Anthropogenic Landscapes ground us in the Anthropocene. They connect us with the land and the ecologies we shape, inhabit, and make use of, as they stress how intimately we are creating the planet that is recursively creating us. A  fieldtrip to the former VEB Elektrokohle (People’s Enterprise Electro-coal) in Berlin-Lichtenberg helped us to observe, study, and reshape the shift from the larger context down to the local.

The biosphere has budded off a second global “sphere,” the technosphere, a technology-based system on which humans now depend—and which they find hard to control. Which tools are needed to ensure human survival in the technosphere?

The blurring of distinctions between Earth processes and human history requires us to be “transdisciplinary” and sometimes even “undisciplinary” – in order to combine the knowledge base and research capacities of a wide variety of stakeholders.

The Anthropocene lens acts as a “filter”: it emphasizes some elements of the socio-ecological spectrum even as it screens out certain others. But how exactly does the idea of the Anthropocene shape understandings and actions about human‒environmental relations? An awareness of these filters is essential for acting ethically and effectively in response to the challenges confronting us.

Political and military conflict and their environmental conditions seem to occupy opposite ends of the epistemic spectrum. We need to develop operative concepts able to work across this divide, establishing “field causalities,” a framework that allows us to connect individuals, environments, and artifices.

The Anthropocene remains peculiarly flat and colorless when it comes to concrete images, which are lacking cultural nuance and historical depth. New imaginaries and imaginations are needed to engage with alternative futures of infrastructure and anthropogenically altered landscapes.

Applying transdisciplinary systems models to problems such as climate change or global food supply gives us useful heuristics, while forcing us to think about complexity and witness nonlinear and counterintuitive outcomes.

Grasping the Anthropocene demands a sense of deceleration—we need “slow media” that by analogy with the slow food movement, engages with the complexities of a rapidly changing world by slowing down to the pace of a museum visit or engaging with physical or visual objects. 

The overexploitation of natural capital will lead to profound and unanticipated social and environmental changes, if we do not learn to “value nature”. But is the equivalence of natural and financial capital adequate? How can we identify the threshold between what can and cannot be  subjected to market rules?