Alexander von Humboldt, da 250 anni il teorizzatore dello studio interdisciplinare dell'ambiente

In the 19th century, the term scientist was coined to indicate, in general, a cultivator of the sciences. This definition involved both the beginning of the professionalization of Sciences and the end of the "eclectic scholar" of Nature, of which Aristotle was the prototype and Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was its last important exponent. Humboldt was a polymath, explorer, prolific writer, experimenter, university lecturer; he dealt with geology, geography, oceanography, astronomy, meteorology, climatology, botany, philosophy, anthropology, etc. He was the most famous scholar of sciences of his time. Humboldt, with his works, has managed to connect all disciplines in a unified view of the world. In his conception organic nature and inorganic nature form a single system of active forces and all the organisms of the Earth are linked as a family sharing the same "home". In 1866 Ernst Haeckel called the Humboldt's holistic view ecology (from the Greek oikos, home, and logos, study) meaning the whole science of the relationship of the environment with the surrounding environment. A scientific world now organized in increasingly limited and specialized fields soon forgot Humboldt's holistic interdisciplinary vision, but his principles remained. Humboldt showed Nature as a single force with climatic zones that corresponded to each other across continents. He argued that the plants were not to be arranged according to taxonomic categories of belonging, but they had to be considered in relation to the climate and location. In our time, given the anthropic damage caused to Nature, it is necessary to consider again Humboldt's unitary vision, establishing interdisciplinary connections between scholars of the various disciplines, thus expanding knowledge in a more organic and global vision of the Environment.