The compounding societal and environmental crises of the Anthropocene necessitate a more holistic, critical and systems understanding of our relationship to and with the earth surface. We are now aware that every landscape is touched by Man, a mosaic of recorded artifacts of historical human activity. In order to address the braided realities of this age, geomorphologists need to embrace diverse ways of knowing, most especially indigenous, local and place-based knowledges of landscapes and our role in shaping them. We need to examine how using a singular, objective standpoint in the scientific process privileges determinism over other ways of seeing and being.
In a recent commentary in Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, I argue that the discipline of geomorphology as it is commonly practiced in the Global North is ill-suited to address the crises of the Anthropocene. In order to reorient the discipline towards a more ethical and societally-relevant role, we need to seek and integrate place-based and situated perspectives and include global, local, and complex frameworks of inquiry into the scientific work of understanding the landscapes we are working in, particularly as so many of the communities most impacted by these changing landscapes are the least involved in guiding our scientific efforts and outcomes.
