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

by Andrea Wulf

Emerson’s insistence on sleeping indoors was a ‘sad commentary’, Muir said, on ‘the glorious transcendentalism’.

Emerson, though, was so impressed by Muir’s knowledge and love for nature that he wanted him to join the faculty at Harvard University where he himself had studied and still sometimes gave a lecture. Muir refused.

In his copy of The Maine Woods he underlined Thoreau’s call for ‘national preserves’ and began to think about the protection of the wilderness. Humboldt’s ideas had come full circle. Not only had Humboldt influenced some of the most important thinkers, scientists and artists but they in turn inspired each other.

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.” ’

Muir also noted how many wildflowers had disappeared since he had first visited the Sierra two decades earlier.

And it was for those reasons that Muir co-founded the Sierra Club two years later, in 1892. Conceived as a ‘defence association’ for the wilderness, the Sierra Club is today America’s largest grassroots environmental organization.

Muir, by contrast, interpreted Humboldt’s ideas differently. He advocated preservation, by which he meant the protection of nature from human impact. Muir wanted to keep forests, rivers and mountains in pristine conditions, pursuing that goal with a steely persistence.

They had learned hard lessons. ‘Nothing dollarable is safe, however guarded,’ as Muir said.

Two weeks later Muir reached Belém in Brazil, the gateway to the Amazon. Forty-four years after he had left Indianapolis for his walk south, and more than a century after Humboldt had set sail, Muir finally set foot on South American soil. He was seventy-three years old.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world. He was one of the last polymaths, and died at a time when scientific disciplines were hardening into tightly fenced and more specialized fields. Consequently his more holistic approach – a scientific method that included art, history, poetry and politics alongside hard data – has fallen out of favour. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there was little room for a man whose knowledge had bridged a vast range of subjects. As scientists crawled into their narrow areas of expertise, dividing and further subdividing, they lost Humboldt’s interdisciplinary methods and his concept of nature as a global force.

Unlike Christopher Columbus or Isaac Newton, Humboldt did not discover a continent or a new law of physics. Humboldt was not known for a single fact or

discovery but for his worldview. His vision of nature has passed into our consciousness as if by osmosis. It is almost as though his ideas have become so manifest that the man behind them has disappeared.

In a world where we tend to draw a sharp line between the sciences and the arts, between the subjective and the objective, Humboldt’s insight that we can only truly understand nature by using our imagination makes him a visionary.

‘There is in fact no distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of the people. When one is abused, the other suffers.’