Earth at its limits

With the new special exhibition EARTH AT ITS LIMITS the Natural History Museum Basel (NMB) picks up a topic of great current interest and relevance: the human overuse of natural resources and its consequences. We aim at providing a platform to inform visitors, provide new insights and inspire to reflect, discuss and act. To this end I apply for the SNF AGORA rolling call funding scheme to help finance a section with interactive stations. This section shall allow visitors to understand key processes in nature and better place in context the role we humans play as natural beings.The (social) media report daily of environmental crises across the globe, ranging from climate change, deforestations, heat waves and melting glaciers, to the Covid-19-pandemics. This overwhelming picture of a vast number of singular problems blurs the broader insight that, in fact, there is a common denominator. They are all symptoms of deep human interventions into global natural processes and system. These have led to changed living conditions on this planet characterising a new earth time, the Anthropocene. While there have been other exhibitions on the Anthropocene, EARTH AT ITS LIMITS takes an explicitly different approach: we take the challenging global situation as an opportunity to transfer knowledge and fascination about the questions how nature works, why biodiversity is key, and what natural role our own species plays. Only if we understand our own role in nature can we make informed individual, political and societal decisions and changes, thereby adapting to the changing living conditions on our planet. EARTH AT ITS LIMITS will be in three languages (Main exhibition languages: German & English, in booklet: French) and consist of four main sections: 1) a prologue on natural diversity and the state of our planet, 2) a section on natural processes and the role we humans play in them, 3) a section on big issues of human impact on the environment, and 4) an epilogue introducing the human earth age (Anthropocene) and addressing the questions how we ended up here, how we may adapt and shape our future for a good life despite limited resources.This AGORA proposal focusses on part 2. Here we develop in collaboration with scenographers, graphic artists and illustrators interactive stations where the visitors can try out and learn about the carbon cycle and its varied paths, the water cycle and its necessity for life, the fact that natural systems are dynamic and can adapt by changing - provided there is sufficient diversity, and finally our lifestyle and the associated ecological footprint representing the pressure on ecosystems through our high-level demands for natural resources. A fifth intervention shows an ecosystem as a network of ecological interactions among organisms - one position being free for the visitor, representing us humans in the network. This view is a key take-home image to clarify that ecosystems are not mere assemblies of organisms, but complex (and fascinating) interaction networks. And we humans are not standing apart or above, but rather are embedded in these networks in a multitude of ways.