Have you ever wondered where today’s expansive environmental movement got its start? In The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf describes the life and work of Alexander Humboldt who, she argues, did more to demonstrate the value of nature than any other man.
Over the course of his almost 90-year life from 1759 to 1869, Humboldt explored the Americas, Europe, and Asia and wrote hugely influential books which elucidated not just botany and zoology, but reached into geology, evolution, ecology and even tied science and poetry together. This brilliant polymath was friends with the leading scientists of his day, presidents and kings, revolutionaries, poets, and scholars of every nation, chronicled by the 50,000 letters he wrote to them and others.
Wulf describes the effect of Humboldt’s writing on these and future influential scientists, naturalists, poets, political leaders, and artists. Humboldt directly inspired Charles Darwin in his journey to the theory of evolution, John Muir’s advocacy for preserving nature, Henry David Thoreau’s naturalism, and Frederic Church’s landscapes. Others less known today, like George Perkins Marsh (who worked to warn of environmental degradation) and Ernst Haeckel (who invented ecology), were inspired by his publications. Thomas Jefferson was his friend, King Leopold of Prussia and Czar Nicholas sponsored him, while the revolutionary Simon Bolivar was also a friend. Goethe and the romantic poets of England – Wordsworth and Coleridge – played on his ideas. In Wulf’s opinion, Humboldt was the first to insist that nature must be felt and experienced, not just measured.
More places and living things on earth are named after Humboldt than any other person. Wulf counts almost 300 plants and more than 100 animals named after him. She also points out that in North America alone there are four counties, thirteen towns, mountains, bays, and a national park named after him, and in countries from Greenland to Australia, the same is true, for a total of 95 places (blog authors’ count from Wikipedia). A century after his birth, there were celebrations of him on 5 continents, with 25,000 people gathering in Central Park in New York, and thousands more celebrating and processing in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Chicago, Charleston, and San Francisco.
So who was he? Humboldt was the second son of Prussian nobility and grew up on an estate near Berlin, Germany. His early life was spent as a mining engineer – a job and an education which he took to appease his mother, but which let him pursue his studies of science and geology. He had a difficult personal life, making deep attachments to fellow scientists, but no lasting romantic relationships; he could be endlessly garrulous and loquacious, which leaves the impression he could be exhausting.
His first great journey of exploration was to South America, traveling through what is now Venezuela to prove that the Orinoco and Amazon basins are connected (which is true).
Everywhere he and his botanist companion, Aimé Bonpland, traveled, they measured everything and wrote it all down. Humboldt concluded that the land was badly degraded where colonial plantations and crops were dense and that Spanish colonialism had a lot to answer for. He established that Lake Valencia was drying up due to climate change caused by their deforestation and explained just what trees do to retain moisture and enrich soil. Humboldt predicted that man-made interventions would lead to irreversible climate change across the planet, thus predicting global warming as far back as 1800.
Anti-colonialism became an article of faith, and later gave him trouble with both the French and the English.
After exploring the jungle, he climbed Mount Chimborazo (in Ecuador), making it to 19,400 feet, just shy of the summit. He made measurements the entire way, all while hauling brass instruments – among them a telescope, barometer, hygrometer, magnetometer, thermometer - despite a wounded foot and wearing street shoes.
Humboldt came to realize that plants populate microclimates in layers as he ascended – and the microclimates and plants are the same across all mountains, allowing for latitude.
He was the first to define isotherms (a line on a map connecting points having the same temperature at the same time). He also came up with the ideas that volcanoes may be linked by the magma beneath them and that South America was once joined to Africa, foreshadowing plate tectonics. Humboldt was the first to find the magnetic equator and to measure magnetism across continents.
This expedition also included visits to Colombia, Peru, Havana, Mexico, Philadelphia and New York, followed by an invitation to meet with Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues at Monticello, where he educated them about the Louisiana Purchase they had just made, and gave them their first and best maps. Humboldt and Jefferson shared a lot of ideas, the one disagreement being on slavery, which Humboldt was implacably set against.
Once back in Europe, he was fêted in Paris, where he seemed to be everywhere, the expert on every new field of knowledge, alone able to link them all together. He did the same in London, where his publications were taking off – but failed to persuade the East India Company to let him explore India, those aristocratic grandees having no intention of allowing such an anti-colonial near their richest possession (Napoleon disliked him for similar reasons).
Returning to Berlin in his fifties, he continued to publish, to lecture (anyone could attend, which was unusual at the time, and his lectures were packed with people), and to bring scientists of different fields to conference together. This too was unique – the idea that science is interlinked and that cross-fertilization of ideas among disciplines can lead to new insights. In 1828, he managed to persuade the Germans, Russians, and the British (and their dominions) to measure magnetism daily, to investigate geomagnetic storms (his term for them), and thus established the first global ‘Big Science’ project.
Stuck as the Chamberlain to King Leopold in Berlin – essentially, intellectual entertainment for the evening – he eventually broke free by going on an expedition to look at platinum mines for the Russians, who wanted to use the metal as a currency. He was now 60, and the journey he undertook led him over the Urals and around the Caspian Sea, all the way to the border of China and back, over 10,000 miles without roads. His objective was to gain enough comparative knowledge to make his explorations and insights of South America and Europe truly global.
Once back in St Petersburg, and finally Berlin, he was able to complete his five-volume magnum opus, Cosmos, literally weaving together everything then known about the natural world. Humboldt’s books were translated into a dozen languages and devoured by lay readers as well as scientists, politicians, and businessmen.
The 100th anniversary of his death was celebrated across the world with parades and lavish events, but more recently he has become relatively unknown in English-speaking countries. This may be due to the anti-German sentiment in the United States and Great Britain leading up to and after World War I, his flowery and verbose writing style, or because his work was in multiple scientific areas, not easily taught and recognized within a single discipline.
Perhaps Humboldt’s greatest contribution is that he understood how “mankind’s mischief…disturbs nature’s order”. As early as 1800, he described how deforestation and monoculture destroyed soil, dried up lakes, destroyed native species and caused starvation. He promoted cooperation among scientists, humanists, and political leaders, eschewing the siloed approach which later developed, and wrote his books using language that could be understood and enjoyed by older children as well as mature scientists of the day.
The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf is a fascinating, inciteful read about his life, achievements, and legacy. It is also a humbling eye-opener to any of us who thought that our own generation invented environmentalism and is a must-read for anyone who enjoys nature.
Sources and Bibliography:
Wulf, Andrea. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. New York: Vintage Books, 2015
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