A Platform for Research, Design, and Application of the Humankind–Nature Nexus
A joint project of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Ramat Hanadiv
In the Anthropocene era, in which humankind is a formative geological force, there is no “clean” or “virgin” nature, and humankind is not a force that exists outside nature. Rather, humans are intertwined with the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere, profoundly altering them. In this new era, nature and human are interwoven by means of relations of dependence, responsibility, and vulnerability. In fact, all layers of our lives are intertwined with nature, but in the absence of a sufficiently calibrated, targeted, and sensitive cultural, scientific, and institutional lens, this reality remains transparent.
The joint research platform of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Ramat Hanadiv declares resolutely: The traditional distinction between humankind and nature has collapsed!
If so, what can be built on the ruins of the distinction?
“Human–nature” is not a new topic, and the theoretical discussion of it has reached maturity; much has been written and said about it. But it is a new institutional problem. It requires not only theoretical concepts, but also new forms of education, research, professional training, and ethical decision-making forms that take nature itself into account when considering what constitutes a better or more ethical course of action. The question guiding us on our platform is how to establish a professional and methodological field in a hybrid reality.
Israel, with its political, ecological, and cultural density, is a unique laboratory for studying this question. Israel is saturated with “natures”—climatic, ecological, historical and political, each one loaded with cultural narratives, with a longing for the green European landscapes, and the use of nature as a tool for sovereignty, exclusion, and identity. Precisely because of this density, the local field can make a broad theoretical contribution to understanding how human nature relations become research, design, and action in the post-dichotomous “nature–culture” world.
Building Field Infrastructure
We replace the generic call for collaboration with active building of field infrastructure. No single discipline can understand the Anthropocene reality, and certainly cannot act adequately within it. The friction between the languages of different fields of knowledge enables the development of new concepts, methods, and forms of action.
The platform promotes three main paths of action:
- Tools for thought. Development of methodologies that combine several knowledge fields in order to create a language that is not bound to a single scientific logic.
- Ethics, emotion, and science. Bringing back questions of value, meaning, empathy, responsibility, and belonging to the heart of the exact sciences, the natural sciences, and climate We use such approaches as Gaya theory as a bridge between the planetary perspective and professional identity.
- Agents of place. Creating “radical localization” by examining local entities—for example, a pasture or an olive tree—as agents that shape the politics and culture of the Mediterranean basin. Here, localization refers to the ecological niche through which culture itself is formed.
The humankind–nature platform does not aim to add new content to the existing discourse, but rather to change the conditions of the discourse itself. It acts by means of niche construction that shapes the conditions in which new public, research, and design forms of humankind–nature can flourish. In this new space, the languages, methods, and institutional forms required for thinking, studying, shaping, and acting in a shared world can emerge.