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

by Andrea Wulf

This one tree, he said, ‘spreads life around it in the desert’. Humboldt had discovered the idea of a keystone species, a species that is as essential for an ecosystem as a keystone is to an arch, almost 200 years before the concept was named. For Humboldt the Mauritia palm was the ‘tree of life’ – the perfect

They sorted and packed up everything they had hoarded over the past one and a half years to send to Europe.

Banks had also always tried to help French scientists by providing them with passports, despite the Napoleonic Wars, in the belief that the international community of scientists transcended war and national interests. ‘The science of two Nations may be at Peace,’ he said, ‘while their Politics are at war.’

The first was to ascertain if they were ‘local’ occurrences or if they were linked subterraneously with each other. If they were not just local phenomena but instead consisted of groups or clusters that stretched across huge distances, it was possible that they were connected through the core of the earth. Humboldt’s second reason was that studying volcanoes might provide an answer to how the earth itself had been created.

The irony was that Rosa’s handsome brother, Carlos Montúfar, now became Humboldt’s companion – a pattern of friendship that repeated itself in Humboldt’s life. He never married – in fact, he once said that a married man was always ‘a lost man’ – nor did he ever seem to have had any intimate relationships with women.

Mountains held a spell over Humboldt. It wasn’t just the physical demands or the promise of new knowledge. There was also something more transcendental.

Spanish Empire in Latin America was divided into four viceroyalties and a few autonomous districts such as the Captaincy General of Venezuela. The Viceroyalty of New Granada encompassed much of the northern part of

There was no way to cross. As they paused, Humboldt took out the barometer again and measured their altitude at 19,413 feet. Though they wouldn’t make it to the summit, it still felt like being on the top of the world. No one had ever come this high – not even the early balloonists in Europe.

Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force. He was, a colleague later said, the first to understand that everything was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads’. This new idea of nature was to change the way people understood the world.

‘Nature is a living whole,’ he later said, not a ‘dead aggregate’. One single life had been poured over stones, plants, animals and humankind.

This variety and richness, but also the simplicity of the scientific information depicted, was unprecedented. No one before Humboldt had presented such data visually.

Instead of placing plants in their taxonomic categories, he saw vegetation through the lens of climate and location: a radically new idea that still shapes our understanding of ecosystems today.

The bark of the cinchona tree contains quinine which was used to treat malaria, but once the bark was removed, the trees died. The Spanish had stripped huge swathes of wild forest. Older and thicker trees, Humboldt noted, had now become scarce.

As Humboldt had moved south along the Andes from Bogotá to Quito, coming closer to the Equator, he had measured how the earth’s magnetic field decreased. To his surprise, even after they had crossed the Equator near Quito the intensity of the magnetic field had continued to drop, until they reached the barren Cajamarca Plateau in Peru which was more than 7 degrees and about 500 miles south of the geographic Equator. It was only here that the dip of the needle turned from north to south: Humboldt had discovered the magnetic equator.

The current’s cold, nutrient-loaded water supports such abundance of marine life that it is the world’s most productive marine ecosystem.

one way it is because it is so close to the Equator, its peak is the furthest away from the centre of the earth.

He was a restless man who warned his daughter that ennui was ‘the most dangerous poison of life’.

He suffered from what he called the ‘malady of Bibliomanie’, constantly buying and studying books. In Europe, he had also made time between his duties to see the finest

There were those, like Jefferson, who envisaged the United States as an agrarian republic with an emphasis on individual liberty and the rights of the individual states, but also those who favoured trade and a strong central government.

that Jefferson wanted to convey. Jefferson regarded himself foremost as a farmer and gardener, and not as a politician. ‘No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth,’

Humboldt talked and talked, Gallatin noted, ‘twice as fast as anybody I know’. Humboldt spoke English with a German accent but also German, French and Spanish, ‘mixing them together in rapid Speech’. He was a ‘fountain of knowledge which flows in copious streams’. They learned more from him in two hours than they would from reading books for two years. Humboldt was a ‘very extraordinary man’, Gallatin told his wife. Jefferson agreed – Humboldt was ‘the most scientific man of his age’.

timber – ‘either by violence or exchange’, Humboldt said, and motivated only by ‘insatiable avarice’.

The Spanish king even enjoyed a monopoly on snow in Quito, Lima and other colonial towns, so that it could be used for the production of sorbet for the wealthy elites. It was absurd, Humboldt said, that something that ‘fell from the sky’ should belong to the Spanish crown. To his mind the politics and economics of a colonial government were based on ‘immorality’.

crops. More than any other plant, indigo ‘impoverishes the soil’, Humboldt had noted. The land looked exhausted and in a few years, he predicted, nothing would grow there any more. The soil was being exploited ‘like a mine’.

did not create a happy society, Humboldt said. What was needed was subsistence farming, based on edible crops and variety such as bananas,

As he had crossed Venezuela on his way to the Orinoco, Humboldt had been impressed by his host at Lake Valencia who had encouraged the progress of agriculture and the distribution of wealth by parcelling up his estate into small farms.

The institution of slavery was unnatural, Humboldt said, because ‘what is against nature, is unjust, bad and without validity.’

observations. He brought back some 60,000 plant specimens, 6,000 species of which almost 2,000 were new to European botanists – a staggering figure, considering that there were only about 6,000 known species

Humboldt was not planning to keep his specimens, but was instead sending them to scientists across Europe because he believed that to share was the path to new and greater discoveries.

Although Humboldt enjoyed being fêted in Paris, he also felt like a stranger and dreaded the first European winter – and so perhaps it was no surprise that he gravitated towards a group of young South Americans living in Paris at that time whom he probably met through Montúfar. One was twenty-one-year-old Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan who would later become the leader of the revolutions in South America.2

When Bolívar visited Humboldt in his lodgings, which were filled with books, journals and drawings from South America, he discovered a man who was enchanted with his country, a man who couldn’t stop talking about the riches of a continent unknown to most Europeans.

But behind Humboldt’s ambition, hectic activity and sharp comments, his brother Wilhelm believed, was a great gentleness and a vulnerability that no one really noticed. Though Alexander hankered after fame and recognition, Wilhelm

In the first half of the eighteenth century the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus had revolutionized this concept with his so-called sexual system, classifying the world of flowering plants based on the number of reproductive organs in the plants – the pistils and stamens.

In the Essay Humboldt explained the idea of vegetation zones – ‘long bands’ as he called them – that were slung across the globe.1 He gave western science a new lens through which to view the natural world.

The similarities of their coastal plants, Humboldt wrote, showed an ‘ancient’ connection between Africa and South America as well as illustrating how islands that were previously linked were now separated – an incredible conclusion more than a century before scientists had even begun to discuss continental movements and the theory of shifting tectonic plates.

His so-called ‘philosophy of nature’ became the theoretical backbone of German Idealism and Romanticism. Schelling called for ‘the necessity to grasp nature in her unity’.

a scientific book unembarrassed by lyricism. For Humboldt the prose was as important as the content and he insisted that his publisher was not allowed to change a single syllable lest the ‘melody’ of his sentences would be destroyed.

In Views of Nature Humboldt showed how nature could have an influence on people’s imagination. Nature, he wrote, was in a mysterious communication with our ‘inner feelings’. A clear blue sky, for example, triggers different emotions than a heavy blanket of dark clouds. Tropical scenery, densely filled with banana and palm trees, has a different effect than an open forest of white-stemmed slender birches. What we might take for granted today – that there is a correlation between the external world and our mood – was a revelation to Humboldt’s readers. Poets had engaged with such ideas but never a scientist.

Henry David Thoreau read it, as did Ralph Waldo Emerson who declared that Humboldt had swept clean ‘this sky full of cobwebs’. And Charles Darwin would ask his brother to send a copy to Uruguay where he hoped to pick it up when the Beagle stopped there.

Another acquaintance compared him to an ‘overcharged instrument’ that played incessantly. Humboldt’s way of speaking was ‘actually thinking out loud’.

In his notebooks, for example, Davy filled one side with the objective accounts of his experiments, while on the other page he wrote his personal reactions and emotional responses.

Like Humboldt, Davy believed that imagination and reason were necessary to perfect the philosophic mind – they were the ‘creative source of discovery’.

Humboldt’s books and ideas would feed into the liberation of Latin America – from his criticism of colonialism and slavery to his portrayal of the majestic landscapes.

‘With his pen’ Humboldt had awakened South America, Bolívar later said, and had illustrated why South Americans had many reasons to be proud of their continent.

To this day Humboldt’s name is much more widely known in Latin America than in most of Europe or the United States.

There were also so-called captaincy generals, such as those of Venezuela, Chile and Cuba.

As the revolutions unfolded the former American President, Thomas Jefferson, bombarded Humboldt with questions: If the revolutionaries succeeded what kind of government would they establish, he asked, and how equal would their society be? Would despotism prevail? ‘All these questions you can answer better than any other,’ Jefferson insisted in one letter.

He said that dancing was the ‘poetry of motion’, but could also coldly order the execution of hundreds of prisoners. He could be charming when in a good mood but ‘ferocious’ when irritated, with his moods shifting so fast that ‘the change was incredible’, as one of his generals said.

Legions of Hell were under the command of fierce and sadistic José Tomás Boves, a Spaniard who had lived in the Llanos as a cattle dealer and whose army would eventually kill 80,000 republicans.

Bolívar’s revolution descended into a merciless civil war.