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

by Andrea Wulf

Humboldt influenced many of the greatest thinkers, artists and scientists of his day. Thomas Jefferson called him ‘one of the greatest ornaments of the age’. Charles Darwin wrote that ‘nothing ever stimulated my zeal so much as reading Humboldt’s Personal Narrative,’ saying that he would not have boarded the Beagle, nor conceived of the Origin of Species, without Humboldt. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge both incorporated Humboldt’s concept of nature into their poems. And America’s most revered nature writer, Henry David Thoreau, found in Humboldt’s books an answer to his dilemma on how to be a poet and a naturalist – Walden would have been a very different book without Humboldt. Simón Bolívar, the revolutionary who liberated South America from Spanish colonial rule, called Humboldt the ‘discoverer of the New World’ and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet, declared that spending a few days with Humboldt was like ‘having lived several years’.

Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California

moon there is an area called ‘Mare Humboldtianum’.

Hmm should play part in my book

According to family lore, one day the Prussian king, Frederick the Great, asked the boy if he planned to conquer the world like his namesake, Alexander the Great. Young Humboldt’s answer was: ‘Yes, Sir, but with my head.’

Fittingly, the months before his birth had seen the first international scientific collaboration when astronomers from dozens of nations had coordinated and shared their observations of the transit of Venus.

I read this somewhhre once

As a boy Alexander had read the journals of Captain James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville,

He met Captain William Bligh (of the infamous mutiny on the Bounty), and Joseph Banks, Cook’s botanist on his first voyage around the world, and by now the president of the Royal Society,

WOrd ia small

Fernweh – a longing for distant places –

Humboldt now also became interested in the working conditions of the miners whom he saw crawling into the bowels of the earth every morning. To improve their safety, he invented a breathing mask,

With a scalpel he made incisions on his arms and torso. Then he carefully rubbed chemicals and acids into the open wounds or stuck metals, wires and electrodes on to his skin or under

He was manic!

The University of Jena had become one of the largest and most famous in the German-speaking regions, attracting progressive thinkers from across the other more repressive German states because of its liberal attitude. There was no other place, said the resident poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, where liberty and truth ruled so much.

As is true today in the united states

Kant believed that this order was shaped by our mind, through those tinted spectacles. 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’. The result was that the emphasis was shifting towards the Self.

over the Critique of Pure Reason. One of Kant’s pupils,

Faust

Need to reed

Goethe’s descriptions of nature in his plays, novels and poems were as truthful, Humboldt believed, as the discoveries of the best scientists.

Humboldt would thus become the link that connected Newton’s Opticks, which explained that rainbows were created by light refracting through raindrops, to poets such as John Keats, who declared that Newton ‘had destroyed all the Poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism’.

And yet the poetry of light and prisms is sublime

Benjamin Franklin who had also feared the ‘loss for wood’. As a solution Franklin had invented a fuel-efficient fireplace.

The action of humankind across the globe, he warned, could affect future generations. What he saw at Lake Valencia he would see again and again – from Lombardy in Italy to southern Peru, and many decades later in Russia. As Humboldt described how humankind was changing the climate, he unwittingly became the father of the environmental movement.

Little did he know how prescient he was

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

With every tree that was cut from the virgin forest, they insisted, the air had become healthier and milder. Lack of evidence didn’t stop them from preaching their theories. One such was Hugh Williamson, a physician and politician from North Carolina, who published an article in 1770 that celebrated the clearing of huge swathes of forests, which, he claimed, was to the benefit of the climate.

Look at that, ignorant dangerous politicians even then

The men passed islands that were home to thousands of flamingos, white herons and pink-coloured spoonbills with their large spatula-shaped beaks.

Find his desription of this for serene

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 symbol of nature as a living organism.

Humboldt seemed to prefer to be outdoors, she complained, rather than in the company of attractive women.

Or maybe with men :)

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.

Ah yeah. Why does she not just come out and say he was gay

Humboldt never explicitly explained the nature of these male friendships but it’s likely that they remained platonic because he admitted that ‘I don’t know sensual needs.’

Ah, bs

but 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.

Amen

but 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.

Still pertinent today

There had been a few exceptions. 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. Instead of running a huge plantation, he had given much of his land to impoverished families – some of them freed slaves, others peasants who were too poor to own them. These families now worked as free independent farmers; they were not rich but they could live off the land. Similarly, between Honda and Bogotá, Humboldt had seen small haciendas where fathers and sons worked together without slave labour, planting sugar but also edible plants for their own consumption. ‘I love to dwell on these details,’ Humboldt said, because they proved his point.

Sad thing. The system corrupts, so examples that should be normal are exemplary

Humboldt insisted that there were no superior or inferior races.

No matter what nationality, colour or religion, all humans came from one root. Much like plant families, Humboldt explained, which adapted differently to their geographical and climatic conditions but nonetheless displayed the traits of ‘a common type’, so did all the members of the human race belong to one family. All men were equal, Humboldt said, and no race was above another, because ‘all are alike designed for freedom’.

Views of Nature Humboldt

These annotations, however, were gems in themselves: some were little essays, others were fragments of thoughts or pointers towards future discoveries. Here Humboldt, for example, talked about evolutionary ideas long before Darwin published his Origin of Species.

In the previous year Bolívar had written a letter to Humboldt that underlined how important his descriptions of South America’s nature had been. It had been Humboldt’s evocative writing that had ‘uprooted’ him and his fellow revolutionaries from ignorance, Bolívar wrote; it had made them proud of their continent. Humboldt was the ‘discoverer of the New World’, Bolívar insisted. And it may well have been Humboldt’s obsessive interest in South American volcanoes that also inspired Bolívar’s rallying call to unite his country in their fight: ‘a great volcano lies at our feet … [and] the yoke of slavery will break.’

For decades Humboldt had criticized governments, openly voicing his dissent and opinions, but by the time he moved to Berlin, he had grown disillusioned with politics. As a young man he had been electrified by the French Revolution, but in recent years he had watched how the ultra-royalists of the Ancien Régime were turning back the clock in France. Elsewhere in Europe the mood was also reactionary. Wherever Humboldt looked, he saw how hope of change had been quashed.

Seems we re in one of reactionary moments today

‘We are on the brink of a great struggle between property and population,’

Moms sayings the more things change the more they stay the same

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

And though theories of shifting tectonic plates would only be confirmed in the mid-twentieth century, Humboldt had already discussed in 1807 in the Essay on the Geography of Plants that the continents of Africa and South America had once been connected.

Later he wrote that the reason for this continental shift was ‘a subterranean force’.

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.

Within a few years a web of magnetic stations laced the globe: at St Petersburg, Beijing and Alaska, Canada and Jamaica, Australia and New Zealand, Sri Lanka and even the remote island of St Helena in the South Atlantic where Napoleon had been incarcerated. Almost two million observations would be taken in three years. Like today’s climate change scientists, those who worked at these new stations were collecting global data, participating in what we would now call a Big Science Project. This was an international collaboration on a vast scale – the so-called ‘Magnetic Crusade’.

Charles Lyell’s revolutionary Principles of Geology

Next to it was Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, the seven-volume account of the Latin American expedition and the reason why Darwin was on the Beagle.

He had also turned Carl Linnaeus’s botanical classification system into verse in his hugely popular poem Loves of the Plants – which Humboldt and Goethe had read in the 1790s.

Humboldt read darwin who read humboldt

Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus had already written about it in his book Zoonomia, as had Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Humboldt’s old acquaintance from the natural history museum in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.

‘What hourly carnage in the magnificent calm picture of Tropical forests,’ Darwin scribbled in the margins. ‘To show how animals prey on each other,’ he noted, ‘what a “positive” check.’ Here, written in pencil in the margins of Humboldt’s fifth volume of Personal Narrative, Darwin recorded for the first time his ‘theory by which to work’.

Darwin took Humboldt’s evocative description of thickets teeming with birds, insects and other animals7 and turned it into his famous entangled bank metaphor: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.

Humboldt wrote in Personal Narrative: ‘The beasts of the forest retire to the thickets; the birds hide themselves beneath the foliage of the trees, or in the crevices of the rocks. Yet, amid this apparent silence, when we lend an attentive ear to the most feeble sounds transmitted by the air, we hear a dull vibration, a continual murmur, a hum of insects, that fill, if we may use the expression, all the lower strata of the air. Nothing is better fitted to make man feel the extent and power of organic life. Myriads of insects creep upon the soil, and flutter round the plants parched by the ardour of the Sun. A confused noise issues from every bush, from the decayed trunks of trees, from the clefts of the rock, and from the ground undermined by the lizards, millepedes, and cecilias. There are so many voices proclaiming to us, that all nature breathes; and that, under a thousand different forms, life is diffused throughout the cracked and dusty soil, as well as in the bosom of the waters, and in the air that circulates around us.’

And so, in 1834, the very year that the term ‘scientist’1 was first coined, heralding the beginning of the professionalization of the sciences and the hardening lines between different scientific disciplines, Humboldt began a book that did exactly the opposite.

After an early breakfast of black coffee – ‘concentrated sunshine’,

Prussia was going backwards, Humboldt said, much like William Parry, the British explorer who had believed that he was marching towards the North Pole when in reality he was drifting away from it on the moving ice.