Scientific investigation about the facts of anthropocentric planetary change, and understanding how to mitigate against these changes, are not enough to make the reversals necessary to survive what is sometimes called ‘the sixth great extinction event’. Environmental groups lose out to bodies able to manipulate the messages of science to serve profit-driven purposes. The Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene addresses this situation as one of its priorities, and the ‘thinking practices for the Anthropocene’ are beyond surplus thinking in order to move from known facts, to ways around culturally and socially determined impasses, embodied by the human effects of the Anthropocene.