The Anthropocene poses many new ethical challenges both for the Earth sciences and for how those disciplines interact with the humanities and social sciences. Novel tensions and interactions are emerging between an Earth history which will continue for billions of years, whatever the circumstances, and a human history of more questionable near-term future continuity.

The complex system of interactions between the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere, that maintains a habitable space at the Earth's surface, is increasingly threatened by human actions. The Earth System is currently rapidly changing to a state likely to be less hospitable to most humans and indeed to most other organisms as a result of scientific, political, cultural, and economic practices, not least fossil fuel extraction, that until very recently were widely approved. As perceptions of right and wrong now change in response to the Anthropocene, geoscientists (not least) need to navigate this rapidly shifting context of their working lives, ideally toward patterns that build, not degrade, Earth's habitability. We explore here five pathways appropriate to the challenges of the Anthropocene world:

(1) developing a planetary perspective on energy consumption;
(2) assisting with the evolution of a global regulatory framework designed for Anthropocene, not Holocene, conditions;
(3) fostering cooperation among disciplines to articulate new values for an altered world and help develop systemic views of the Earth system, including its human component;
(4) developing a futures literacy founded on geology's rich deep time context; and
(5) exploration of concepts such as circular economies and mutualism in the design of human ecosystems.

Developing geoethics in response to the Anthropocene requires a transformative multidisciplinary effort through which the ideas and perceptions developed in the Holocene are replaced by new concepts appropriate to a more unstable and unpredictable Earth System.