ABSTRACT
The global ecological diagnosis of the Anthropocene, however, requires that perspective assume an entirely different scale: the planetary. Epistemologically speaking, scale variation becomes interesting at the very moment when size begins to matter, that is, when the quantitative upscaling leads to entirely new and different qualities of the object. The architectural model is a classic case of a scale effect, as small models of buildings or machines have entirely different structural qualities than the object in real size. Scale is a dimension intrinsic to the interactions between the organisms of a biotope. Organisms have to be understood as attuned to a certain scale of observation and activity. To describe the Anthropocene as a scale effect is to emphasize its emergent properties. As an age of digital cartography, the Anthropocene is the age of the global zoom, where the largest and the smallest features of the Earth can be taken in at one fell swoop.
