Land and life in the Anthropocene: Landscape reform

How can we learn to live on earth in new ways? This is the challenge of the Anthropocene. We propose a novel 4Ps framework to investigate land–life dynamics, which, for the first time, will connect perspectives on human–nonhuman relations (Partners), property-making (Property), land regimes (Profit) and land–climate systems (Planet). We will draw on critical perspectives from both environmental humanities and agrarian studies, bringing together diverse traditions from human–nonhuman anthropology, geography, political ecology and economy, ecological economics and complex systems thinking in a unique interdisciplinary synthesis. Connecting land and life, this project will address four Anthropocene challenges – climate, biodiversity, food and infrastructure/investment – through four exemplar landscape cases in the Colombian Amazon, southern African savannas, Spanish Mediterranean plains and coastal Southeast Asia. The core team (Borras, Corbera, Scoones and Tsing) bring a range of expertise and experience that, together with eight postdoctoral and seven PhD researchers, can form the foundation for radically rethinking how we conceptualise land–life relations in the Anthropocene. We have designed a collaborative project organisation and process for working together that will promote synergistic conceptual and methodological breakthroughs, while building the capacity of researchers to engage with Anthropocene challenges through a novel framework. Engaging with policymakers, social movements and local communities, our public action work will in turn lead to practical approaches to ‘landscape reform’, where new ways of living in the Anthropocene are imagined and elaborated.