The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science

by Andrea Wulf

Humboldt was the first to explain the fundamental functions of the forest for the ecosystem and climate: the trees’ ability to store water and to enrich the atmosphere with moisture, their protection of the soil, and their cooling effect.fn1 He also talked about the impact of trees on the climate through their release of oxygen. The effects of the human species’ intervention were already ‘incalculable’, Humboldt insisted, and could become catastrophic if they continued to disturb the world so ‘brutally’.

Humboldt began giving his publishers desperate excuses which ranged from running out of money to pay his engravers whom he had commissioned to illustrate the books, to ‘melancholy’ and even ‘painful haemorrhoidal incidents’.

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.