The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

by Andrea Wulf

In Miass, on 14 September, Humboldt celebrated his sixtieth birthday with the local apothecary, a man whom history would remember as Vladimir Lenin’s grandfather.

Later, when he published the results of the Russian expedition in two books,2 Humboldt wrote about the destruction of forests and of humankind’s long-term changes to the environment. When he listed the three ways in which the human species was affecting the climate, he named deforestation, ruthless irrigation and, perhaps most prophetically, the ‘great masses of steam and gas’ produced in the industrial centres. No one but Humboldt had looked at the relationship between humankind and nature like this before.3

Humboldt’s nature was ‘animated by one breath – from pole to pole, one life is poured on rocks, plants, animals, and even into the swelling breast of man’,

comprised of.

because at his age he was running out of time – ‘those half dead are riding fast,’ he said.

Humboldt had studied venomous snakes in South America ‘and learned a lot from them’, one young scientist claimed.

Many noticed how impossible it was for Humboldt just to sit. One moment he was standing at his shelves searching for a book, and at another bending over a table to roll out some drawings.

At the turn of the century, Haeckel published a series of booklets called Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) – taken together it was a collection of one hundred exquisite illustrations that would shape the stylistic language of Art Nouveau.

Some of the sequoias in Mariposa Grove soared almost 300 feet high and were more than 2,000 years old. The largest single-stemmed trees on earth, they are one of the oldest living things on the planet.

On one occasion, when he climbed a mountain with Charles Sargent, the director of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, Muir was amazed how a man so learned about trees could be so untouched by the magnificent autumnal scenery. While he was jumping around and singing to ‘glory in it all’, Sargent stood ‘cool as a rock’. When Muir asked him why, Sargent replied, ‘I don’t wear my heart upon my sleeve.’ But Muir was not allowing Sargent to get away with this. ‘Who cares where you wear your little heart, man,’ Muir countered, ‘there you stand in the face of all Heaven come down to earth, like a critic of the universe, as if to say “Come, Nature, bring on the best you have: I’m from BOSTON.”

‘Nothing dollarable is safe, however guarded,’ as Muir said.