About life in the Anthropocene

The expansive dynamics of industrialized societies have catapulted us into a new era. The Anthropocene presents humanity with global challenges of unprecedented proportions: climate change, species extinction, environmental destruction, new distribution struggles - we must adapt to a fundamentally new human-earth system, to new social and political conditions. A comprehensive understanding of global interrelationships and innovative cooperation between the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities are necessary for life and survival in this often precarious era. Equally important are political debates on how civil society should deal with scientific findings and on the meaning and purpose of new technologies. We want to contribute to these debates with our new series "On Life in the Anthropocene". In constant collaboration with the Studium Generale at the University of Freiburg and the newly established Günther Anders Research Center at the University of Freiburg, as well as in selective cooperation with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the German-American Institute in Freiburg and various Franco-German institutes, we are seeking a dialogue with voices and perspectives from the sciences, politics and various areas of civil society. The series will be opened by science historian Prof. Dr. Jürgen Renn. He was Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin for many years and has been building a new Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena since summer 2022. This will bring together research from archaeology, history, life sciences and social sciences with findings from earth system sciences in order to develop an overall perspective on the consequences of human activity for the entire ecosystem. With his magnum opus DIE EVOLUTION DES WISSENS. A NEW SIGNIFICANCE OF SCIENCE FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE, published in 2022, he himself has made an important contribution to this. Speaker: Prof. Dr. Jürgen Renn (History of Science, Jena) Director of studies: Josef Mackert