The foundational premise of the Anthropocene, constant across the range of proposed definitions, is that the biophysical world is now profoundly social. This carries substantive methodological implications: If the environment is ecosocial, surely the way it is studied must be, too. Yet, as our bibliometric analysis demonstrates, the bulk of academic articles on the Anthropocene published between 2002 and 2019 focus on its conceptual implications rather than embracing its analytical consequences. Further, of the subset of articles that engage the Anthropocene empirically, fewer than a quarter employ interdisciplinary methods at even a cursory level. In response, we outline an alternative approach, critical physical geography (CPG), which enables researchers to pick up the methodological and conceptual gauntlet thrown down by the Anthropocene. Work in CPG begins from the premise that all biophysical questions are also social, but it goes beyond a simple mixed methods approach to emphasize the politics both of how knowledge is produced and of how it is taken up outside academia. We illustrate the utility of a CPG approach for analysis of the Anthropocene via succinct examples of research in critical dendrochronology, geomorphology, and remote sensing.

人类世的基本前提（在拟议的定义范围内始终保持不变）是，生物物理世界现在已具有深远的社会意义。这具有实质性的方法论含义：如果环境是生态社会的，那么肯定也必须研究环境。然而，正如我们的文献计量学分析所表明的那样，2002年至2019年之间发表的关于人类世的学术文章大部分都集中在其概念意义上，而不是在拥抱其分析结果。此外，在经验上与人类世有关的文章子集中，不到四分之一的人甚至在粗略的水平上采用了跨学科的方法。作为回应，我们概述了另一种方法，即关键自然地理学（CPG），它使研究人员能够掌握人类世所扔下的方法论和概念上的挑战。CPG的工作始于所有生物物理问题都具有社会性的前提，但它超越了简单的混合方法方法，既强调了知识的产生方式，又强调了学术界如何吸收知识。我们通过关键树轮年代学，地貌学和遥感研究的简洁示例，说明了CPG方法在人类世分析中的实用性。