Environment, society and sustainability: The transdisciplinary exigency for a desirable anthropocene

Abstract

The chapter places the transdisciplinary exigencies for coupled socio-ecological understandings towards sustained interventions by addressing the complex interface between environment, society and sustainability. This book chapter places the Anthropocene as both the crisis and the opportune moment to forge the transformative context to advance cross-disciplinary agendas and pursuits, fleshing out why and how the coupled human-nature or socio-natural analytic is crucial in fostering co-production of knowledge through multi-stakeholder engagement. Painted with broad temporal strokes, the chapter contextualizes 'metabolic rift' separating nature with society followed by the efflorescence of interdisciplinary ecological frameworks emphasizing on socio-ecological entanglements. The chapter also uses first-hand empirical research lessons to showcase integrational-implementation possibilities across situated multi-layered understandings of specific socioecological settings, demonstrating that discussions surrounding 'sustainability' remain fallaciously redundant unless pluriversal possibilities are explored and encountered at to transcend transdisciplinarity from a tool of analysis and application to 'a way of being' (Rigolot 2020).