and the social; the agency of the non-human as much as the human.

Accounts of the Anthropocene should not be based on a sense of human exceptionalism. Longstanding and local multispecies relationships, transformations in agricultural production, industrial and urban landscapes and infrastructure are all aspects the Anthropocene. Through all of this we are conscious of the unequal and uneven ways in which anthropogenic effects have been generated and experienced, from the deep past and into the present day.

Consequences and implications of being human on a damage planet
The Anthropocene’s most intractable problems arise from particular historical ways of being human. Adapting to conditions on a damaged planet will necessarily involve cultural, societal, political and psychological invention, alongside the formulation of evidence-based environmental policies. The Anthropocene raises questions of environmental and social justice, of responsibility and meaning, together with the need to develop new technologies and governance mechanisms.