Alexander von Humboldt's invention of the natural landscape

Landscape took on a new meaning through the new science of plant geography of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1857). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “landscape” was foremost a painterly genre. Slowly, painted landscapes came to bear on natural surroundings, but by 1800 it was still not common to designate sites as “landscapes.” Humboldt looked at plant vegetation with a painterly gaze. Artists, according to him, could suggest in their work that an abstract unity lay hidden underneath observable phenomena. Humboldt projected painted landscapes on nature and found its ecological unity. By doing so, he ultimately stripped the concept of landscape from its primary visual meaning.     

Interdisciplinarity and Postmodernity in the Environmental Sciences

Postmodern science has aspects of both technoscience and interdisciplinary science, but is described exhaustively by neither. Twenty‐five years ago, Lyotard expected that postmodern science would reinforce our capacity to endure incommensurability. This paper suggests that the reverse is true also. Ignoring incommensurability is a precondition for the emergence of postmodern science. The bias in several large international science programs since around 1980 is toward data gathering and the technological and experimental aspects of science. Interdisciplinarity is the mechanism used to bring this about. One precondition of the success of these efforts is the low status of theory in current science and a predominance of data.