EAA CONFERENCE 2024
October 10 to 12, 2024

The Rise of the Ecological Imagination

in German-speaking Cultures from the 18th Century to the Present.

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Ecology is a composite term made up of the Greek oikos (house, maintenance) and logos. In its original Greek sense, the logos of “the household” was concerned with everything that pertained to living and maintaining the house, while living within one`s means.
 

Although it can be said that Charles Darwin`s On the Origins of Species (1859) laid the foundation for ecology, it was German-speaking scientists of the late 19th and early 20th century who founded ecology as Wissenschaft. Justus von Liebig, who taught at Munich beginning in 1852, approached it through chemistry. A few years later in Munich as well, the Dane J.E.B. Warming did so through plant ecology. Around the same time, in 1861, Ernst Haeckel began his groundbreaking work in ecology at the University of Jena, while August Thienemann commenced his studies of the ecology of water systems at the University of Greifswald in 1905. But it was Jakob Johann von Uexküll, who finally established ecological studies as a field of research at the University of Hamburg in 1924.
 

The reception of Darwin in the German-speaking realm began relatively late in the 19th century. In Germany, ecological thinking has a long prehistory. Already surfacing most plainly in Sturm und Drang, it appeared most clearly in the writing of the Romantics, and especially in the philosophical writings of German Romanticism. In this context, Alexander von Humboldt`s subsequent “scientific” conception of nature in his Kosmos (1845 - 58) can be better understood if one sees it within the philosophical debates of Weimar Classicism. His view of nature as an interconnected and interdependent system, for instance, owes its boldness to Schelling`s assertive Naturphilosophie. And F.W. von Schelling was just one of Humboldt`s nearly 3,000 European correspondents.
 

It is the interplay between science and the humanities that is the subject of this conference. To be held in Munich and in the Alpine community of Murnau, the conference seeks to canvas the widest possible transdisciplinary manifestation in the rise of ecological thinking to date. (Hans-Peter Söder)
 

The conference will take place in Murnau & Munich, Bavaria, from September 20 to 22, 2023. Stay up to date and subscribe to our newsletter.