Natural history in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Numerous ecologists have recently affirmed the vital role of field-based natural history for maintaining first-hand experience and knowledge of nature. These accounts are problematic, however, because they equate natural history with scientific study and assume a relatively stable Holocene context. The Anthropocene jettisons these and other assumptions about who naturalists are, the context in which they operate, and what they bring to society. In response, we synthesize and extend prior arguments to propose six ways for naturalists to adapt to an Anthropocene context: expanding the nature studied; questioning assumptions about data collection; consciously engaging with emotions; ensuring justice, equity, and diversity; critically navigating new technologies; and enlarging the ethical envelope. Through these practices, a sizable community of naturalists may emerge with a distinctive role in drawing attention to nature in peril.

The practice of natural history, “the observational study of organisms in their environment (Barrows et al. 2016),” has fallen in and out of favor over the past few centuries. By the early 19th century, it became professionalized within the natural sciences (Farber 2000). The resultant discipline of ecology—dubbed by Elton (1927) in one of the first textbooks in this field as “scientific natural history”—initially embraced naturalists’ skills and perspectives but over time emphasized generalization, theory, and modeling over observation (Dayton 2003, Fleischner 2005). This not only segregated amateur naturalists but also led to the bemoaned decline of natural history within ecology (e.g., Noss 1996).

Over the past several decades, though, there have been multiple affirmations of observational natural history’s centrality for understanding nature (e.g., Bartholomew 1986, Greene 2005, Sagarin and Pauchard 2012, King and Achiam 2017, Nanglu et al. 2023). Such affirmations may have helped to stem the tide, yet there remain sizeable challenges to prioritizing natural history. For instance, data-driven modeling and large grants embracing “distant-view technologies” continue to be favored over field-based inquiry (Anderson et al. 2021, Engel et al. 2021). Also, urbanization and extensive usage of smartphones and personal computers have eroded direct engagement with natural areas and beings (Truong and Clayton 2020, Beery et al. 2023). Several recent papers have directly addressed such technologies, though not so much critiquing or complicating their use but arguing that natural history must prioritize them (Tewksbury et al. 2014, Tosa et al. 2021, Nanglu et al. 2023).

Although we support these efforts to reinvigorate natural history through new technologies, we argue that contemporary environmental troubles are not merely technological but socio-ecological (Soga and Gaston 2025). Specifically, the digitization of nature contributes to and is symptomatic of the large-scale changes of the Anthropocene (Corlett 2015, Nichols and Gogineni 2020). Although geologists have not formally recognized the Anthropocene, it is widely understood that human-based activities, specifically those in industrialized nations, are having planetary-level impacts (Witze 2024). The planet is undergoing a “qualitative leap from disturbance of ecosystems to disruption of the Earth System” (Hamilton 2017), and natural history and its practitioners must respond accordingly.

How might this contemporary context affect natural history and naturalists? In light of multifarious changes and building on calls to renew natural history, we propose six considerations that are prompted by scholarly discourse about the Anthropocene across disciplines. We recognize that many naturalists are already working along the lines of one or more of these considerations (e.g., Fleischner 2011, Kimmerer 2015), yet in the context of this section, Professional Biologist, we highlight what we believe should become more mainstream, especially in scientific natural history. These reflections stem from our professional and personal experience in this domain. We identify as white men, and we vary in age; two of us are lifelong naturalists and have published as ecologists, and we have all conducted social scientific research concerning people’s relationships to nature. We hope to contribute to a discussion that includes diverse perspectives that can augment and improve our reflections (e.g., Schiebinger 2004, Miriti et al. 2022).

Expand the nature we study

Ecologists and other environmental scientists have long studied nature in contradistinction to people. However, social scientists and humanities scholars have forcefully argued that this distinction is no longer valid in the Anthropocene, if it ever was (e.g., figure 1; Chakrabarty 2009, Descola 2013, Lövbrand et al. 2015, Haraway 2016). First, humanity’s effects on the biosphere date back millennia, and industrial society’s impacts will endure far into the future. Though there remain places that are wilder than others, there are no longer places that have not been influenced to some degree by people (Ellis 2021). Second, agency has previously been ascribed only to humans; in the Anthropocene, however, nature increasingly reasserts itself as an active agent rather than a passive backdrop through fires, floods, hurricanes, and the like (Rickards 2015, Hamilton 2017).

Figure 1.

Naturalists must revisit assumptions about a separation between nature and culture, and extend their interest to less spectacular forms of nature. This image shows the microhabitats created by small-scale food production in an allotment in Aberdeen, Scotland, where the use of ground-covering plastic promotes the invasive New Zealand flatworm, a specialist predator of earthworms. Credit: RvdW.

What will it mean, then, for naturalists to study nature in the context of so much change? Primarily, it will be increasingly fruitless to attempt to isolate humans from nature (Linell et al. 2015). The ideal of a “natural baseline,” for example, will make less sense because observed species and patterns will bear the imprint of humanity in all manner of ways (even though we warn against using this claim disingenuously to further nature’s destruction). In practice, naturalists could engage more attentively with complex hybrids of nature and culture, which they formerly tended to ignore, such as urban, industrial, and agrarian spaces, including small green spaces, gardens, parks, brownfields, and other local bastions of biodiversity (Tsing 2015, Gan et al. 2018, Teixeira and Fernandes 2020). We acknowledge increasing attention to novel systems (e.g., Higgs 2017), a trend that we endorse. Urban ecology is also an established discipline (McPhearson et al. 2016), yet the study of places where most of the world’s people live and work remains underrepresented (Martin et al. 2012, Gadsden et al. 2023). By redressing such issues, natural history can contribute to ongoing debates about green space and sustainable urban and agricultural development (Ruck et al. 2024).

Natural history will also need to address the global effects that modern economies cause on natural processes and other species located in the “wild.” The ongoing debate about invasive species is informative here. These species undoubtedly contribute to environmental change in many instances (IPBES 2023), but a fundamental question is how to conceptualize this change (Boltovskoy et al. 2018). Some consider it unnatural because people have introduced species to new places, whereas for others it is natural because people and their actions are embedded within and part of nature. Put another way, invasive species could be seen as merely “passengers” of large-scale global changes rather than “drivers” of change (Macdougall and Turkington 2005). Rather than excluding newcomers and opportunists, we could ask about the ecological role of these species and how we can live with them given they can apparently live with us (Sax et al. 2022). We thus encourage those studying natural history to carefully consider how to observe nature in a manner that does not separate nature and society so dualistically.

Value natural history’s social significance beyond data collection

As natural history declined in ecology in the 20th century, observational field study (and its associated species knowledge) largely moved outside of academia to be conducted by volunteers. Yet science continues to shape these volunteers’ practices, particularly in its emphasis on data acquisition (Lundquist et al. 2025). Although data collection is crucial (e.g., Tewksbury et al. 2014) and often reflects deep care for the species concerned and presumes a positive impact (Verploegen et al. 2024), it rests upon assumptions that are troublesome in the current era. First, it assumes that knowledge gained through data accrual will somehow help to resolve environmental issues, but we know that they are “wicked” and cannot be resolved merely through increased understanding (Sarewitz 2004, Defries and Nagendra 2017, Head 2022). Second, it assumes that more data is required to document what is happening and thereby effect change, but arguably we as humans already know enough—and simply do not act on it (e.g., Buxton et al. 2021).

Data gathering is critical for the scientific study of nature, but we suggest that overly focusing on it can impoverish natural history’s potential. Engagement in natural history brings myriad benefits for human health and well-being, both through time in nature and through building community (with other humans and beyond). Given their in-depth knowledge and strong relationship with nature, naturalists are well-placed to advocate for human–nature relationships, a point made long ago by Aldo Leopold. They can embrace positive action and stand up for nature in concrete terms, through varied forms of care and environmental citizenship such as species protection, habitat creation, and active resistance to degradation (Jørgensen and Jørgensen 2021, Peterson et al. 2025). There are of course many examples where naturalists are already going beyond quantification (Barrow 2009, Merenlender et al. 2016, Stewart et al. 2017, Cherry 2019), and learning from them will help natural history to further increase its societal relevance.

Consider two examples, both of which concern the protection of nesting birds by volunteers. In southern Ontario, Canada, volunteers spend thousands of hours conducting public outreach and carefully monitoring and protecting the nests of the endangered Piping Plover, which is threatened because its sandy beach habitat is so popular with people (Prentice and Shepherd 2025). Every year in the Netherlands, more than 7000 people patrol farmers’ fields in search of lapwing, bar-tailed godwit, oystercatcher, and redshank nests to protect the eggs and their parents from farming activities (Kleyheeg et al. 2022). In both cases, some of the volunteers elsewhere enumerate birds, yet they are predominantly naturalists with a deep care for birds and the landscapes they inhabit—part of a broader natural history community that is sometimes ignored because it does not first-and-foremost count but physically protects birds.

Engage with emotions

Allowing one’s passion for nature to influence naturalist practices would help to transform natural history and its use in science. In particular, it can lead to a reassessment of scientific objectivity. This could be interpreted as a return to a form of natural history that was considered unsystematic and experiential and abandoned long ago (Farber 2000). Although objectivity in science is laudable, it is disputable in the Anthropocene. Objectivity implies a separation between oneself and the object of study, an Enlightenment stance that underlies humanity’s treatment of nature as an “other” (see Bilgrami 2020). Through an insistence on objectivity, often interpreted as the absence of emotion, there is a risk that the depth of natural history will not be put to its full use and that negative emotions will fester.

Paying attention to love, care, and grief can revolutionize naturalists’ energies in natural science and beyond (Verploegen et al. 2024). Natural history has often become a process of documenting change and loss, so naturalists are vulnerable to solastalgia (nostalgia for lost wild places), eco-anxiety, eco-grief, and other psychological maladies, especially given their awareness of the scale of socio-ecological problems (see figure 2; Head and Harada 2017, Beery et al. 2023). Alongside environmental distress, naturalists are also likely to experience some version of the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (Hobbs 2013). An early stage like denial could manifest in a propensity to continue studying nature the same way as before, as if a stable balance of nature and documentation will solve the intractable, large-scale challenges facing societies, whereas a later stage such as acceptance could lead to hopelessness and inaction.

Figure 2.

Increasingly, environmental issues are becoming serious emotional challenges faced by individuals and society at large.

Credit: artiestick/Shutterstock.

Compliance with permission from the rights holder to display this image online prohibits further enlargement or copying.

Rather than ignoring the emotions involved in doing natural history, naturalists could explicitly acknowledge their presence and incorporate them in nature’s documentation, thereby offering insights for contextualizing reported data. In this manner, they would, perhaps ironically, help to make data collection more, rather than less, objective. The study of natural history would gain further relevance to science and society if emotions and connection to nature became priorities, providing embodied and affective knowledge to live in mutually flourishing ways with other beings and places.

Ensure justice, equity, and diversity

The practice of natural history continues to foster inequalities that contribute to injustice (e.g., Morales et al. 2023, Salomon et al. 2023). Some of them derive from natural history’s origins as a colonial enterprise intent on exploration, domination, and rapacious development. Historically, its leaders tended to be wealthy and white, with Black and Indigenous people and women, among other groups, relegated to secondary status—a pattern tied to its racist underpinnings (Miriti et al. 2022). One cannot consider “natural history’s place in science and society” (Tewksbury et al. 2014) without reckoning with this context and seeking to lessen the systemic justice, equity, and diversity issues that remain in how natural history is imagined and practiced today. There have thus been several recent calls for more “ethical” and decolonial practices, such as discontinuing “parachute” science that excludes people in the Global South and instead promoting equitable research partnerships and local research capacity (Trisos et al. 2021).

It will help naturalists from privileged countries to re-examine how they view the natural world, specifically by judiciously re-assessing colonial, romantic, and objectifying perspectives. For instance, both “connecting with nature” and “nature as wilderness” are constructs that don’t resonate with many of the world’s people, especially Indigenous peoples and those from the Global South (Buijs et al. 2009, Fletcher 2017). They may already spend their lives largely outdoors and view nature as a place to inhabit (Singleton 2021). Contemporary concerns about the loss of nature also tend to ignore Indigenous peoples’ experience of the colonial transformation of their homelands so that they already live in their “ancestors’ dystopia now” (Whyte 2017). Around the world, there are thus efforts to recontextualize natural science and its relationship with Indigenous cultures and their traditional knowledges (e.g., Wong et al. 2020).

Critically navigate technologies

For centuries, the study of nature has utilized technological intermediaries, beginning with lenses and progressing to today’s cell phone apps and data infrastructures (eBird, iNaturalist), not to mention the genomic technologies underlying contemporary taxonomy and species detection (e.g., eDNA, metabarcoding; Van Klink et al. 2022). Several commentators propound the benefits of novel 21st-century technologies (e.g., Tewksbury et al. 2014, McLure et al. 2020), including their capacity to “shift away from descriptive natural history research and training toward hypothetico-deductive research” (Tosa et al. 2021), but as indicated above, we think a more careful evaluation of new technologies is necessary.

New technologies can certainly bring considerable progress in scientific knowledge while also connecting more people to nature, but they also change human behaviors and our relationship to the natural world (Lundquist et al. 2025). Fundamentally, the implications of these new technologies are not well understood (Altrudi 2021). Rather than focusing on presumed benefits or suspected dangers, we need further investigations of how these technologies modify naturalists’ experience (whether undermining or enhancing), to influence their design (Truong and Clayton 2020, Arts et al. 2021). They can perhaps be used in novel ways to serve or stand up for nature (Edwards and Larson 2020). Natural history will also need to address AI technologies, including their application in automated species recognition (Truong and Van der Wal 2024), which will replace certain skills of field naturalists (e.g., Terry et al. 2020).

Enlarge the ethical envelope

The tools and practices of natural history have evolved in response to changing cultural and technological circumstances. For instance, most naturalists have replaced their guns with photography for the purpose of identification or close inspection. Instead of collecting bird eggs, as we mentioned above, some now help to protect birds’ nests. However, further inroads into animal and plant welfare can still be made in many domains, such as more careful consideration of the impacts of ornithological studies and the destructive sampling of insects (figure 3; Fischer and Larson 2019, Lövei et al. 2023). Although there has been some reflection on these direct impacts on animal welfare, it is largely assumed that they are compensated by the benefits of knowledge acquisition.

Figure 3.

Natural history has often relied on obtaining specimens, both for description and documentation of species, but also for public engagement such as this insect display in a natural history museum. But in an era when insects are declining so rapidly, such practices merit reconsideration. Credit: BMHL.

Additionally, awareness of sustainability issues may encourage naturalists, whether amateur or professional, to reduce their indirect impacts on nature. Scientific naturalists travel the world to conduct research or attend conferences. And more generally, naturalists appreciate diversity and often travel to see new ecosystems and species, whether by car, boat, or plane, and they thereby drive industries of “last chance to see” (Lemelin et al. 2010). These travels have large environmental costs, including fossil fuel emissions, unsustainable airline and hotel practices, and sometimes direct impact on species’ populations (Hall et al. 2015). It seems fitting for naturalists to be self-reflective and self-critical in their decisions about resource consumption.

Discussion

Given these points, we consider romantic Victorian as well as scientific natural history (e.g., Tewksbury et al. 2014) to be outmoded trends, maladapted to the context of the Anthropocene. From our perspective, there have been too many changes in the natural world, in the culture of the human beings who study it, and in the dawning realization of their entanglement to justify the continuation of natural history as it’s often imagined.

The question remains: Where do naturalists go from here? We have suggested that natural history could realize its greater societal potential by engaging with broader concerns related to its assumptions, culture, emotional relevance, and political and ethical purview. Thus far, conceptual distinctions between nature, technology, and society separate the traditions and activities in natural history, science, and environmental politics. Yet, the Anthropocene calls for thoughtful integration. We need to continually be open to new orientations and actions that can generate deep knowledge about nature while also connecting to wider contexts and contributing to nature’s well-being by working from emotion as much as scientific objectivity.

Many of our recommendations for natural history are value-based; they are not normally the province of natural science. Yet they ought to be components of an Anthropocene natural history. Scientific natural history will remain, as modeled by the “Natural History Miscellany” and “Scientific Naturalist” sections in the journals American Naturalist and Ecology, respectively, but scientific organizations such as the Ecological Society of America and the British Ecological Society have already begun to reassess the role of values in their science. Such reflections offer an opportunity to expand the focus toward connecting diverse people with the living world—in part by learning from those who harbor diverse ways of knowing about other beings—and assisting them to become advocates and activists (Racimo et al. 2022). The seed for such connection is planted in childhood, and it is nurtured by play and simple time in nature rather than facts (Hecht et al. 2019, Van Heel et al. 2023). Natural history can best address the Anthropocene context not only by leveraging new technologies but, more importantly, by deepening and developing connections that can build diverse communities and desirable places.

In this respect, we should reconsider usage of the Anthropocene label. Despite its popular adoption, geologists have officially rejected it, and naturalists might follow suit. It endorses the idea that humans are the central force on Earth, whereas naturalists recognize that this is incorrect and instead understand ourselves as embedded in ecological systems. Based on their personal and professional experience, naturalists need to promote this view wherever and whenever they can. Rather than the Anthropocene, we thus recommend an alternative label, the Symbiocene, to underscore the relational, symbiotic context of human lives (Prescott and Logan 2017, Albrecht 2020). It is not an era we are entering, but one we have always been in—even if that is not how humans in industrial societies have been inhabiting our planet. Naturalists have a key role to play in fomenting a transformational understanding of our proper place as denizens of planet Earth.

Author contributions

Brendon Larson (Conceptualization, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing), Jesse Peterson (Writing—review & editing), René van der Wal (Writing—review & editing)