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Abstract

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.