Extensive resource extraction serving a fast-growing global human population has, on the one hand, brought about rapid economic growth and prosperity, whilst on the other hand has caused climate change, pollution, destruction of ecosystems and species extinction. As a result, a geological transition is underway in which the earth is shifting out of the Holocene epoch (that is, time since the last ice age) to a post-Holocene era. This new era is characterized by degraded environmental conditions that differ significantly from the ‘safe operating space’ (see Rockström et al, 2009) that humans, along with all other species, have depended upon for their wellbeing and survival. A proposed term to identify this new era, the Anthropocene, emphasizes how humans have impacted these developments as they transitioned from being ‘insignificant animals’ to being a significant ‘geological force’ (Holley and Shearing, 2018) over the past couple of centuries.

Ontological and epistemological developments that recognize the human/non-human entanglements that the Anthropocene foregrounds, have challenged conceptions that posit the existence of two sui generis realities, namely a social world studied by social science and a natural world studied by natural sciences, in favour of a single socio-material reality. In understanding the rapidly increasing impact of human activities on the natural world, considerable attention has been paid to urban-based industrialization – particularly the extraction and use of fossil fuels – and its effects on global climate change and rising sea levels.

Less front and centre have been the broadly conceived ‘rural’: countryside and ocean-based industrial developments such as extensive land and ocean-based harvesting of minerals (industrial-scale mining) and food production through industrial-scale fishing, as well as industrial-scale agriculture and aquiculture. This (over)harvesting of resources has been facilitated by the largely uncoordinated and poorly regulated use of a plethora of technological advancements, most recently artificial intelligence. Technological advancements have also been employed to mitigate or adapt to the effect of humanity’s ever-increasing consumption of natural resources.

These planetary developments have profoundly changed rural terrains, and the non-human and human lives that exist within them. For example, lifestyles associated with agriculture and aquaculture have been fundamentally impacted as food production methods have become increasingly industrialized; a development that has negatively impacted biodiversity.