Science for the Anthropocene - Learning to Fly

A key challenge for science in – and ‘for’ – the Anthropocene hangs on the extraordinary influence and authority that scientific knowledge now has in shaping public decision-making. Of course, science is needed to develop constructive and adaptive responses to many of the challenges of the Anthropocene. But it is also the case that it is only through science that we can even identify many of the challenges we now need to address, AND that science has been instrumental in CREATING many of those challenges in the first place. In short, then, science and its claims to definitive ‘knowledge’ are now inseparably woven into human lives and societal decisions affecting us all. An inescapable outcome of this, though, is that science now needs to be explicitly engaged with the questions of justice to which it gives rise in wielding that authority; regarding, say, public health guidance, environmental issues or the introduction of new technologies. And this gives rise to a novel form of justice: epistemic justice. In Episode 22, we discuss this crucial agenda with leading expert on question of justice and scientific expertise, Professor Gwen Ottinger. Drawing on her extensive experience working for participatory processes in environmental justice campaigns that have depended on authoritative scientific claims (e.g. to prove harm), Gwen argues that there are deep-seated problems afflicting current relations between science and society, regarding a ‘moral brokenness’ manifest in a ‘scientific chauvinism’ that is the antithesis of epistemic justice.  Join us for a profound exploration of this key challenge for science today, in which we explore crucial ideas of epistemic and reparative justice, ‘careful knowing’, ‘fact-shaming’ and how scientific credentialism is the last remaining ‘acceptable’ snobbery… and, crucially, what

Much of the ‘science for the Anthropocene’ that we explore on this podcast focuses on the ‘cutting-edge’ of research and new knowledge. But there is another whole side to science that merits our concerted attention: education, or the transmission of hard-earned knowledge and ways of thinking from generation to generation. Our guest in this bumper summer episode, Dr Zachary Stein, has literally written the book on this agenda of ‘Education for the Anthropocene’, and much else besides. Discussing his hugely insightful work, we unpack how a system and vision of education – or a ‘paideia’ – is actually the very core of a flourishing civilisation… and how profoundly and urgently we need to attend to and revive ours; not only in order to meet the unprecedented complex challenges of our time, but also even just to avoid a ratchet in the other direction, towards accelerating civilisational implosion. Join us for a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation in which we explore the centrality of education, the (dark and techno-fetishist) default futures of education continuing along existing trajectories, what the sciences of learning have told us about the stages of learning and how we need to revamp our education systems, the (seemingly counter-cultural) importance of ‘teacherly authority’, the crisis of elite higher education, the ‘growth to goodness’ fallacy and much more.

In Episode 20, we continue with our theme of the planetary boundaries (PB), turning to perhaps the most perplexing of them: so-called ‘novel entities’, or the release of things that are ‘new’ into the environment, including chemical pollution, but also new life-forms, pharmaceuticals, radioactivity or nano-particles. As the notorious case of CFCs and the Ozone layer has shown (eliciting a planetary boundary all of its own!), the mass release and accumulation of such novel entities can have negative, and potentially irreversible, global impacts that take us entirely by surprise. Yet we continue the relentless development and release of ever more, and ever more complex, chemicals and technological entities. It is thus little surprise that the latest assessment of the planetary boundaries (as discussed in Episode 19) concludes that we are well outside the ‘guardrail’ for this issue. But the current state of play is, arguably, the least of our worries. More troubling is a seemingly inescapable conundrum regarding the very epistemic predicament to which the novel entities PB awakens us: namely that this is problem of fundamental ignorance and with the highest of stakes. To unpack this crucial and unprecedented challenge for science and environmental policy, we are delighted to be joined by two of the key scientists who have identified, formulated and explored this challenge and what we can do about it: Professors Cynthia De Wit and Matthew MacLeod. Across a wide-ranging discussion, we go into the challenges of doing science on issues characterised, by definition, by irreducible ignorance; the key issue of time, and hence the parallel challenges of rate of release and rate of (effective regulatory) understanding; how the ‘novel entities’ PB reframes and reinforces the precautionary principle; and much more…

The new planetary condition summarized as the 'Anthropocene’ is very much NOT limited only to the (still undeniably crucial) issue of climate. But how can science offer of more definitive characterisation? One of the most high-profile answers today to this key question is the emergent framework of the ‘planetary boundaries’, which clearly enumerate 9 (or 11, depending on how you count them) specific planetary-scale processes that are crucial to maintaining the extraordinarily stable conditions on Earth that have enabled the take-off of human civilisation over the last ten thousand years or so – hence the only conditions we have known as a species as hospitable to such human flourishing. First devised and published in 2009, and with several highly-cited updates since then, the good news that we have some level of understanding of these key processes is quickly matched by the bad news regarding the current state of the majority of them due to (ongoing, even accelerating) human impacts. To discuss this crucial framework, how it is illuminating our current predicament and how it is changing science itself, in Episode 19 we are joined by the one of the trio of world-leading scholars who conceived it, Katherine Richardson. Drawing on Katherine’s expertise on the crucial issue of the oceans regarding a number of these planetary boundaries, including especially phytoplankton’s impact on both ocean acidification/climate control and marine biodiversity, we also discuss the mind-bending challenges of understanding across scales as divergent as these vast watery worlds and the microscopic lifeforms that shape their planetary impacts.

A science FOR and IN the Anthropocene needs a fundamental shift of orientation towards prioritizing the cultivation of situated, strategic, ethical wisdom, or ‘phronesis’ – or so we argue (and have argued in previous episodes) in this podcast. But what does this rather abstract and programmatic statement mean? What is phronesis, in practice? And where, or which institutions of science and higher education, are going to support that cultivation? In Episode 18, we discuss these key questions with Ioan Fazey, Professor of the Social Dimensions of Environment and Change at York University, UK and a teacher of shamanic practices. In particular we explore the potential – and, conversely, the current inadequacies – of seemingly the pre-eminent institution of ‘science’ in our current culture: the modern university. Identifying a crisis in the university across three over-lapping dimensions of increasing levels of abstraction – the ‘manifest’, the ‘conceptual’ and the ‘existential’ – we unpack the likely futures of science and the university, the prospects of the latter changing without major disruption, and how coming ‘back to our senses’ is going to be a key element of constructing better ways forward, including for and within science.

Amongst the many environmental challenges of the Anthropocene age, air quality is exemplary in numerous ways. Air pollution is the no.1 environmental public health issue globally, causing approximately 7 million early deaths annually, yet it remains curiously neglected.  As such it is something of an ‘invisible killer’, to quote the title of the book by Dr Gary Fuller, one of our guests in this episode, alongside Dr Suzanne Bartington, both of whom are UK Clean Air Champions. Part of the problem here is the sheer complexity of air quality issues: the number and diversity of pollutants and their chemical interactions; their geographical distribution, across scales and both outdoor and indoor, affecting diverse demographics and socio-economic inequalities; and the way in which almost every aspect of mundane everyday life likely has some impact on air quality. Join us for a wide-ranging discussion exploring what it is about the air specifically that shapes this relative neglect; how the politics and public response to air quality as an issue has undergone a complete reversal and sudden polarization in recent years; how it is better framed as a public health, rather than environmental, issue; and what we know about the effectiveness, and remaining gaps, in policy responses.

This podcast is about how we can and must transform science so that it becomes fit for purpose in tackling the complex, unprecedented and even existential challenges of the ‘Anthropocene’ – ‘science FOR the Anthropocene’, not just of or about it.  But what if we need to go one step further in our understanding of the relationship between science and our new planetary condition in order to rise to the challenge? What if science in many respects IS the Anthropocene, hence ‘science AS the Anthropocene’?  This is the bold and persuasive thesis of eminent historian of science, Professor Jürgen Renn, Director the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, in his excellent recent book “The Evolution of Knowledge, Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene” (2020, Princeton UP).  In this rich volume, which is both sweeping in its argument and compendious in its historical detail, Renn sets out how human knowledge has evolved over history up to the present, with a specific form of knowledge – i.e. modern science – emerging along the way: first, as a relatively peripheral way of knowing but then, in recent centuries, taking off in self-propelling feedback loops with the transformation of society and planet in ways that have now placed it at the very heart of our current condition as a species. Join us to understand the ‘ergosphere’, the emergence of ‘epistemic evolution’, the need for a new ‘epistemic web’, and how all this hangs on issues of ‘knowledge economy’ (and what that seemingly familiar phrase does and does not mean).  

The relation between science and politics, knowledge and power, may sound like an arcane and abstract issue, a concern for eggheads and wonks. But, as events across many university campuses at the tail end of 2023 showed, it is very far being a dry and specialist issue. Rather how these two major elements of modern society are understood to be related – not least by society’s custodians of higher learning – directly shapes such central matters as the parameters of acceptable speech and action in public, and even what specifically is to be celebrated or condemned. Responding to the problems of the Anthropocene, which are the focus of this podcast, will also need careful navigation through the parallel and inseparable challenges of potential breakdowns in civilisation; and this will not be possible if science itself is a lead protagonist in the latter. Recorded in December 2023, in episode 15 we pick up these key issues for a Science for the Anthropocene (S4A); or rather, we pick them up again and specifically, in order to clarify and distinguish the argument underpinning this podcast

Climate change is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only unprecedented ecological challenge we are facing in the 21st century.  Another key arena, intimately associated with the ongoing assault on global biodiversity, is that of toxicity and pollution. In episode 14, we discuss these key issues with Professor Alice Mah of Glasgow University by zeroing in on a key, but much overlooked, protagonist

Do we only have 100 (or 60… or even just 30!) harvests left, as now many reports and media headlines have asserted? Our guest for Episode 13 of Learning to Fly, Professor Jess Davies, responded to this terrifying claim by deciding to knuckle down and see what scientific corroboration it has. As such, it is also a perfect example of the kind of high-impact interdisciplinary and myth-busting work she and her colleagues are now doing on numerous questions regarding the key issues of futures of food and agricultural systems. Join us for illuminating discussion not just about some key issues of the sustainability and resilience of our food systems – ranging from soil and its degradation, to urban farming –; but also about the key role for science (i.e. science FOR and in the Anthropocene) of removing obstructions to skilful practical responses to current problems, in terms of both plugging knowledge gaps and puncturing mistaken received wisdoms, and hence in deliberately and concertedly reaching out to publics, not just experts, in circulating its findings.