European Academy of Sciences and Arts
Academia Scientiarum et Artium Europaea
03. September 2012A Sense of Place. Landschaft und Heimat im Umweltschutz
Schönes Haus
University of Basel Nadelberg 6
4051 Basel
Switzerland
Conference in Basel, September 3-5, 2012
A Sense of Place. Landschaft und Heimat im Umweltschutz
The conference will address those aspects of environmental thinking that engage with the human need for settlement. It will take place in Switzerland, a country that has thrived on a culture of home and dwelling that has transcended linguistic and religious divisions, and engendered a continuing concern for the environment that could perhaps serve as a useful model for Europe and the wider world. We wish to bring together philosophers, geographers and architects, as well as others actively engaged in artistic enterprises and in humane scholarship, to explore the many ways in which people have protected their shared natural assets through shaping them as a home. The communal sense of beauty is one of the major instruments of making such a shared home. It is our view that current environmental thinking has been overly concerned with global problems and the (often futile) search for global solutions, and has paid insufficient attention to local ways of managing the earth and our relation to it. Hence environmental thinking has pursued comprehensive objectives that require radical changes in life-style, while paying scant attention to the motives that people might have for complying with them. We do not have a dogmatic position on any of the problems that the world now confronts. But we believe that there are important traditions of thought, feeling and humane awareness that are often overlooked in the crisis-fed concerns of environmentalists today, and we wish to put together a conference in which these traditions can be critically explored, with a view to learning what we can from them. The conference is organised by Angelika Krebs, Professor of Philosophy at Basel University and author of The Ethics of Nature, and Roger Scruton, Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University, author of Green Philosophy. The languages of the conference will be German and English. The German speaking contributors will be asked either to introduce their talks with an English abstract or to present their whole talks in English. The conference will take place over three days, with the intention of generating a continuous discussion.
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