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

by Andrea Wulf

Some admired Humboldt’s ability to serve a royal master while maintaining the ‘courage to have his own opinion’. The King of Hanover, Ernst August I, however, remarked that Humboldt was ‘always the same, always republican, and always in the antechamber of the palace’. But it was probably Humboldt’s ability to inhabit both these worlds that allowed him so much freedom. Otherwise, as he admitted himself, he might have been thrown out of the country, for being ‘a revolutionary and the author of the godless Cosmos’.

During his lifetime the Americans had declared independence, yet they continued to spread what he called the ‘pest of slavery’.

the age of eighty, he wrote in November 1849, he was reduced to the ‘worn-out hope’ that the people’s desire for reforms had not disappeared for ever. Though it may seem ‘to be asleep’ periodically, he still hoped that their wish for change was in fact ‘eternal as the electromagnetic storm which sparkles in the sun’. Perhaps the next generation would succeed.

As the mathematician Friedrich Gauß said, the zeal with which Humboldt helped and encouraged others was ‘one of the most wonderful jewels in Humboldt’s crown’.

Europe. Life at the Prussian court had not broken his liberal ideals, he assured Bonpland, he still believed in freedom and equality. As both men grew older, their letters became increasingly tender, reminding each other of their long friendship and shared adventures.

Railways, steamships and telegraphs ‘made space shrink’, he declared.

The rooms overflowed with manuscripts and drawings, scientific instruments and more stuffed animals, as well as folios filled with pressed plants, rolled-up maps, busts, portraits and even a pet chameleon.

Many visitors commented on his boyish humour, such as his much repeated joke about his chameleon which was like ‘many clerics’, he said, in its ability to look with one eye to the heavens and with the other to the earth.

He was particularly furious when a pro-slavery southerner published an English edition of his Political Essay on the Island of Cuba, in 1856, in which all his criticism of slavery had been edited out. Outraged, Humboldt issued a press release that was published in newspapers across the United States, denouncing the edition and declaring that the deleted sections were the most important in the book.

hour’. That afternoon, at 2.30 p.m., Humboldt opened his eyes one more time as the sun caressed the walls of his bedroom and uttered his last words: ‘How glorious these sunbeams are! They seem to call Earth to the Heavens!’ He was eighty-nine when he died.

The Heart of the Andes combined beauty with the most meticulous geological, botanical and scientific detail – it was Humboldt’s concept of interconnectedness writ large on canvas. The painting transported the viewer into the wilderness of South America. Church was, the New York Times declared, the ‘artistic Humboldt of the new world’. On 9 May, and unaware that Humboldt had died three days earlier, Church wrote to a friend that he planned to send the painting to Berlin to show the old man the ‘scenery which delighted his eyes sixty years ago’.

One hundred and thirty years after Humboldt’s death, the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez resurrected him in The General in his Labyrinth, his fictionalized account of the last days of Simón Bolívar.

Humboldt was the ‘greatest of the priesthood of nature’, Marsh said, because he had understood the world as an interplay between man and nature – a connection that would underpin Marsh’s own work because he was collecting material for a book that would explain how humankind was destroying the environment.

‘I should like to know,’ he wrote to an English friend, ‘whether the newness of everything in America strikes a European as powerfully as the antiquity of the Eastern continent does

made sense. Humboldt had written that the ‘restless activity of large communities of men gradually despoil the face of the earth’ – exactly what Marsh was seeing now. Humboldt had said that the natural world was linked to the ‘political and moral history of humanity’, from imperial ambitions that exploited colonial crops to the migration of plants along the paths of ancient civilizations. He had described how sugar plantations in Cuba and the smelting of silver in Mexico had caused dramatic deforestation. Greed shaped societies and nature. Man left trails of destruction, Humboldt had said, ‘wherever he stepped’.

‘Trust nothing to the memory,’ wrote the man who was famed for his ability to recollect everything he read.

Man and Nature was the synthesis of what Marsh had read and observed over the past decades. ‘I shall steal, pretty much,’ he had joked to his friend Baird when he started, ‘but I do know some things myself.’

in some parts of Europe because their usual hunters were occupied on the battlefields.

This speech carried the nucleus of American environmentalism. Nature, Madison had said, was not subservient to the use of man. Madison had called upon his fellow citizens to protect the environment but his warnings had been largely ignored.

It was Simón Bolívar who had first enshrined Humboldt’s ideas into law when he had issued a visionary decree in 1825, requiring the government in Bolivia to plant 1 million trees.

‘Measures for the Protection and Wise Use of the National Forests’ for Colombia, with a particular focus on controlling the quinine harvest from the bark of the wild-growing cinchona tree – a damaging method that stripped the trees of their protective bark and one that Humboldt had already noted during his expedition.4

Man and Nature was the first work of natural history fundamentally to influence American politics. It was, as the American writer and environmentalist Wallace Stegner later said, the ‘rudest kick in the face’ to America’s optimism. At a time when the country was racing towards industrialization – fiercely exploiting its natural resources and razing its forests – Marsh wanted to make his compatriots pause and think.

John Muir, the ‘father of the National Parks’, would read it, as would Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the United States Forestry Service, who would call it ‘epoch-making’.

Man and Nature resonated internationally too. It was intensely discussed in Australia and inspired French foresters as well as legislators in New Zealand. It encouraged conservationists in South Africa and Japan to fight for the protection of trees. Italian forest laws cited Marsh, and conservationists in India even carried the book ‘along the slope of the Northern Himalaya, and into Kashmir and Tibet’. Man and Nature shaped a new generation of activists and would in the first half of the twentieth century be celebrated as ‘the fountainhead of the conservation movement’.

Where Faust is torn between his love for the earthly world and the longing to soar to higher realms, Haeckel was torn between art and science, between feeling nature with his heart or investigating the natural world like a zoologist.

climbed Vesuvius and then sailed to Capri, another small island in the Bay of Naples where Haeckel hoped to see nature as an ‘interconnected whole’.

Week after week, Haeckel identified new species and even new families. By early February he had discovered over sixty previously unknown species. Then, on 10 February 1860, the morning catch alone brought twelve new ones. He fell on his knees in front of his microscope, he wrote to Anna, and bowed to the benevolent sea gods and nymphs to thank them for their generous gifts.

Haeckel the act of drawing was the best method of understanding nature. With pencil and paintbrush, he said, he ‘penetrated deeper into the secret of her beauty’ than ever before; they were his tools of seeing and learning. The two souls in his breast had finally been united.

Generelle Morphologie was not only a rallying call for the new theory of evolution but also the book in which Haeckel first named Humboldt’s discipline: Oecologie, or ‘ecology’.

Greek word for household – oikos – and applied it to the natural world. All the earth’s organisms belonged together like a family occupying a dwelling; and like the members of a household they could conflict with, or assist, one another. Organic and inorganic nature made a ‘system of active forces’, he wrote in Generelle Morphologie, using Humboldt’s exact words. Haeckel took Humboldt’s idea of nature as a unified whole made up of complex interrelationships and gave it a name. Ecology, Haeckel said, was the ‘science of the relationships of an organism with its environment’.5

Here in the tropics, Haeckel said, the ‘struggle of survival’ was so intense that the weapons that flora and fauna had developed were ‘exceptionally rich’ and varied. This was the place to see how plants and animals lived together with ‘friends and enemies, their symbionts and parasites’, Haeckel wrote. It was Humboldt’s web of life.

The tropics are exemplary of the rest of Natur for their abundance. They represent the trophic chains in their maximum expression

Many of Haeckel’s books included his sumptuous illustrations, mostly presented as a series rather than as individual images. For Haeckel these depictions showed the narrative of nature – his compelling way of making evolution ‘visible’. Art had become a tool through which Haeckel conveyed scientific knowledge.

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.

Published between 1899 and 1904, Art Forms in Nature became hugely influential.

The Art Nouveau artists at the turn of the century tried to reconcile the disturbed relationship between man and nature by taking aesthetic inspiration from the natural world. They ‘now learned from nature’ and not from their teachers, one German designer commented.

Art Nouveau its particular style. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí magnified Haeckel’s marine organisms into banisters and arches. Giant sea urchins decorated his stained-glass windows, and the huge ceiling lamps that he designed looked like nautilus shells.

Binet’s Porte Monumentale at the Paris World Fair in 1900 (Illustration Credit

He became an ardent proponent of ‘monism’ – the idea that there was no division between the organic and the inorganic world.

Welträthsel (The Riddle of the Universe) which was published in 1899, the same year as the first issue of his Art Forms in Nature. It became a huge international bestseller, with 450,000 copies sold in Germany alone. Welträthsel was translated into twenty-seven languages, including Sanskrit, Chinese and Hebrew and became the most influential popular science book at the turn of the century.

Haeckel wrote that the goddess of truth lived in the ‘temple of nature’.

He also believed that the unity in nature could be expressed through aesthetics. To Haeckel’s mind, this nature-infused art evoked a new world. As Humboldt had already said in his ‘brilliant Kosmos’, Haeckel wrote, art was one of the most important educational tools as it nurtured the love for nature.

What Humboldt had called the ‘scientific and aesthetic contemplation’ of the natural world, Haeckel now insisted, was essential for the understanding of the universe, and it was this appreciation that became a ‘natural religion’.

As long as there were scientists and artists, Haeckel believed, there was no need fo...

In the late summer of 1867, eight years after Humboldt’s death, twenty-nine-year-old John Muir packed his bag and left Indianapolis, where he had worked for the previous fifteen months, to make his way to South America.

‘I was fond of everything that was wild,’ Muir recalled, remembering how he would escape from a father who forced him to recite the entire Old and New Testaments ‘by heart and by sore flesh’.

When his eyesight was fully restored, nothing was going to prevent him from going to South America to see the ‘tropical vegetation in all its palmy glory’.

‘The cosmos,’ he said, using Humboldt’s term, would be incomplete without man but also without ‘the smallest transmicroscopic creature’.

Over the past two decades the gold rush had turned the small town of 1,000 inhabitants into a bustling city of some 150,000 people.

As he wrote of ‘a thousand invisible cords’ and ‘innumerable unbreakable cords’, and of those ‘that cannot be broken’, he mulled over a concept of nature where everything was connected. Every tree, flower, insect, bird, stream or lake seemed to invite him ‘to learn something of its history and relationship’, and the greatest achievements of his first summer in Yosemite, he said, were ‘lessons of unity and inter-relation’.2

Unlike the scientists who at that time conducted the Geological Survey of California and who believed that cataclysmic eruptions had given birth to the valley, Muir was the first to realize that glaciers – slowly moving giants of ice – had carved it out over thousands of years. Muir began to read the glacial footprints and scars on the rocks. When he found a living glacier, he proved his theory of glacial motion in Yosemite Valley by placing stakes into the ice which moved several inches over a period of forty-six days.