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

by Andrea Wulf

On the whole the ‘subduing of the wilderness’, most agreed, was the ‘foundation for future profit’.

Beauty was equated with utility and every acre wrested from the wilderness was a victory of civilized man over uncivilized nature.

There was something about the flatness and its daunting size that ‘fills the mind with the feeling of infinity’,

‘What speaks to the soul,’ Humboldt said, ‘escapes our measurements.’

Whenever he stood on a summit or a high ridge, he felt so moved by the scenery that his imagination carried him even higher. This imagination, he said, soothed the ‘deep wounds’ that pure ‘reason’ sometimes created.

public welfare could not be measured ‘according to the value of its exports’. Justice and freedom were more important than numbers and the wealth of a few.

Scientists needed to leave their garrets and travel the world.

This was a scientific book unembarrassed by lyricism.

‘Without a diversity of opinion, the discovery of truth is impossible,’

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.

Nature was a ‘living whole’ where organisms were bound together in a ‘net-like intricate fabric’.

Where other scientists focused only on meteorological data such as temperature and weather, Humboldt was the first to understand climate as a system of complex correlations between the atmosphere, oceans and landmasses.

‘How glorious these sunbeams are! They seem to call Earth to the Heavens!’

‘We can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble in the ocean of organic life,’

‘Earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant,’

‘Why ought man to value himself as more than an infinitely small unit of the one great unit of creation?’

‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,’

‘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.” ’

‘I mean simply to go on hammering & thumping as best I can.’

‘Nothing dollarable is safe, however guarded,’

‘But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure … a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.’