Adrian Buck’s Reviews > The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt > Status Update

"His vision of nature has passed into our consciousness as if by osmosis." - yes, it's a vision, not a theory.

"Monism turned explicitly against the concept of a dualism between mind and matter. This idea of unity replaced God, and with this, monism became the most ersatz religion at the turn of the twentieth century." - strangely I have never heard of this.

"The new stylistic language of Art Nouveau infused everything with borrowed from nature" - a history of the representation of nature in art would be a good read.

"Haeckel first named Humboldt's discipline...ecology...the 'science of the relationships of an organism with its environment" - this seems significantly more reductive than 'the web of life', it provides a focus for further study.

"Civilization and the destruction of forests came 'hand in hand'...Barren soils, climate change and starvation would eventually lead to a mass exodus from Europe to more fertile lands"... written in 1854, and starvation and exodus that has happened in Europe since has been the result of politics not agriculture.

"Marsh beleived that the lessons were buried in the scars that the human species had left left on the landscape for thousands of years." - meteor strikes, glaciation, the conversion of forest to grassland by herbivores?

'Humboldt was the "greatest of the priesthood of nature', Marsh said he had understood the world as an interplay between man and nature..." - The idea the man is somehow apart from nature is an Abrahamic one, have environmentalists replaced the worship of God with the worship of nature?

"Humboldt had plucked the word Kosmos from ancient Greek where it meant order and beauty - but one created through the human eye" - for my purposes the best chapter so far, one that defines Humboldt's conception of nature by contrasting it with others. Not so much THE invention of nature as AN invention of nature. Thoreau played an important part in the development of the American conception of Wilderness.

"Knowledge did not 'chill the feelings' because the senses were connected'...Thoreau followed Humbolt's deep seated belief in the 'deep seated bond' that united knowledge and poetry." - the Metaphysical poets?