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

by Andrea Wulf

Knowledge, he said, could never ‘kill the creative force of imagination’ – instead it brought excitement, astonishment and wondrousness.

Another American writer who loved Humboldt’s work was Edgar Allan Poe, whose last major work – the 130-page prose poem Eureka, published in 1848 – was dedicated to Humboldt and was a direct response to Cosmos.

Cosmos was also responsible for the maturing of one of America’s most influential nature writers: Henry David Thoreau.

The British polymath William Whewell coined the term ‘scientist’ in his review of Mary Somerville’s book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences in the Quarterly Review in 1834.

But even his friend and Concord neighbour, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, described Thoreau as ‘an intolerable bore’ who made him feel ashamed for having money, or a house, or writing a book that people will read.

Few degrees of separation, darwin - humboldt - thoreau - hawthorn

But even his friend and Concord neighbour, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, described Thoreau as ‘an intolerable bore’ who made him feel ashamed for having money, or a house, or writing a book that people will read.

Ha ironic

The Transcendentalists had been inspired by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant

When economic decline and the suppression of political gatherings sparked violent protests in Paris, a terrified King Louis Philippe abdicated on 26 February, and escaped to Britain. Two days later, the French declared the Second Republic and within weeks more revolutions rippled through Italy, Denmark, Hungary and Belgium, among others. In Vienna the conservative Chancellor of State, Prince von Metternich, tried and failed to control uprisings in which students and the working classes had joined forces. On 13 March Metternich resigned and he too fled to London. Two days later the Austrian emperor, Ferdinand I, promised his people a constitution. Rulers across Europe panicked.

It seems we always go back and forth between rebellion and reaction

Humboldt was deeply disappointed with revolutions and revolutionaries. During his lifetime the Americans had declared independence, yet they continued to spread what he called the ‘pest of slavery’. In the months before the 1848 events in Europe, Humboldt had followed news of the war that the United States had waged with Mexico – shocked, as he said, by America’s imperial behaviour which reminded him of ‘the old Spanish Conquista’. As a young man he had witnessed the French Revolution but also Napoleon crown himself emperor. Later, he had watched Simón Bolívar liberate the South American colonies from Spanish tyranny, only then to see ‘El Libertador’ declare himself dictator. And now his own country had failed miserably. At 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.

we are in a reactionary period

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

For decades he had also been trying to convince his North and South American friends that a canal across the narrow isthmus of Panama would prove an important trade route and a viable engineering project.

It was a ‘stain’ on the American nation, he said.4 He

Telluric

Name of earthborn

As the income of ordinary Americans rose, meat consumption, for example, increased – which in turn had a big impact on nature. The ground required to feed the animals, Marsh calculated, was much greater than the size of the fields needed for the equivalent nutritional value in grains and vegetables. Marsh concluded that a vegetarian’s diet was environmentally more responsible than that of a meat eater.

And we still know that and more important than ever

Marsh left a country that was tearing itself apart to move to one that was in the process of uniting.

Caroline enjoyed picking wildflowers but her husband thought it was ‘a crime’ against nature.

Marsh’s vision of the future was bleak. If nothing changed, he believed, the planet would be reduced to a condition of ‘shattered surface, of climatic excess … perhaps even extinction of the [human] species’. He

We can take this as either we always cry wolf or we been wrned

The consequences of man’s action were unforeseeable. ‘We can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble in the ocean of organic life,’ Marsh wrote. What he did know was that the moment ‘homo sapiens Europae’ had arrived in America, the damage had migrated from east to west.

In North America Henry David Thoreau had called for the preservation of forests in 1851. ‘In Wildness is the preservation of the World,’ Thoreau had said, and then later concluded in October 1859, a few months after Humboldt’s death, that every town should have a forest of several hundred acres ‘inalienable forever’.

There are more forests today than. Perhaps becauue of these and later efforts?

‘We are,’ he warned prophetically, ‘breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling.’

‘Earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant,’ Marsh wrote.

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’. Marsh’s observations on deforestation in Man and Nature led to the passage of the 1873 Timber Culture Act which encouraged settlers on the Great Plains to plant trees. It also prepared the ground for the protection of America’s forests, leading to the 1891 Forest Reserves Act which took much of its wording from the pages of Marsh’s book and from Humboldt’s earlier ideas.

Yep

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’. Haeckel took the 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.

Ecology, Haeckel said, was the ‘science of the relationships of an organism with its environment’.5

These organic movements and lines gave 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. Enormous clumps of seaweed intertwined with algae and marine invertebrates gave shape to Gaudí’s rooms, staircases and windows. Across the Atlantic, in the United States, Louis Sullivan, the so-called ‘father of skyscrapers’, also turned to nature for inspiration. Sullivan owned several of Haeckel’s books and believed that art created a union between the artist’s soul and that of nature. The façades of his buildings were decorated with stylized motifs from flora and fauna. American designer Louis Comfort Tiffany was also influenced by Haeckel. The almost ethereal diaphanous

On 27 March 1868, a month after he had departed from New York, Muir arrived in San Francisco, on the West Coast of the United States. He hated the city. 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. Bankers, merchants and entrepreneurs had come with those who had tried to find their luck. There were noisy taverns and well-stocked shops, as well as full warehouses and plenty of hotels. On his first day, Muir asked a passer-by the way out of town. When questioned where he wanted to go, he replied, ‘To any place that is wild.’

The Central Valley resembled one enormous flowerbed, a carpet of colour that was rolled out under his feet.

No longer

All this would change within the next few decades as agriculture and irrigation transformed it into the world’s largest orchard and vegetable patch. Muir would later lament that this great wild meadow had been ‘ploughed and pastured out of existence’.

It is so steep that scaling El Capitan remains one of the greatest challenges for climbers today.

I wonder what muir would think of the free climber today

One visitor was Henry David Thoreau’s old mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had been encouraged by Jeanne Carr to seek out Muir.

indigenous tribes that Humboldt had encountered in South America and who regarded nature as sacred.

Just thought of something, maybe a hunter gatherer society is closer to nature and thus do treat it better?

In the decade after his first summer in Yosemite, Muir turned to writing to ‘entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness’. As he composed his first articles, he studied Humboldt’s books as well as Marsh’s Man and Nature and Thoreau’s The Maine Woods and Walden. In

Relentlessly pushed by Johnson, Muir turned his love of nature into activism and began to write and campaign for the creation of a national park in Yosemite – like Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, the first and so far only one in the country, which had been established in 1872.

Humboldt was not known for a single fact or a discovery but for his worldview.

As scientists are trying to understand and predict the global consequences of climate change, Humboldt’s interdisciplinary approach to science and nature is more relevant than ever. His beliefs in the free exchange of information, in uniting scientists and in fostering communication across disciplines, are the pillars of science today. His concept of nature as one of global patterns underpins our thinking.

There were moments in his life when he was so pessimistic that he painted a bleak future of humankind’s eventual expansion into space, when humans would spread their lethal mix of vice, greed, violence and ignorance across other planets. The human species could turn even those distant stars ‘barren’ and leave them ‘ravaged’, Humboldt wrote as early as 1801, just as they were already doing with earth.

I am not so pessimstic

It feels as if we’ve come full circle. Maybe now is the moment for us and for the environmental movement to reclaim Alexander von Humboldt as our hero.

Views of Nature This was Humboldt’s favourite book, combining scientific information with poetic landscape descriptions. It was divided into chapters such as ‘Steppes and Deserts’ or ‘Cataracts of the Orinoco’. It was first published in Germany in early 1808 and

Cosmos Humboldt worked for more than two decades on Cosmos. It was first published in German as Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weltgeschichte. Originally planned as a two-volume publication, it eventually became five, published between 1845 and 1862. It was Humboldt’s ‘Book of Nature’, the culmination of his working life and loosely

Humboldt’s spectacular three-foot by two-foot Naturgemälde which was part of his Essay on the Geography of Plants (Illustration Credit ins.7)