The Invention of Nature (2 page)

When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel. After he saw the devastating environmental effects of colonial plantations at Lake Valencia in Venezuela in 1800, Humboldt became the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced climate change. Deforestation there had made the land barren, water levels of the lake were falling and with the disappearance of brushwood torrential rains had washed away the soils on the surrounding mountain slopes. Humboldt was the first to explain the forest’s ability to enrich the atmosphere with moisture and its cooling effect, as well as its importance for water retention and protection against soil erosion. He warned that humans were meddling with the climate and that this could have an unforeseeable impact on ‘future generations’.

The Invention of Nature traces the invisible threads that connect us to this extraordinary man. 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’.

On 14 September 1869, one hundred years after his birth, Alexander von Humboldt’s centennial was celebrated across the world. There were parties in Europe, Africa and Australia as well as the Americas. In Melbourne and Adelaide people came together to listen to speeches in honour of Humboldt, as did groups in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. There were festivities in Moscow where Humboldt was called the ‘Shakespeare of sciences’, and in Alexandria in Egypt where guests partied under a sky illuminated with fireworks. The greatest commemorations were in the United States, where from San Francisco to Philadelphia, and from Chicago to Charleston, the nation saw street parades, sumptuous dinners and concerts. In Cleveland some 8,000 people took to the streets and in Syracuse another 15,000 joined a march that was more than a mile long. President Ulysses Grant attended the Humboldt celebrations in Pittsburgh together with 10,000 revellers who brought the city to a standstill.

In New York City the cobbled streets were lined with flags. City Hall was veiled in banners, and entire houses had vanished behind huge posters bearing Humboldt’s face. Even the ships sailing by, out on the Hudson River, were garlanded in colourful bunting. In the morning thousands of people followed ten music bands, marching from the Bowery and along Broadway to Central Park to honour a man ‘whose fame no nation can claim’ as the New York Times’s front page reported. By early afternoon, 25,000 onlookers had assembled in Central Park to listen to the speeches as a large bronze bust of Humboldt was unveiled. In the evening as darkness settled, a torchlight procession of 15,000 people set out along the streets, walking beneath colourful Chinese lanterns.

Let us imagine him, one speaker said, ‘as standing on the Andes’ with his mind soaring above all. Every speech across the world emphasized that Humboldt had seen an ‘inner correlation’ between all aspects of nature. In Boston, Emerson told the city’s grandees that Humboldt was ‘one of those wonders of the world’. His fame, the Daily News in London reported, was ‘in some sort bound up with the universe itself’. In Germany there were festivities in Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt and many other cities. The greatest German celebrations were in Berlin, Humboldt’s hometown, where despite torrential rain 80,000 people assembled. The authorities had ordered offices and all government agencies to close for the day. As the rain poured down and gusts chilled the air, the speeches and singing nonetheless continued for hours.

Though today almost forgotten outside academia – at least in the English-speaking world – Alexander von Humboldt’s ideas still shape our thinking. And while his books collect dust in libraries, his name lingers everywhere from the Humboldt Current running along the coast of Chile and Peru to dozens of monuments, parks and mountains in Latin America including Sierra Humboldt in Mexico and Pico Humboldt in Venezuela. A town in Argentina, a river in Brazil, a geyser in Ecuador and a bay in Colombia – all are named after Humboldt. 1

There are Kap Humboldt and Humboldt Glacier in Greenland, as well as mountain ranges in northern China, South Africa, New Zealand and Antarctica. There are rivers and waterfalls in Tasmania and New Zealand as well as parks in Germany and Rue Alexandre de Humboldt in Paris. In North America alone four counties, thirteen towns, mountains, bays, lakes and a river are named after him, as well as the Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California and Humboldt Parks in Chicago and Buffalo. The state of Nevada was almost called Humboldt when the Constitutional Convention debated its name in the 1860s. Almost 300 plants and more than 100 animals are named after him – including the Californian Humboldt lily (Lilium humboldtii), the South American Humboldt penguin (Spheniscus humboldti) and the fierce predatory six-foot Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas) which can be found in the Humboldt Current. Several minerals carry his name – from Humboldtit to Humboldtin – and on the moon there is an area called ‘Mare Humboldtianum’. More places are named after Humboldt than anyone else.

Ecologists, environmentalists and nature writers rely on Humboldt’s vision, although most do so unknowingly. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is based on Humboldt’s concept of interconnectedness, and scientist James Lovelock’s famous Gaia theory of the earth as a living organism bears remarkable similarities. When Humboldt described the earth as ‘a natural whole animated and moved by inward forces’, he predated Lovelock’s ideas by more than 150 years. Humboldt called his book describing this new concept Cosmos, having initially considered (but then discarded) ‘Gäa’ as a title.

We are shaped by the past. Nicolaus Copernicus showed us our place in the universe, Isaac Newton explained the laws of nature, Thomas Jefferson gave us some of our concepts of liberty and democracy, and Charles Darwin proved that all species descend from common ancestors. These ideas define our relationship to the world.

Humboldt gave us our concept of nature itself. The irony is that Humboldt’s views have become so self-evident that we have largely forgotten the man behind them. But there exists a direct line of connection through his ideas, and through the many people whom he inspired. Like a rope, Humboldt’s concept of nature connects us to him.

The Invention of Nature is my attempt to find Humboldt. It has been a journey across the world that led me to archives in California, Berlin and Cambridge among many others. I read through thousands of letters but I also followed Humboldt’s footsteps. I saw the ruin of the anatomy tower in Jena in Germany where Humboldt spent many weeks dissecting animals, and at 12,000 feet on the Antisana in Ecuador, with four condors circling above and surrounded by a herd of wild horses, I found the dilapidated hut where he had spent a night in March 1802.

In Quito, I held Humboldt’s original Spanish passport in my hands – the very papers that allowed him to travel through Latin America. In Berlin, I finally understood how his mind worked when I opened the boxes that contained his notes – marvellous collages of thousands of bits of paper, sketches and numbers. Closer to home, at the British Library in London, I spent many weeks reading Humboldt’s published books, some so huge and heavy that I could scarcely lift them on to the table. In Cambridge I looked at Darwin’s own copies of Humboldt’s books – those that Darwin had kept on a shelf next to his hammock on the Beagle. They are filled with Darwin’s pencil marks. Reading these books was like eavesdropping on Darwin talking to Humboldt.

I found myself lying at night in the Venezuelan rainforest listening to the strange bellowing cry of howler monkeys, but also stuck in Manhattan without electricity during Hurricane Sandy when I had travelled there to read some documents in the New York Public Library. I admired the old manor house with its tenth-century tower in the little village of Piòbesi outside Turin where George Perkins Marsh wrote parts of Man and Nature in the early 1860s – a book inspired by Humboldt’s ideas and one that would mark the beginning of America’s conservation movement. I walked around Thoreau’s Walden Pond in deep freshly fallen snow and hiked in Yosemite, reminding myself of John Muir’s idea that: ‘the clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness’.

The most exciting moment was when I finally climbed Chimborazo, the mountain that had been so elemental to Humboldt’s vision. As I walked up the barren slope, the air was so thin that every step felt like an eternity – a slow pull upward while my legs felt leaden and somehow disconnected from the rest of my body. My admiration for Humboldt grew with every step. He had climbed Chimborazo with an injured foot (and certainly not in walking boots as comfortable and sturdy as mine), loaded with instruments and constantly stopping to take measurements.

The result of this exploration through landscapes and letters, through thoughts and diaries, is this book. The Invention of Nature is my quest to rediscover Humboldt, and to restore him to his rightful place in the pantheon of nature and science. It’s also a quest to understand why we think as we do today about the natural world.

1 To this day many German-speaking schools across Latin America hold biannual athletic competitions called Juegos Humboldt – Humboldt Games.

1

Beginnings

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT was born, on 14 September 1769, into a wealthy aristocratic Prussian family who spent their winters in Berlin and their summers at the family estate of Tegel, a small castle about ten miles north-west of the city. His father, Alexander Georg von Humboldt, was an officer in the army, a chamberlain at the Prussian court and a confidant of the future king Friedrich Wilhelm II. Alexander’s mother, Marie Elisabeth, was the daughter of a rich manufacturer who had brought money and land into the family. The Humboldt name was held in high regard in Berlin and the future king was even Alexander’s godfather. But despite their privileged upbringing, Alexander and his older brother, Wilhelm, had an unhappy childhood. Their beloved father died suddenly when Alexander was nine and their mother never showed her sons much affection. Where their father had been charming and friendly, their mother was formal, cold and emotionally distant. Instead of maternal warmth, she provided the best education then available in Prussia, arranging for the two boys to be privately tutored by a string of Enlightenment thinkers who instilled in them a love of truth, liberty and knowledge.

These were strange relationships in which the boys sometimes searched for a father figure. One tutor in particular, Gottlob Johann Christian Kunth, who oversaw their education for many years, taught them with a peculiar combination of expressing displeasure and disappointment while at the same time encouraging a sense of dependency. Hovering behind them and watching over their shoulders as they calculated, translated Latin texts or learned French vocabulary, Kunth constantly corrected the brothers. He was never quite satisfied with their progress. Whenever they made a mistake, Kunth reacted as if they had done so to hurt or offend him. For the boys, this behaviour was more painful than if he had spanked them with a cane. Always desperate to please Kunth, as Wilhelm later recounted, they had felt a ‘perpetual anxiety’ to make him happy.

It was particularly difficult for Alexander who was taught the same lessons as his precocious brother, despite being two years younger. The result was that he believed himself to be less talented. When Wilhelm excelled in Latin and Greek, Alexander felt incompetent and slow. He struggled so much, Alexander later told a friend, that his tutors ‘were doubtful whether even ordinary powers of intelligence would ever be developed in him’.

Schloss Tegel and the surrounding estate (Illustration Credit 1.1)

Wilhelm lost himself in Greek mythology and histories of ancient Rome, but Alexander felt restless with books. Instead he escaped the classroom whenever he could to ramble through the countryside, collecting and sketching plants, animals and rocks. When he returned with his pockets full of insects and plants his family nicknamed him ‘the little apothecary’, but they didn’t take his interests seriously. 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.’

Much of his early life, Humboldt later told a close friend, was spent among people who loved him but who didn’t understand him. His teachers were demanding and his mother lived withdrawn from society and her sons. Marie Elisabeth von Humboldt’s greatest concern was, Kunth said, to foster the ‘intellectual and moral perfection’ of Wilhelm and Alexander – their emotional wellbeing was seemingly of no interest. ‘I was forced into a thousand constraints,’ Humboldt said, and into loneliness, hiding behind a wall of pretence because he never felt that he could be himself with his stern mother watching his every step. Expressions of excitement or of joy were unacceptable behaviour in the Humboldt household.

Alexander and Wilhelm were very different. Where Alexander was adventurous and enjoyed being outside, Wilhelm was serious and studious. Alexander was often torn between emotions, while Wilhelm’s overriding character trait was self-control. Both brothers withdrew into their own worlds – Wilhelm into his books and Alexander on lonely walks through Tegel’s forests, great woods that had been planted with imported North American trees. As he wandered among colourful sugar maples and stately white oaks, Alexander experienced nature as calming and soothing. But it was also among these trees from another world that he began to dream of distant countries.