Biocentric Work in the Anthropocene: How Actors Regenerate Degenerated Natural Commons

Abstract

As natural commons vital to selves, organizations, and institutions collapse under cumulative anthropogenic pressures, can human agency still reverse some of the damage already done? This article explores how emerging forms of social symbolic work regenerate degenerated natural commons. Using a five‐year multi‐sited immersive ethnography of natural commons that had collapsed, we explain how actors (re)turn to the biophysical roots of socio‐ecological systems to take care, work with, and care for nature. We show how actors’ comprehension develops over time by connecting their social‐symbolic construction of natural commons post collapse with three sets of practices we label biomanipulation, biofacilitation, and bioaffiliation. We inductively theorize biocentric work as a processual form of social‐symbolic work that connects three cycles of material abduction, relational intercession, and discursive grounding. Our tri‐cyclical process model underscores the biophysical foundations of social‐symbolic work in the Anthropocene by explicitly and iteratively situating self, organizations and institutions in the states and dynamics of natural commons.