Putting the Anthropocene into Practice: Methodological Implications

Abstract

The foundational premise of the Anthropocene, constant across the range of proposed definitions, is that the biophysical world is now profoundly social. This carries substantive methodological implications: If the environment is ecosocial, surely the way it is studied must be, too. Yet, as our bibliometric analysis demonstrates, the bulk of academic articles on the Anthropocene published between 2002 and 2019 focus on its conceptual implications rather than embracing its analytical consequences. Further, of the subset of articles that engage the Anthropocene empirically, fewer than a quarter employ interdisciplinary methods at even a cursory level. In response, we outline an alternative approach, critical physical geography (CPG), which enables researchers to pick up the methodological and conceptual gauntlet thrown down by the Anthropocene. Work in CPG begins from the premise that all biophysical questions are also social, but it goes beyond a simple mixed methods approach to emphasize the politics both of how knowledge is produced and of how it is taken up outside academia. We illustrate the utility of a CPG approach for analysis of the Anthropocene via succinct examples of research in critical dendrochronology, geomorphology, and remote sensing.