The idea of coupled socio-ecological systems was presented, along with a challenge to the notions of stasis and progressive change as normal. The authors’ trick, if I can call it that, was to link then relatively new ideas about ontology to equally new ideas about environmental policy and pitch them as globally (not just regionally or locally) relevant. Leading scientific researchers authored it: the article’s brevity was thus not to be taken as a sign that it could somehow be discounted. The article is not cluttered with caveats and qualifications. Second, the article makes a plenary argument by presenting a number of important propositions and concepts in a coherent, succinct and confident way. First, behind it sits a substantial report, prepared for the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg (Folke et al. Upon a closer reading, it’s quickly evident why. Yet its citation impact is remarkably high, at over 3600 citations in Google Scholar. The text proper is less than 2 pages (4 with images, abstract and 2 boxes). At first reading, ‘Resilience and sustainable development: building adaptive capacity in a world of transformations’ (Folke 2002) is a rather slight contribution.
However, as we shall see, they were important precursors to the two influential papers that did. The first two articles did not mention the Anthropocene. In future, Ambio can help to foster this productive dissonance by loosening its own intellectual parameters while maintaining its high standards of scholarship. Looking ahead, dissonant forms of knowledge and argument about Earth present and future will be key to forging a ‘good Anthropocene’. The papers assessed in this commentary have, albeit unintentionally, helped inspire this de- and reframing in wider social science, the humanities and the arts. diverse social values, needs and wants, which imply alternate courses of possible future action). A scientific framing of the Anthropocene needs to be deframed and then reframed in terms of what science misses (e.g. However, for all their merits, the papers form part of a wider scientific discourse that threatens to colonise the imagination of Earth present and future. The four Ambio papers evaluated here helped to both build the roof and the family. The concept serves as a metaphorical ‘roof’ that allows a family of geoscientific terms to reside together harmoniously in the same space. Epochal and topically encompassing, the concept has served to focus academic and political attention on the extraordinary scale, scope and magnitude of the human impact on the Earth. Publishing in Ambio and elsewhere, geoscientists distributed across several disciplines have both created and substantiated the Anthropocene concept since the turn of the millennium.
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