The Newcastle Approach
Newcastle upon Tyne was at the vanguard of Victorian Age change – it is arguable that the city formed the epicentre of the global carbon economy. This challenges us with a specific responsibility to think about the history of anthropogenic change of the biosphere. At Newcastle University we take the start of the ‘Great Acceleration’ in 1950 to indicate the commencement proper of the Anthropocene epoch, but this epochal marker should be seen within the longer trajectory of major systemic changes such as the Industrial Revolution, the merging of the Eurasian and American biota around 1500 and the development of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution. We use the Anthropocene concept as an intellectual lens through which to view the future. In a world of over 7 billion humans, we contend there is no one ‘Anthropocene’; rather any number of ‘Anthropocenes’ - depending on an individual’s status, vulnerability, livelihood aspiration and optimism or pessimism in the future.
...at Newcastle brings together natural scientists, humanists, social scientists, artists, policy makers, and community organisers to create a collegiate transdisciplinary environment where specialists can speak across disciplinary and professional boundaries and where the methods and scholarship of each can inform and inspire others.
Together we aim to address four vital projects:
Addressing global societal challenges, our Anthropocene work aims to transform dominant modes of thinking, not just within researcher communities, but also among the general public, policy-makers, non-governmental agencies, and industry and the media. This is known as ‘Global Systems Science’, where our approach is to integrate knowledge from the natural, engineering and social sciences and apply it to real-life situations. In this way we can begin to address major challenges that are beyond the remit of any one traditional discipline.
Furthermore, we believe locally-focused or indigenous knowledge has a significant role to play in environmental management and governance. Yet there is still a tendency by the scientific community to assimilate or ‘fit’ local-scale ecological knowledge within Western world-views of managing nature. Typically though, communities possess the expertise and local knowledge to resolve their own problems and implement their own solutions. Key is finding ways to enable this to happen. Ultimately the aim must be to ensure solutions are equitable, good for the environment, self-reliant and not dependent on long term external support. Solutions should be built on collective values and have a strong underpinning of justice and governance. Our approaches emphasize community-owned approaches so that community members can monitor for themselves the quality, impact and outcomes of initiatives. Previous work under these auspices has led to the Living Delta Research Hub
‘Holocene’ thinking was about ‘experts’ and policymakers developing and holding information within a hierarchical relationship, exacerbating divisions between specialist fields of knowledge and raising barriers between the academic disciplines, especially between the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. By privileging the ‘expert’ over the ‘non-expert’ and favouring an overly narrow approach 'observe, react, observe’, traditional ways of dealing with environmental and societal issues were to design solutions FOR people without engaging WITH people. Therefore, we seek to co-create knowledge and make information and datasets as widely accessible and understandable to as wide a sector of society as possible..