Diversity and Beauty

Second chapter of Ricardo Rozzi et al.’s virtual exhibition, From Hand Lenses to Telescopes: Exploring the Microcosm and Macrocosm in Chile’s Biocultural Laboratories.

From Hand Lenses to Telescopes: Exploring the Microcosm and Macrocosm in Chile’s Biocultural Laboratories

Chile is a land drawn with the rhythm of nature itself. It is a natural laboratory that invites us to look up into the macrocosm and down into the microcosm. At both extremes of this long and narrow country, science activities have a major global impact. Today, over 50 percent of the world’s astronomical observations use the telescopes of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other institutions installed in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Complementarily, at its southern end Chile established the Cape Horn International Center for Global Change Studies and Biocultural Conservation (CHIC) to investigate the microcosms, from the largest organism, planet Earth, to the smallest ones. CHIC explores diverse forms of knowledge and values to understand and protect the biosphere in the context of global socio-environmental change. This virtual exhibition enhances the integration of the sciences, arts, and humanities through a novel partnership with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, inviting visitors to be enchanted across the multiple scales of the cosmos.

About the Exhibition

About the author

Rozzi, Ricardo

Cape Horn International Center for Global Change Studies and Biocultural Conservation, Chile

Ricardo Rozzi is a Chilean ecologist and philosopher. Rozzi is a professor at the University of North Texas in the United States and at the University of Magallanes in Chile, where he is director of the Cape Horn International Center (CHIC). He has coined three interrelated terms: “biocultural conservation,” “biocultural homogenization,” and “biocultural ethics.” The latter values the vital links between the lifestyles of coinhabitants who share a common habitat. He led the establishment of the UNESCO Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve (2005) and the Diego Ramírez Islands - Drake Passage Marine Park (2019). He also first introduced the “field environmental philosophy” methodology for biocultural education, generating innovations in special-interest tourism themes and activities, such as “Ecotourism with a Hand Lens.”

orcid.org/0000-0001-5265-8726

Paneque Carreño, Teresa

European Southern Observatory

Teresa Paneque Carreño has an MS in astronomy and is currently a doctoral candidate at the European Southern Observatory, through the International Max Planck Research School program, and at the University of Leiden. She is also a topselling author of the multivolume children’s books El Universo Segun Carlota (2021–2023) and does astronomy outreach through social media (@terepaneque). Her scientific interests revolve around planet-formation processes and the distribution and abundance of molecules in protoplanetary disks.

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History of the Exploration

First chapter of Ricardo Rozzi et al.’s virtual exhibition, From Hand Lenses to Telescopes: Exploring the Microcosm and Macrocosm in Chile’s Biocultural Laboratories.

From Hand Lenses to Telescopes: Exploring the Microcosm and Macrocosm in Chile’s Biocultural Laboratories

Chile is a land drawn with the rhythm of nature itself. It is a natural laboratory that invites us to look up into the macrocosm and down into the microcosm. At both extremes of this long and narrow country, science activities have a major global impact. Today, over 50 percent of the world’s astronomical observations use the telescopes of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other institutions installed in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Complementarily, at its southern end Chile established the Cape Horn International Center for Global Change Studies and Biocultural Conservation (CHIC) to investigate the microcosms, from the largest organism, planet Earth, to the smallest ones. CHIC explores diverse forms of knowledge and values to understand and protect the biosphere in the context of global socio-environmental change. This virtual exhibition enhances the integration of the sciences, arts, and humanities through a novel partnership with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, inviting visitors to be enchanted across the multiple scales of the cosmos.

About the Exhibition

About the author

Rozzi, Ricardo

Cape Horn International Center for Global Change Studies and Biocultural Conservation, Chile

Ricardo Rozzi is a Chilean ecologist and philosopher. Rozzi is a professor at the University of North Texas in the United States and at the University of Magallanes in Chile, where he is director of the Cape Horn International Center (CHIC). He has coined three interrelated terms: “biocultural conservation,” “biocultural homogenization,” and “biocultural ethics.” The latter values the vital links between the lifestyles of coinhabitants who share a common habitat. He led the establishment of the UNESCO Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve (2005) and the Diego Ramírez Islands - Drake Passage Marine Park (2019). He also first introduced the “field environmental philosophy” methodology for biocultural education, generating innovations in special-interest tourism themes and activities, such as “Ecotourism with a Hand Lens.”

orcid.org/0000-0001-5265-8726

Leibundgut, Bruno

European Southern Observatory

Bruno Leibundgut’s career as an astrophysicist spans more than 30 years. His scientific contributions range from the nucleosynthesis in stellar explosions to the evolution of the universe. After completing his PhD at the University of Basel, Switzerland, he held positions as junior researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, and the University of California, Berkeley. For nearly 30 years he has been an astrophysicist at the European Southern Observatory (ESO). He held various positions within this intergovernmental organization, among them director for science. Bruno Leibundgut is deeply involved in the operations of large telescopes and currently serves as program scientist of the Very Large Telescope (VLT). Since 2012 he has also held an honorary professorship at the Technical University of Munich.

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Interview with David Munns, author of Engineering the Environment

In this episode from the New Books Network podcast, former Rachel Carson Center fellow David Munns is interviewed on his new book, Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War.

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What Living in Space Teaches Us about Living on Earth

by David Munns

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Arcadia, Spring 2019, no. 14

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"Beyond Whole Earth: Planetary Mediation and the Anthropocene”

In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Tobias Boes examines the hermeneutic and poetic operations by which we as human beings turn our very planet into a signifier for our collective existence as a species, a process he refers to as “planetary mediation.”

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“Fractal Eaarth: Visualizing the Global Environment in the Anthropocene”

In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Thomas Lekan offers a postcolonial critique of recent environmentalist literature and exhibitions that frame the Anthropocene using the NASA Apollo mission’s Earthrise (1968) and Blue Marble (1972) photographs from space.

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"On the Plausibility of Intelligent Life on Other Worlds: A Cognitive-Semiotic Assessment of fi· fc · L"

In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, David Dunér scrutinizes the underlying suppositions involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) research, particularly the last three factors of the Drake equation.

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"Foreword: A Wrinkle in Space"

Stefan Helmreich’s foreword to a Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, concludes that the anthropology of outer space these days is a machine for chaotic and cosmic travel, chrono-synclastic infundibulation, and analogical involution, a wrinkle in the discipline and its companion fields that changes what can count as both the “environment” and the “humanities.”

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"Introduction: Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien"

In this introduction to their Special Section “Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien,” editors Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar discuss the growing research on the wider universe and how it is apprehended by modern cosmology, and how the extraterrestrial has become part of the remit of anthropologists, philosophers, historians, geographers, scholars in science and technology studies, and artistic researchers, among others.

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"Gestures of Cosmic Relation and the Search for Another Earth"

In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Lisa Messeri concludes that outer space, far from being removed from Earthly matters, offers a different scale and perspective for examining technocultural relations.

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