On the Exactly Balanced Use of Nature and Its Representation

Abstract

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.