What is the Anthropocene? How can we make it Awesome?
Futerra has a new mission, but what does that actually mean?
For decades Futerra has been proud of our previous mission ‘to make sustainable development so desirable that it becomes normal’. That mission was written into our constitutional documents as a business and was emblazoned on every presentation and even a few t-shirts.
Once, when an external facilitator asked a gathering of Futerrans if they knew the company purpose, he stumbled backwards as everyone repeated it, word perfect and in unison.
Mission matters in Futerra
Which is why changing our mission, our very reason for existence, hasn’t been a small undertaking.
For starters, if it ain’t broke, why fix it? Our previous mission has motivated us for years, and the need to make sustainability desirable remains, so why this change?
Firstly, our old mission now has thousands of adherents and other organisations diligently, and successfully, pursuing it. Even though, when we first launched it, the idea of sustainability being ‘desirable’ was challenging for many. Futerra has always sought to push the edge of sustainability thinking, defying accepted paradigms and driving ourselves to think ‘what does the world need next’. We’re incredibly grateful that our previous mission is now so mainstream, it no longer needs Futerra to champion it.
What does need championing, desperately, is the fluttering and pale flame of hope that tomorrow could be better than today.
We believe that little flame of hope still lives, and it flutters within what is called the ‘anthropocene’.
Suggested by biologist Eugene Stormer and chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000, the Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.
Simply put, we humans are having such an impact on the planet it will be visible in the rock for millennia to come. And many people think that’s a really bad thing.
You might be surprised, considering our new mission, that Futerra agrees. In many ways the anthropocene is disastrous for many humans and the rest of life on earth right now. For many people, it seems like we’re heading to apocalypse. As our global survey in partnership with Ipsos Mori revealed, 1 in 5 young people are now fatalistic about our chances of solving climate change. The World Economic Forum sites ‘youth disillusionment’ and fear about the future as a top blindspot for leaders worldwide. The Covid pandemic has let to rising inequality and growing mental health problems as everyone struggles with what tomorrow might hold.
This age of humans could be the last age of life on earth as we know it.
The key word there being…‘could’.
Because some climate emergency-ecosystem collapse-war-apocalypse is not inevitable. We human beings made all those problems so we can solve them.
Not by doing a little bit better, or trying to just mitigate the worst, negotiate with chemistry or uphold colonial and exploitative power structures despite their failure.
Tinkering isn’t going to cut it. Only but demanding awesome can we avoid the utterly awful.
At Futerra we will only accept all the billions of healthy, educated and free human beings thriving in a recovered natural world. That is the minimum of what an awesome anthropocene should deliver.
We thought about the semantics of our new mission very carefully. It could be argued that ‘make the anthropocene awesome’ is just ‘make a better future’ written in a way you can’t ignore or mildly nod too. Anthropocene is esoteric and scientific, awesome is bold, colloquial and kitsch, and out together the make for a mission with guts and glory built in.
In our new Awesome Anthropocene Goals we set out, with extensive evidence and a new theory of change, exactly what our mission means.
There’s one final thing to know about our mission – that it’s an invitation.
It must be, because while Futerra intends to contribute everything we are to fulfilling it, we are only a few of the solutionists needed to reach that goal.
Just like our previous mission is now owned by many and mainstream, we hope our new mission will act as ignition for wider movements.
We have set ourselves a mission that is impossible to achieve alone.
So please join us, or take our mission as your own, share it, challenge it and think about how to make your own awesome impact on the anthropocene.
