Alexander von Humboldt might have been the first European to truly observe, acknowledge, document, and describe so eloquently the impact human beings have on this planet. Yet few recognize his name now despite the fact that in 1869 cities in multiple continents, including North America, held gatherings and parades with hundreds of thousands of merry-makers that celebrated what would have been Humboldt's 100th birthday. Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature (2015) seeks to make Humboldt relevant again through an in-depth history of Humboldt's life, tracing those he influenced including Darwin, Walt Whitman, Thoreau and Muir, among others.
Humboldt's greatest contribution to thought is the invention of the concept of nature and the idea that we are indeed part of and have an important role to play both in our earth's health and destruction. Humboldt's pivotal moment comes in the year 1800 in Venezuela while on his most epic expedition through South America and observing the effects that deforestation was having on erosion. Humboldt wrote the following words, which so poignantly describe the people-nature-planet connection, which is important because we still need reminding that not only are we part of nature but we have an impact on the planet's inter-workings: "When forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by the European planters, with an imprudent precipitation, the springs are entirely dried up, or become less abundant. The beds of the rivers, remaining dry during a part of the year, are converted into torrents, whenever great rains fall on the heights. The sward and moss disappearing with the brush-wood from the sides of the mountains, the waters falling in rain are no longer impeded in their course: and instead of slowly augmenting the level of the rivers by progressive filtrations, they furrow during heavy showers the sides of the hills, bear down the loosened soil, and form those sudden inundations, that devastate the country." Anyone who has lived where human activity affects water flow can recognize the alarm Humboldt is sounding with these sentences.
I see this 1800 moment as a turning point in human history. For so long it had been "go forth and propagate," but at this moment, Humboldt markedly points out that human beings have a negative impact on the planet. Being aware of our impact should affect personal and policy decisions, yet 216 years later we still try to sweep what we do under the rug rather than change course on our actions, thereby inflicting more stress upon the ecosystems within which we live.
"Everything," Humboldt later writes, "is interaction and reciprocal." The balance is key, and humankind--whether because of its success, its greed, or just its very existence--has thrown out the balance. Humboldt pins down humankind's long-term effects on the environment--namely, the 3 big ones: deforestation, ruthless irrigation or careless water use, and "the great masses of steam and gas" produced in industrial centers. Sound familiar? Yet, even so, nature has a tendency to auto-correct very well without us. Humboldt was the first European to document that nature is a web of life, a powerful force interwoven by a "a thousand threads." We can see hawks feeding on small birds, small birds on spiders, spiders on dragonflies, dragonflies on hornets, and hornets on aphids. Each animal has its own God-given purpose, and without our help (or our harm) can maintain a healthy, stable balance through perpetuity. And maybe that is our ecological role--to throw off the fine-tuned inter-workings of this planet and maybe, just maybe, use our ingenuity to improve it, even when hubris frequently leads us astray in our attempts.
In Humboldt's time, there was no real name for what he was, but today it could be fair to call Humboldt, an intrepid explorer who sought to document everything he saw, forming important connections, the world's first naturalist. Humbolt writes in Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1851) that it was his obsession "to pursue one and the same object until I can explain it." His subject: The Universe. Which means that beauty and order were also applied to the universe as an ordered entity. Perhaps Humboldt's greatest legacy is leaving us with his idea that the Earth is living and that we indeed have an effect on it. Indeed, we are part of it. This is his, and still our, concept of nature, and it's a notion we tend to lose sight of.
Without Humboldt's writings, Wulf notes that it's highly likely we might not have a Charles Darwin, whose writings on evolution were also based in the idea that everything is interconnected. Later, in General Morphology of Organisms, a fervent salute to Darwin's Origin of the Species, German biologist Ernst Haeckel finally gives a word for what Humboldt did--oecologie--ecology. Oikos is Greek for "household" and ecology takes "household" and applies it to the natural world. Haeckl, whose Art Forms in Nature (1899) would shape the stylistic language of the Art Nouveau, featuring illustrations of calcareous radiolarians, sponges, jellyfish and other microscopic creatures. That illustrations of microscopic creatures could become the voice of architects and designers is pure Humboldt in action. The synthesis of the organic living world into the mechanical world furthers Humboldt's thesis. At a broader level, this interconnection is important because, as Humboldt and all of his followers have noted and I repeat here because we forget, we are all part of nature.
What's perhaps most telling is the title of Wulf's book, and the emphasis on the invention of nature rather than the idea of nature as innate part of the world. It begs the question: Are we separate from nature? Does their need to be a man-nature dichotomy? It's always been there; Humboldt just helped us describe it. Or was the concept of nature really so far outside of the reality, the inner worlds of the Europeans of his time that it took Humboldt to invent it? Too often we have segregated what we do, how we see the world, into different little categories. Particularly now, our careers have become more and more specialized. Division between the arts, the sciences, humanities, has never been greater in the academy. All of this division, which really hurts our understanding of the health of our world in the end, was just the opposite of how Humboldt saw the world. Humboldt's legacy is his holistic approach, which has fallen out of favor in academia and the tech pursuits these days in which everything is so highly specialized that we are witnessing robots take away our jobs. We've become single-minded cogs, and perhaps a more well-rounded Humboldtian approach would help us.
We've become so compartmentalized that we've lost sight of the Big Picture as a society. And this is why Humboldt matters. Because nature is a global pattern, it is made up innumerable complex parts that interplay in ways we don't understand because we now have a much more myopic me-first perspective of the world.
When Thoreau's science and poetry journals became one in the same, we see the work of Humboldt and his more holistic approach to the world at hand. Thoreau sought a unifying perspective: the lichen on the rocks and the trees in the distance were perceived in relation to each other and "reduced to a single picture." There is an order in the Cosmos. Everything is interconnected. Humboldt's concept of Cosmos captures the relationship between human beings and nature. Thoreau takes this idea, but deepens our sense of nature: The Earth is "living poetry...not a fossil earth but a living specimen."
Humboldt's vision of nature also resonates with what George Perkins Marsh writes in Man and Nature (1864) when he is sailing down the Nile and observes how man leaves trails of destruction in his path. Marsh lists off numerous examples of how humankind interfered with nature and the curious but illustrative results: When a Parisian milliner invented silk hats, fur hats became unfashionable and decimated beaver populations began to recover. Farmers, who killed birds to protect their harvests then had to deal with swarms of insects that were previously the birds' prey. Wolves reappeared in Europe during the Napoleonic wars, as men were too busy fighting each other to kill off wolves.
Wulf's great contribution in her biography of Humboldt is her tracing of the influence Humboldt had on great thinkers and hence on the way we think. You can see Humboldt as Muir traces the scars of glaciation in Yosemite Valley. As Muir writes in 1869, also under the influence of Humbolt, "[w]hen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe...The whole wilderness seems to be alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly." Wulf traces Humboldt from Darwin to Marsh to Haeckl to Muir and you can extend his vision out from Muir, for when I read Muir, I extrapolate him out to thinkers like Kerouac and his wild descriptions of man in nature out on a fire watch.
But we also need to have a deeper appreciation of nature and our place in it. Wendell Berry, another Humboldtian protege, puts it so well: "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." And now we suffer. Or, do we get off this planet to mine and log the others?
Without knowing it, I've been influenced by Humboldt. I've always tried to live by the Boy Scout motto: To leave things better than how you found them. Because the unified whole is made up of complex interconnected parts--like a tight band, a good novel, or the interconnected pieces that make a trout stream special.
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