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

by Andrea Wulf

thirty-two-year-old had brought a vast array of the best instruments from Europe. For the ascent of Chimborazo,

He saw the earth as one great living organism where everything was connected, conceiving a bold new vision of nature that still influences the way that we understand the natural world.

compared America to ‘a Cartesian vortex, carrying away and levelling everything to dull monotony’.

He was confident, yet constantly yearned for approval.

He wanted to excite a ‘love of nature’.

After he saw the devastating environmental effects of colonial plantations at Lake Valencia in Venezuela in 1800, Humboldt became the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced climate change. Deforestation there had made the land barren, water levels of the lake were falling and with the disappearance of brushwood torrential rains had washed away the soils on the surrounding mountain slopes.

Forgotten history

In Cleveland some 8,000 people took to the streets and in Syracuse another 15,000 joined a march that was more than a mile long.

Let us imagine him, one speaker said, ‘as standing on the Andes’ with his mind soaring above all.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is based on Humboldt’s concept of interconnectedness, and scientist James Lovelock’s famous Gaia theory of the earth as a living organism bears remarkable similarities.

In Quito, I held Humboldt’s original Spanish passport in my hands – the very papers that allowed him to travel through Latin America. In Berlin, I finally understood how his mind worked when I opened the boxes that contained his notes – marvellous collages of thousands of bits of paper, sketches and numbers.

John Muir’s idea that: ‘the clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness’.

though French and English contemporaries often dismissed the Germans as coarse and backward, there were more universities and libraries in the German states than anywhere else in Europe.

Humboldt felt an inexplicable pull towards the unknown, what the Germans call Fernweh – a longing for distant places

During the eighteenth century ‘natural philosophy’ – what we would call ‘natural sciences’ today

It was during this period that Humboldt became obsessed with so-called ‘animal electricity’, or Galvanism as it was known after Luigi Galvani, an Italian scientist.

the concept of organic and inorganic ‘matter’ and whether either contained any kind of ‘force’ or ‘active principle’.

Newton had propounded the idea that matter was essentially inert but that other properties were added by God. Meanwhile, those scientists who had been busy classifying flora and fauna had been more concerned with bringing order to chaos than with ideas that plants or animals might be governed by a different set of laws than inanimate objects.

The beginning of an organizing link and properties between all living beings

‘Gordian knot of the processes of life’.

Science for him was like a ‘plank in a shipwreck’.

Goethe was not interested in classification but in the forces that shaped animals and plants, he explained. He distinguished between the internal force – the urform – that provided the general form of a living organism and the environment – the external force – that shaped the organism itself.

Comparison became Humboldt’s primary means of understanding nature, not abstract mathematics or numbers.

Rationalists tended to believe that all knowledge came from reason and rational thought, while the empiricists argued that one could ‘know’ the world only through experience. Empiricists insisted that there was nothing in the mind that had not come from the senses.

The laws of nature as we understand them, Kant wrote in his famous Critique of Pure Reason, only existed because our mind interpreted them.

Our senses as much as our reason are like tinted spectacles through which we perceive the world.

We impose this order on nature, and not nature upon us. And with this the ‘Self’ became the creative ego – almost like a lawgiver of nature even if it meant that we could never have a ‘true’ knowledge of the ‘thing-in-itself’.

In his Physische Geographie, as the series was called, Kant insisted that knowledge was a systematic construct in which individual facts needed to fit into a larger framework in order to make sense.

He used the image of a house to explain this: before constructing it brick by brick and piece by piece, it was necessary to have an idea of how the entire building would look. It was this concept of a system that became the linchpin of Humboldt’s later thinking.

Half a century later, he would still say that the external world only existed in so far as we perceived it ‘within ourselves’. As it was shaped inside the mind, so did it shape our understanding of nature. The external world, ideas and feelings ‘melt into each other’, Humboldt would write.

When Faust declares his ambition in the first scene, ‘That I may detect the inmost force / Which binds the world, and guides its course’,

Humboldt scribbled in the margins in jest: ‘large mouth, fat nose, but chin bien fait’.

provided a passport to the colonies in South America and the Philippines on the express condition that Humboldt financed the voyage himself. In return Humboldt promised to dispatch flora and fauna for the royal cabinet and garden. Never before had a foreigner been allowed such great freedom to explore their territories. Even the Spanish themselves were surprised by their king’s decision.

forty-two instruments in all, individually packed into protective velvet-lined boxes

But the real purpose of the voyage, he said, was to discover how ‘all forces of nature are interlaced and interwoven’ – how organic and inorganic nature interacted. Man needs to strive for ‘the good and the great’, Humboldt wrote in his last letter from Spain, ‘the rest depends on destiny’.

When he first saw the Southern Cross, Humboldt realized that he had achieved the dreams of his ‘earliest youth’.

So did I feel this sense of accomplishment on a two am flight from saopaulo to Fortaleza

The colonies were forbidden to trade with each other without explicit permission. Communication was also closely controlled. Licences had to be granted to print books and newspapers, while local printing presses and manufacturing businesses were prohibited, and only those born in Spain were allowed to own shops or mines in the colonies.

Unlike other naturalists, Humboldt was not interested in filling taxonomic gaps – he was collecting ideas rather than just natural history objects,

mid-November Humboldt and Bonpland – together with a mestizo servant called José de la Cruz – chartered a small open thirty-foot local trading boat to sail westwards.

Ninety-five per cent of the city’s white population were criollos, or as Humboldt called them ‘Hispano-Americans’ – white colonists of Spanish descent but born in South America.

Memories and emotional responses, Humboldt realized, would always form part of man’s experience and understanding of nature. Imagination was like ‘a balm of miraculous healing properties’, he said.

‘smiling valleys of Aragua’. Stretching west were endless neat rows of corn, sugarcane and indigo. In between they could see small groves of trees, little villages, farmhouses and gardens. The farms were connected by paths lined with flowering shrubs and the houses shaded by large trees – tall ceibas clothed in thick yellow blossoms with their branches plaited into the flamboyant orange blooms of coral trees.

It was here, at Lake Valencia, that Humboldt developed his idea of human-induced climate change.

Timber was the oil of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and any shortages created similar anxieties about fuel, manufacturing and transport, as threats to oil production do today.

‘Everything,’ Humboldt later said, ‘is interaction and reciprocal.’

century Buffon had painted a picture of the primeval forest as a horrendous place full of decaying trees, rotting leaves, parasitic plants, stagnant pools and venomous insects. The wilderness, he said, was deformed.

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

cacao as well as the pod-like fruits of the tamarind tree which they were told turned the river water into a refreshing lemonade. The rest of the food they would have to catch – fish, turtle eggs, birds and other game – and barter for more with the indigenous tribes with the alcohol they had packed.

It was the absence of man, Humboldt noted, that allowed animals to prosper abundantly but it was a development that was ‘limited only by themselves’ – by their mutual pressure.

Then, as they reached the most southerly point of their river expedition, with their supplies at their lowest, they found huge nuts which they cracked open for their nutritious seeds – the magnificent Brazil nut that Humboldt subsequently introduced to Europe.

‘What speaks to the soul,’ Humboldt said, ‘escapes our measurements.’ This was not nature as a mechanistic system but a thrilling new world filled with wonder. Seeing South America with the eyes that Goethe had given him, Humboldt was enraptured.

And though Humboldt had not ‘discovered’ the Casiquiare, he had made a detailed map of the complex tributary system of these rivers.