On the Exactly Balanced Use of Nature and Its Representation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22126263 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lisa Cronjäger (0000-0001-8839-7935, University of Basel, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 161-175 |
| Publication date | 2022-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History of Humanities (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2379-3163 • E-ISSN: 2379-3171 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/721307 |
| OpenAlex | W4312783730 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
Over the last two decades, environmental humanities has been established as a new research field combining a variety of disciplines. Environmental humanities promises to overcome both disciplinary borders and the divide between nature and culture. However, if we look back into the history of environmental knowledge, forestry academies already by the early nineteenth century turn out to be sites of interdisciplinary interaction on questions of sustainability and the representation of the environment. Artists, scholars, scientists, polymaths, and their respective skill sets were part of these institutions. By analyzing a prevalent mapping method in nineteenth-century European forestry, this essay illustrates how perspectives from the humanities legitimated practices that were meant to conduct sustainable resource management. Forestry scientist Heinrich Cotta set out to achieve a compromise between overall clarity and exactitude in forest maps. Similar thoughts on a well-balanced representation of nature on maps and visualizations can be found in Alexander von Humboldt’s writings and the Romantic discourse on nature paintings. Ultimately, reflections on a both lucid and exact depiction of forests influenced the history of environmental knowledge in the humanities and the sciences
Art · CLARITY · Compromise · Depiction · Discipline · Humanities · Literature · Political science · Romance · Social science · Sociology · Sustainability · American Environmental and Regional History · Computer Science · Ecology, Conservation, and Geographical Studies · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Law · Ecology
Nature's End
The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century
Sustainable Gains
The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective
Trust in Numbers
How Terms Shape Forests
Historicizing Sustainability
Estimated truths
Environmental Humanities
Humboldtian Science, Creole Meteorology, and the Discovery of Human-Caused Climate Change in South America
The Invention of Sustainability
On Scientific Observation
Mining as the Working World of Alexander von Humboldt's Plant Geography and Vertical Cartography
Seeing Like a State
Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities
Modernity's Frail Climate
| Highly cited | No |
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