The Invention of Nature (45 page)

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’. Whereas Madison and Bolívar had seen the protection of trees as an economic necessity, Thoreau insisted that ‘national preserves’ should be set aside for recreation. What Marsh now did with Man and Nature was to bring it all together and dedicate an entire book to the subject, presenting the evidence that humankind was destroying the earth.

‘Humboldt was the great apostle,’ Marsh had declared when he began Man and Nature. Throughout the book he referred to Humboldt but expanded his ideas. Where Humboldt’s warnings had been dispersed across his books – little nuggets of insight here and there but often lost in the broader context – Marsh now wove it all into one forceful argument. Page after page, Marsh talked about the evils of deforestation. He explained how forests protected the soil and natural springs. Once the forest was gone, the soil lay bare against winds, sun and rain. The earth would no longer be a sponge but a dust heap. As the soil was washed off, all goodness disappeared and ‘thus the earth is rendered no longer fit for the habitation of man’, Marsh concluded. It made for gloomy reading. The damage caused by just two or three generations was as disastrous, he said, as the eruption of a volcano or an earthquake. ‘We are,’ he warned prophetically, ‘breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling.’

Marsh was telling Americans that they had to act now, before it was too late. ‘Prompt measures’ had to be taken because ‘the most serious fears are entertained’. Forests needed to be set aside and replanted. Some should be preserved as places of recreation, inspiration and habitat for flora and fauna – as an ‘inalienable property’ for all citizens. Other areas needed to be replanted and managed for a sustainable use of timber. ‘We have now felled forest enough,’ Marsh wrote.

Marsh was not just talking about a parched spot in the south of France, an arid region in Egypt or an overfished lake in Vermont. This was an argument about the whole earth. Man and Nature’s power stemmed from its global dimension because Marsh compared and understood the world as a unified whole. Instead of looking at local occurrences, Marsh lifted environmental concerns to a new and terrifying level. The whole planet was in danger. ‘Earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant,’ Marsh wrote.

Man and Nature was the first work of natural history fundamentally to influence American politics. It was, as the American writer and environmentalist Wallace Stegner later said, the ‘rudest kick in the face’ to America’s optimism. At a time when the country was racing towards industrialization – fiercely exploiting its natural resources and razing its forests – Marsh wanted to make his compatriots pause and think. To his great disappointment, the initial sales of Man and Nature were low. Then over the next few months, sales improved and over 1,000 copies were sold and his publisher began to reprint.5

Man and Nature’s full impact was not felt for several decades but the book influenced a great number of people in the United States who would become key figures in the preservation and conservation movements. 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.

Man and Nature resonated internationally too. It was intensely discussed in Australia and inspired French foresters as well as legislators in New Zealand. It encouraged conservationists in South Africa and Japan to fight for the protection of trees. Italian forest laws cited Marsh, and conservationists in India even carried the book ‘along the slope of the Northern Himalaya, and into Kashmir and Tibet’. Man and Nature shaped a new generation of activists and would in the first half of the twentieth century be celebrated as ‘the fountainhead of the conservation movement’.

Marsh believed that the lessons were buried in the scars that the human species had left on the landscape for thousands of years. ‘The future,’ he said, ‘is more uncertain than the past.’ By looking back, Marsh was looking forward.

1 The seven slave states that first seceded were: South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana and Alabama. By May 1861 four more had followed: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina.

2 Humboldt had already seen these dangers and warned that the scheme to irrigate the Llanos in Venezuela by canal from Lake Valencia would be irresponsible. In the short term it would create fertile fields in the Llanos, but the long-term effect could only be an ‘arid desert’. It would leave the Aragua Valley as barren as the deforested surrounding mountains.

3 Everyone who was twenty-one and older and who had not fought against the United States could apply. The requirement was to live on the land for at least five years and to ‘improve’ it.

4 Bolívar made the removal of any tree or timber from state-owned forests a punishable offence. He also worried about the possible extinction of the wild herds of vicuñas.

5 Marsh donated the copyright of Man and Nature to a charity that helped wounded Civil War soldiers. Luckily for Marsh, his brother and nephew quickly bought the copyright back before the sales picked up.

22

Art, Ecology and Nature

Ernst Haeckel and Humboldt

THE DAY HE heard about Alexander von Humboldt’s death, twenty-five-year-old German zoologist Ernst Haeckel felt miserable. ‘Two souls, alas, live in my chest,’ Haeckel wrote to his fiancée, Anna Sethe, using a well-known image from Goethe’s Faust to explain his feelings. Where Faust is torn between his love for the earthly world and the longing to soar to higher realms, Haeckel was torn between art and science, between feeling nature with his heart or investigating the natural world like a zoologist. The news that Humboldt was dead – the man whose books had inspired Haeckel’s love for nature, science, explorations and painting since early childhood – had triggered this crisis.

At the time Haeckel was in Naples in Italy where he hoped to make some zoological discoveries that would kick-start his academic career in Germany. So far the scientific part of the trip had turned out to be completely unsuccessful. He had come to study the anatomy of sea urchins, sea-cucumbers and starfish but it had been impossible to find enough living specimens in the Gulf of Naples. Instead of a rich sea harvest, it was the Italian landscape that offered what he called ‘beckoning temptations’. How was he supposed to be a scientist in a discipline that felt claustrophobically cramped when nature laid out its tantalizing wares as if in an oriental bazaar? It was so bad, Haeckel wrote to Anna, that he could hear ‘Mephistopheles’ scornful laughter’.

In this one letter, Haeckel filtered his doubts through the lens of Humboldt’s vision of nature. How was he to reconcile taking the detailed observations that his scientific work required with his urge to ‘understand nature as a whole’? How was he to align his artistic appreciation for nature with scientific truth? In Cosmos Humboldt had written about the bond that united knowledge, science, poetry and artistic feeling, but Haeckel was unsure how to apply this to his zoological work. Flora and fauna invited him to unlock their secrets, teasing and luring him, but he didn’t know if he should use a paintbrush or a microscope. How could he be sure?

Humboldt’s death set in motion a phase of uncertainty in Haeckel’s life during which he searched for his true vocation. It marked the beginning of a career that was shaped partly by anger, crisis and grief. Death would become a channelling force in Haeckel’s life – but instead of leading towards stasis or stagnation, it made him work harder, more ferociously and with no concern for his future reputation. It also made Haeckel one of the most controversial and remarkable scientists of his time1 – a man who influenced artists and scientists alike, and one who moved Humboldt’s concept of nature into the twentieth century.

Humboldt had always loomed large in Haeckel’s life. Born in Potsdam in 1834 – the same year that Humboldt had begun Cosmos – Haeckel had read his books as a boy. His father worked for the Prussian government but was also interested in science and the Haeckel family spent many evenings reading scientific publications aloud to each other. Though he had never met Humboldt, Haeckel had been immersed in his ideas of nature from childhood. He so adored Humboldt’s descriptions of the tropics that he too dreamed of being an explorer, but Haeckel’s father had envisaged a more traditional career for him.

Following his father’s wishes, the eighteen-year-old had therefore enrolled in 1852 at the medical school in Würzburg in Bavaria to become a doctor. Haeckel was homesick and lonely in Würzburg. After long days at school, he withdrew to his room, desperate to read Cosmos. Every evening when he opened the well-thumbed pages, Haeckel disappeared into Humboldt’s glorious world. When not reading, he hiked through the forests, seeking solitude and a connection to the natural world. Tall, slender, handsome and with piercing blue eyes, Haeckel ran and swam every day and was as athletic as Humboldt had been as a young man.

‘I cannot tell you how much joy the pleasure of nature gives me,’ Haeckel wrote to his parents from Würzburg; ‘all my worries disappear at once.’ He wrote of the gentle song of birds and of the wind combing through the leaves. He admired double rainbows and mountain slopes dappled in the fleeting shadows of the clouds. Sometimes Haeckel returned from his long walks loaded with ivy with which he made wreaths that he hung across Humboldt’s portrait in his room. How he longed to live in Berlin, closer to his hero. He wanted to attend the annual dinner at the Geographical Society in Berlin where Humboldt would be, he wrote to his parents in May 1853, a few months after his arrival in Würzburg. Seeing Humboldt – even from a distance – was his ‘most ardent desire’.

The following spring Haeckel was allowed to study for a term in Berlin – and although he failed to glimpse Humboldt, he did find someone else to admire. Haeckel took some classes on comparative anatomy with the most famous German zoologist of the time, Johannes Müller, who was working on fish and marine invertebrates. Enthralled by Müller’s lively stories of seashore collecting, Haeckel spent a summer in Heligoland, a small island off the coast of Germany in the North Sea. He spent his days outside, swimming and catching sea creatures. Haeckel admired the jellyfish they caught – their transparent bodies were veined with streaks of colour and their long tentacles moved elegantly through the water. When he netted a particularly magnificent one, Haeckel had found his favourite animal and a scientific discipline to pursue: zoology.

Ernst Haeckel with his fishing equipment (Illustration Credit 22.1)

Though Haeckel obeyed his father’s wishes and continued his medical studies, he never intended to practise as a doctor. He enjoyed botany and comparative anatomy, marine invertebrates and microscopes, mountain climbing and swimming, painting and drawing, but loathed medicine. His appetite for Humboldt’s work increased the more he read. When he visited his parents, he took Views of Nature with him and asked his mother to buy him a copy of Personal Narrative because, he said, he was ‘obsessed’ with it. From the university’s library in Würzburg he borrowed dozens of Humboldt’s books, ranging from the botanical volumes to the large folio edition of Vues des Cordillères with its spectacular engravings of Latin American landscapes and monuments – ‘preciously sumptuous editions’, as he called them. He also asked his parents to send him as a Christmas present the atlas that had been published to accompany Cosmos. It was easier for him, he explained, to understand and memorize through images rather than words.

During a visit to Berlin, Haeckel made a pilgrimage to the Humboldt family estate, Tegel. It was a glorious summer’s day even if Humboldt was nowhere to be seen. Haeckel bathed in the lake where his hero had once swum and sat at the water’s edge until the moon cast a silver veil across the surface. This was the closest he had ever come to Humboldt.

He wanted to follow Humboldt’s footsteps and see South America. This would be the only way to reconcile the two conflicting souls in his chest: the ‘man of reason’ and the artist ruled by ‘feeling and poetry’. The only profession that combined science with emotions and adventure was that of an explorer-naturalist, Haeckel was certain. He dreamed ‘day and night’ of a great voyage and began to make plans. First he would take his medical degree and then find a position as a ship’s surgeon. Once he had reached the tropics, he would leave the ship and begin his ‘Robinsonian project’. The advantage of this scheme was, Haeckel told his increasingly worried parents, that it would force him to finish his studies in Würzburg. He would do anything as long as it meant going ‘far, far into the world’.

Haeckel’s parents, though, had different ideas and insisted that their son work as a doctor in Berlin. Initially Haeckel did as he was asked, but quietly tried to sabotage their plans. When he set up his practice in Berlin, he introduced rather eccentric opening hours. Patients could only see him for consultations between five and six o’clock in the morning. Unsurprisingly, he had just half a dozen patients during his year as a doctor – although, as he proudly announced, none died in his care.

In the end it was Haeckel’s love for his fiancée Anna that made him consider a more conventional career. Haeckel called her his ‘truly German forest child’. Instead of material things – clothes, furniture or fine jewellery – Anna enjoyed the simple joys of life such as a walk in the countryside or lying in a meadow among wildflowers. She was, as Haeckel said, ‘completely unspoiled and pure’. Serendipity had it that she shared her birthday with Humboldt – 14 September – which was also the date that the couple announced their engagement. Haeckel decided to become a zoology professor. It was a respectable profession, and he wouldn’t have to deal with his ‘insurmountable revulsion’ at the ‘diseased body’. To make his mark in the scientific world, he simply needed to decide on a research project.