Over the last few years, I’ve gotten to know a determined cast of characters in academia aiming to identify paths to a good Anthropocene — Anthropocene being the closest thing there is to common shorthand for this span of human-dominated planetary history unfolding around us.
One such researcher is Elena M. Bennett, an ecosystem ecologist and geographer at McGill University. She’s the lead author of “Bright Spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene,” published in the October edition of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. The paper describes an effort to identify and propagate social and environmental projects that could reverse a centuries-long pattern in which human prosperity has come at the cost of substantial harm to ecosystems and excluded communities.
Bennett describes the work in a “Your Dot” contribution here:
Seeds of a Good Anthropocene
By Elena Bennett
It feels like we’re bombarded, almost daily, with negative visions of the future. That negativity about the future of the environment drags us down, makes it difficult for us to talk to our kids about the future and the environment, and generally threatens to keep us from doing the work we need to do to make the planet safer, better, healthier, and more just.
Scientists, in particular, are drawn to problems and problem solving, and so science often focuses on describing and understanding problems. This can leave society uninspired, with little sense of potential solutions and with no blueprint for the transformations required to solve the truly big and important problems we face. A few years ago, we helped gather together a group of scientists to try a different approach.
Supported by the international Future Earth research initiative, we initiated a project designed to solicit, explore, and develop a suite of alternative, plausible visions of Good Anthropocenes, positive visions of futures that are socially and ecologically desirable, just and sustainable. Unlike previous scientific efforts to build scenarios for future change, which typically rely on structures organized from the top down, we’re building these global pathways from the bottom up, by crowdsourcing a rich data base of “bright spots,” real places that demonstrate one or more elements of a positive future that might serve as seeds of a good Anthropocene. As William Gibson has said: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed yet.” Could we find examples of futures we wanted that were already in existence. And by studying how these examples came about, could we understand how to create further transformation?
Thus far, we’ve built a database of over 500 of these bright spots or seeds of good Anthropocenes. They include projects that link human health to healthy forests, such as the Health In Harmony project in Indonesia, or, closer to home, the Hudson River Valley’s Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture and its Young Farmers Conference. [See Dot Earth.]
The Health in Harmony project provides free or low cost health care in exchange for commitments to protect local forest, with funding provided by donors who aim to improve human and forest health. The Young Farmers Conference works by connecting young farmers to each other as well as other experts to help them overcome common hurdles in farming.
These bright spots can then be used to generate creative, detailed scenarios about transformations toward a better Anthropocene.
Existing global narratives about the future tend to be either dystopian visions of collapse and hardship, poorly articulated pathways to utopian fantasies, or stories that overestimate the power of conventional strategies to create real change. The resulting scenarios are very similar to the status quo but magically end in better futures. We aim to use the bright spots in groups to help build scenarios of futures that are at once realistic and positive.
We cannot build what we cannot imagine. Creating visions of positive futures is important work. And this is only the beginning- we hope to open up to a much wider visioning process. And of course, seeds of a better future won’t make a difference unless they can grow and be widely distributed. You can learn more by watching a video presentation on the project here: