It is rare to hear environmental scientists sounding positive about the future. But that's exactly what's happening now with an international group of researchers. Because over the past two years, they have been gathering examples of positive initiatives of various kinds from communities around the world. They believe that there are aspects of these projects that can be used either alone, or in combination with one another to build a better, more sustainable future.
The researchers have analysed 100 of the more than 500 projects that have been contributed to the website they have created, Good Anthropocene. As a result, they have identified some of the overarching trends in community initiatives that they believe can potentially play a role in creating a future that is both more just and more sustainable.
The researchers pulled out six main overarching themes from the projects that were submitted. They are:
"I'm excited about this project because it represents a big shift for environmental scientists to start looking at things positively," says Elena Bennett, who teaches at McGill's School of the Environment and is the lead author on a paper on the subject published today. "As scientists, we tend to be very focussed on all the problems, so to look at examples of the sustainable solutions that people are coming up with - and to move towards asking, 'what do the solutions have in common' is a big change."
Bennett adds, "This is also a move away from the typical academic perspective of looking at things in a top-down way, where we the scientists determine all the definitions. We have encouraged people who are involved in the projects to define what makes a project 'good', partly because we didn't want to be driven only by our Northern European or North American sensibilities. We wanted to see a variety of ideas about what people want from the future."
The researchers invite those who are involved with sustainability projects of various kinds around the world to go to the Seeds of a Good Anthropocene website and contribute them.
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About Seeds of a Good Anthropocene: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.1309/abstract;jsessionid=3EB343DC33A4C617A3CAFD6861C7B3F7.f01t04
"Seeds of a Good Anthropocene" is a collaboration led by McGill University in Canada, the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden, and the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition (CST) at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. It forms part of the initiative "Bright Spots - Seeds of a Good Anthropocene," a FutureEarth funded project.
This research was supported by Future Earth, The Swedish Research Council Formas, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden; Program on Ecosystem Change and Society, ecoSERVICES, the SwedBio programme and the Natural Sciences and Research Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC).
To read "Bright spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene," by Elena Bennett et al, Frontiers in Ecology , published online October 05, 2016. doi: 10.1002/fee.1309
Contacts:
Elena Bennett, McGill University, Dept. of Natural Resource Sciences and School of the Environment,
Elena.Bennett@mcgill.ca
Katherine Gombay, McGill University, Media Relations
katherine.gombay@mcgill.ca , 514-398-2189
http://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/
http://twitter.com/McGilluMedia
Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment