Different Ways of Thinking Globally: The Unlikely Return of the Noosphere in Russian Environmental Discourses

by Victoria Myznikova

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Arcadia, Summer 2023, no. 16

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“‘We Have Always Known’: On the Trails of People, Plants, and Humboldt”

While reading Baron von Humboldt’s 1807 Essay on the Geography of Plants, Paula Unger writes about modern science creating boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, and how Indigenous understandings transcend them.

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“Organisms, Life Relations, and Evolution: Inter-Dependencies after Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid”

This article reconsiders the relevance of Peter Kropotkin’s notion of mutual aid in evolution, which holds that cooperation is a more decisive factor than competition both among human and nonhuman animals.

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Making Carbon and Climate Change Visible

Third 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

Goffinet, Bernard

University of Connecticut, USA

Bernard Goffinet is a professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut. His research interests focus on the diversity and evolution of mosses and lichens based on field work in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. He also engages in enhancing awareness of these lesser-known organisms through walks, books, and exhibits. He completed his BS and MS at the University of Liège, with a thesis focused on epiphytes in old growth forests, and earned his PhD at the University of Alberta for his study on the evolution of mosses. He has edited and written several books and is currently the president of the International Association of Bryologists. You can learn more about his work here.

Smette, Alain

European Southern Observatory

Alain Smette has been an operations staff astronomer at the European Southern Observatory since 2004. He received his PhD from the University of Liège, Belgium, in 1994. After a postdoc at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, Groningen, he became a research associate at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, then returned to Liège in 2001. His research interests include the study of absorption lines in the spectra of quasars and gamma-ray burst optical afterglows, gravitational lensing, and active galactic nuclei. As a member of the Science Operations department at Paranal, he was successively the instrument scientist for the VISIR then CRIRES instruments, and instrument operations team coordinator. He is currently a system scientist in the system engineering group at the Paranal Observatory.

Browse the exhibition

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.