Science for the Anthropocene - Learning to Fly

In recent episodes we have discussed the importance of the longstanding cultural ‘missing piece’ of a sense of sacredness and associated modes of thinking – analogical, allegorical, relational – to refit science and higher education as adequate for our new Anthropocene age. But can we simply return to and revive ‘religion’ so easily? Do we really want to? What about the quite evident down sides an...

Mainstream approaches to the unprecedented challenges of the Anthropocene and ‘global sustainability transition’ often focus on a geographical context of modern urban areas where new technologies will primarily be developed and used. But the front lines of the Anthropocene are frequently in regions of the world far from these shiny hi-tech centres; places, moreover, that may well already be burden...

The built environment accounts for some 40% of GHG emissions and profoundly shapes a further 25% from transport, while contributing around a third of unrecyclable waste. So transforming it through redesign is a key lever of environmental action. But redesigning it how and with what goals or inspirations? Does not design itself need to be fundamentally transformed, given that the existing built env...

We can theorize the problems of the metacrisis forever, but the only way forward is to get stuck in to the practical issues, getting our hands into the mud – proverbial and literal – of transformation.  In this wonderful, wide-ranging discussion, we explore precisely this predicament from a number of perspectives, guided along the way through exploration of the impressively diverse, and yet still...

How do we scale the transformative change we evidently need to respond to the unprecedented ecological challenges of our time? Global challenges, on tight timelines of necessary change, regarding profound destabilization of natural systems…: all this adds up to a clear need for rapid, scaled action in response, and, at one remove, for determined strategic prioritization of this agenda. Yet this, i...

This podcast explores how we need to change science so that it is part of the ‘solution’ not part of the ‘problem’ regarding our contemporary meta-crisis. But how much science offers fundamental reflections on the predicament of the meta-crisis itself and as a whole, rather than just crucial elements of it like climate change, biodiversity loss or the seeming crisis of democracy? One particular th...

Reforming the scholarly disciplines so that we are developing knowledge adequate for our age of seismic change is evidently not a project limited only to the ‘hard’, physical sciences. Indeed, according to Professor Jeffrey J. Kripal, unless we pay specific and particular attention to reviving the beleaguered humanities, such an objective will continually elude us. But the humanities are not just...

We need a new science for and in the Anthropocene – that is the whole premise of this podcast. But what if we’re trying to build that new science on broken and/or inadequate foundations? What if the whole massive global enterprise of ‘science and technology’ as it is today is marked by a fatal blind spot, which is not only hobbling the productivity of scientific advancement, but even distorting sc...

It’s been a while since our last episode (apologies!) and much has changed in the interim. In particular, the transition from 2024 to 2025 has witnessed a shift in political mood across much of the ‘Western’ world, with a liberating new sense of fearless truth-telling, including a striking return to serious concern with issues of a more-than-materialist metaphysics and the sacred. Variously termed...

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 c...

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 wri...

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 planetar...

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) sp...

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 e...

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 ep...

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 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...

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, pr...

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 s...

Poll after poll has shown for some years that a clear majority of the public are in favour of significant action on climate, and on other environmental crises, such as plastic pollution or biodiversity loss. Yet the politics of actual policy on these issues remains hotly contested and thus largely paralyzed, even in countries where outright denial of these problems is a fringe position. What we cl...

Bees - their decline and even 'colony collapses' - are surely amongst the most high-profile and concerning of our current ecological crises, so it was only a matter of time before we got to discuss them on this podcast. And, in episode 11, we are joined by a singular global authority on the issue, Prof Dave Goulson. Dave is not just a leading expert on bees, their behaviours and the disast...

How can China, the authoritarian technological superpower par excellence, have anything to teach us about an increasingly common rallying cry regarding climate action and responses to the Anthropocene, namely ‘just transition’? In Episode 10, we explore precisely this question and the fascinating and counter-intuitive answer that we do indeed have much to learn from studying China; in fact, that i...

What is meant by the increasingly common phrase ‘more-than-human’? In Episode 9, we dive into this question, which is potentially so important for a science for the Anthropocene, by talking about… the humble chicken.  We are joined for this discussion by the brilliant Catherine Oliver, a ‘beyond-human’ geographer and lecturer in climate change and society. Now bred in their billions (and modified)...

In Episode 8, we stick again with the subjective side of the crises of the Anthropocene, but turning to a more explicitly sociological approach. How do the ways in which we relate to the world shape the problems of climate change and the environment? Pretty fundamentally, according to our guest, the award-winning social theorist, Hartmut Rosa. Indeed, for Rosa, this question of ‘our relations to t...

In Episode 7 we are keeping with the theme of the mind and climate change, but turning directly to the insights available from the mind sciences: neuroscience and psychology. Discussing these issues, we are in the excellent company of Kris de Meyer, who is a neuroscientist and Director of University College London’s Climate Action Unit. In this role, Kris has led numerous important collaborations...