Science for the Anthropocene - Learning to Fly

In Episode 3 we welcome our first guests on the podcast from the natural sciences – Professor Phil Haygarth, Professor Paul Withers, Dr Kirsty Forber and Dr Shane Rothwell – to discuss the key challenge for our food system of phosphorus. Phosphorus is an essential building block of life, and so an essential nutrient in our food and agriculture.  In the last 80 years or so, massive growth of mineral phosphorus in farming has been key to the boom in food production. But too much phosphorus flowing through the rural and natural environment also has profoundly negative environmental impacts, not least for water, on which human and non-human life also utterly depends. And the leaching of phosphorus into rivers, lakes and increasingly oceans sets up a one-way pipeline that is fast depleting this essential but finite resource. With this fantastic panel, we discuss these serious challenges, what is, is not and could be done about them, and all the challenges to the very institutions of contemporary science this brings to light.

Our first guests on the podcast are Lancaster University professors Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski, discussing their fantastic new book 'Planetary Social Thought - The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences' (Polity, 2021). In a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion, we cover: the 'socialization' of the Anthropocene and the converse movement of 'geologizing' social science; a new basis to bring natural and social science together and into new conversation; how taking the planet seriously rewrites familiar narratives of (Western) modernity, colonization and, indeed, contemporary decolonization; the basis of the capacity of human reinvention in the planet's multiplicity and its capacity for transformation; and, of course, the adequacy (or not) of social science for the age of the Anthropocene; and much more... 

Welcome to 'Learning to Fly' - the podcast for 'Science for the Anthropocene' (S4A) at Lancaster Environment Centre (LEC) at Lancaster University, UK.

In this first episode, David Tyfield, Professor of Sustainable Transitions and Political Economy and leader of the S4A research theme at LEC, sets the scene for future episodes, by offering an initial overview to the idea of a 'Science for the Anthropocene', and the argument for its importance and urgency.  This hinges on the imperative of a turn towards 'phronesis', or situated practical wisdom, as the paramount goal and form of skilful judgement that science needs to be actively cultivating if it is to rise to the unprecedented challenges posed by the Anthropocene.  David explores phronesis in several dimensions, and the relevance of all of these to a reorganization and expansion of what science is and what science is actually done. 

In future episodes, David will be in conversation with leading thinkers, from across the world and across the sciences, both natural and social, to explore specific aspects of 'Science for the Anthropocene'.