News > Bright spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene

A new paper by Elena Bennett and colleagues challenges dystopian future scenarios with "bright spots"

Bright spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene, published earlier this month in Frontiers of Ecology and the Environment, explores how examples of positive change in future scenarios, borrowed from existing real-world initiatives, can help us to understand both what people want from a better future and the processes needed to get there.

The paper draws on examples of positive change from around the world that have been collected in an online "seed" database that began as part of the Future Earth project Good Anthropocenes http://goodanthropocenes.net.

The seeds represent a wide range of practices around the world that could help accelerate pathways of transformative change. Each seed offers an example of the types of bottom-up change needed to move towards more sustainable futures.

Elena Bennet spoke of the seeds project in a 5-minute talk she gave this past summer at the World Economic Forum meeting in Tianjin:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BwUbJV3ovg&list=PL7m903CwFUgnlMHVNEQH6kj7RKWvQ8iif&index=3

Citation: Bennett et al 2016 Bright spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene. Front Ecol Environ 2016; 14(8): 441-448, doi:10.1002/fee.1309