Datensatz

Zusammenfassung

When Alexander von Humboldt reached the pass of Huangamarca in the Andes in 1802, the moment fused personal ambition with scientific objectives of creating a revolutionary new view of Earth and its systems. Seeing the Pacific for the first time, combined with an overview of the interconnected landscape, reflected important dimensions of a generalised perception of Earth systems. The moment mirrored Petrarch’s ascent of Mont Ventoux centuries earlier and the development of modern Earth system science in the century from Vernadsky to Lovelock leading to Schellnhuber’s proposal of Earth system analysis, an emerging science of the whole Earth. But what principles should the design of human social, economic and technological systems follow in the age of the Anthropocene, in which human actions are shifting the state of Earth far beyond historical precedence, to enable a future within planetary boundaries and with lives in dignity for all? The Finnish architect Alvar Aalto suggested a centrality of the human scale for avoiding the inhumanity of purely technological industrial products. Such principles of architecture as an art of finding solutions now have to be applied to governing the planetary commons in the Anthropocene. A provisional Humboldtian Programme for the Anthropocene encompassing such lines of thought lists four. The design of all socio-ecological systems must be biocentric, not geocentric; focussed on the human scale; integrate the tensions between natural and human dimensions and be firmly based on the most advanced co-evolutionary Earth system analysis available; and it must take the form of applied art as the only way to interface scientific knowledge with the human mind.