Ricerc@Sapienza

In such a historical dramatic period for the future of our planet and their inhabitants, the role of design appears increasingly as a transversal device that connects different knowledges. The assumption of this article is the awareness of the transition from the Holocene era to what the scientists call the Anthropocene, a revolutionary new phase of earth history, that has been unleashed by human action with bad prospects for the planet and the mass of humanity.

In the last decades much attention has been dedicated to the interpretation of relevant phenomena in the socio-economic field, highlighting the need of general frameworks of reference for the governance of sustainability and often recurring to the Elkington’s triple bottom line and the Etzkowitz’s triple-helix representations as reference models. In front of a massive scientific production that points out criteria and method of the model, the theory could seem less rich of applications and examples, especially in the field of the inquiry defined by sustainability.

Time is a key factor to understand the effects of disturbance on natural communities or ecosystems. In Mediterranean landscapes, where nature and humans have been strongly intermingling since mid-Holocene, the relationships between plant ecology and palaeoecology and their role for the interpretation of natural and anthropogenic changes still needs to be clearly understood. Ecology and palaeoecology are both investigating such problems, but each of them cannot disentangle the specific role played by nature and by humans in shaping the present plant communities and landscapes.