"The Invention of Nature"

[fiefoe]

Andrea Wulf's subject is truly ahead of his time. It's hard not to become of fan of Humboldt after reading about him.

• At a time when other scientists were searching for universal laws, Humboldt wrote that nature had to be experienced through feelings.
• He invented isotherms – the lines of temperature and pressure that we see on today’s weather maps – and he also discovered the magnetic equator. He came up with the idea of vegetation and climate zones that snake across the globe. Most important, though, Humboldt revolutionized the way we see the natural world. He found connections everywhere... ‘In this great chain of causes and effects,’ Humboldt said, ‘no single fact can be considered in isolation.’ With this insight, he invented the web of life, the concept of nature as we know it today.
• 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.
• 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.
• From his youth Alexander seemed to have been torn between this vanity and his loneliness, between a craving for praise and his yearning for independence. Insecure, yet believing in his intellectual prowess, he see-sawed between his need for approval and his sense of superiority. Born the same year as Napoleon Bonaparte, Humboldt was raised in an increasingly global and accessible world.
• In London, Humboldt was introduced to botanists, explorers, artists and thinkers. He met Captain William Bligh (of the infamous mutiny on the Bounty), and Joseph Banks, Cook’s botanist on his first voyage around the world, and by now the president of the Royal Society,
• Back home Humboldt’s misery became a frantic energy. He was impelled by a ‘perpetual drive’, he wrote, as if chased by ’10,000 pigs’.
• With a scalpel he made incisions on his arms and torso. Then he carefully rubbed chemicals and acids into the open wounds or stuck metals, wires and electrodes on to his skin or under his tongue. Every twitch, every convulsion, burning sensation or pain was noted meticulously. Many of his wounds became infected and some days his skin was striped with blood-filled welts.
• Like Humboldt, Goethe adored geology (and mining) – so much so that on special occasions he dressed his young son in a miner’s uniform.
• When he then leaned over the leg in order to check the connecting metals, it convulsed so violently that it leapt off the table. Both men were stunned, until Humboldt realized that it had been the moisture of his breath that had triggered the reaction. As the tiny droplets in his breath had touched the metals they had created an electric current that had moved the frog’s leg. It was the most magical experiment he had ever carried out, Humboldt decided, because by exhaling on to the frog’s leg it was as if he were ‘breathing life into it’.
• Goethe was also grappling with these ideas of the Self and nature, of the subjective and the objective, of science and imagination. He had developed, for example, a colour theory in which he discussed how colour was perceived – a concept in which the role of the eye had become central because it brought the outer world into the inner.
• ‘The senses do not deceive,’ Goethe declared, ‘it is judgement that deceives.’ This growing emphasis on subjectivity began radically to change Humboldt’s thinking.
• Faust, like Humboldt, was driven by a relentless striving for knowledge, by a ‘feverish unrest’, as he declares in the play’s first scene. At the time when he was working on Faust, Goethe said about Humboldt: ‘I’ve never known anyone who combined such a deliberately channelled activity with such plurality of the mind’ – words that might have described Faust.
• Goethe used the properties of these chemical bonds to evoke relationships and changing passions between the four protagonists in the novel.
• Humboldt’s letters home burst with excitement and brought this wondrous world into the elegant salons of Paris, Berlin and Rome. He wrote of huge spiders that ate hummingbirds and of thirty-foot snakes. Meanwhile he amazed the people of Cumaná with his instruments;
• The man who had probably done most to spread this view was the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. During the mid-eighteenth century Buffon had painted a picture of the primeval forest as a horrendous place full of decaying trees, rotting leaves, parasitic plants, stagnant pools and venomous insects. The wilderness, he said, was deformed... Beauty was equated with utility and every acre wrested from the wilderness was a victory of civilized man over uncivilized nature. It was ‘cultivated nature’, Buffon had written, that was ‘beautiful!’.
• Entranced, Humboldt watched the gruesome spectacle: the horses screamed in pain, the eels thrashed beneath their bellies, and the water’s surface boiled with movement. Some horses fell and, trampled by the others, drowned... When he and Bonpland dissected some of the animals, they endured violent shocks themselves. For four hours they conducted an array of dangerous tests including holding an eel with two hands, touching an eel with one hand and a bit of metal with the other, or Humboldt touching an eel while holding Bonpland’s hand (with Bonpland feeling the jolt).
• Then, as they reached the most southerly point of their river expedition, with their supplies at their lowest, they found huge nuts which they cracked open for their nutritious seeds – the magnificent Brazil nut that Humboldt subsequently introduced to Europe.
• It was a shame, he wrote in his diary, that the monkeys didn’t open their mouths as their canoe passed them so that they could ‘count their teeth’.
• Like a wine connoisseur, he sampled the water of the various different rivers. The Orinoco had a singular flavour that was particularly disgusting, he noted, while the Rio Apure tasted different at various locations and the Rio Atabapo was ‘delicious’.
• Unlike most Europeans, Humboldt did not regard the indigenous people as barbaric, but instead was captivated by their culture, beliefs and languages. In fact, he talked about the ‘barbarism of civilised man’ when he saw how the local people were treated by colonists and missionaries.
• Since the Rio Negro was a tributary of the Amazon, it was clear that the two great river basins were indeed connected. And though Humboldt had not ‘discovered’ the Casiquiare, he had made a detailed map of the complex tributary system of these rivers. This map was a great improvement on all previous ones, which, he said, were as imaginary as if they ‘had been invented in Madrid’.
• Humboldt’s declarations tended to be strong. ‘I was tied to you as by iron chains,’ he wrote to one friend, and cried for many hours when he left another. There had been a couple of particularly intense friendships in the years before South America. Throughout his life Humboldt had such relationships in which he not only declared his love but also showed, for him, an unusual submissiveness.
• The fog held Chimborazo’s summit in its embrace. Soon they were crawling on all fours along a high ridge that narrowed to a dangerous two inches with steep cliffs falling away to their left and right – fittingly the Spanish called this ridge the cuchilla, or ‘knife edge’.。。 Despite these difficulties, Humboldt still had the energy to set up his instruments every few hundred feet as they ascended. The icy wind had chilled the brass instruments and handling the delicate screws and levers with half-frozen hands was almost impossible.
• As he stood that day on Chimborazo, Humboldt absorbed what lay in front of him while his mind reached back to all the plants, rock formations and measurements that he had seen and taken on the slopes of the Alps, the Pyrenees and in Tenerife. Everything that he had ever observed fell into place. Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force... Humboldt was struck by this ‘resemblance which we trace in climates the most distant from each other’. Here in the Andes, for example, grew a moss that reminded him of a species from the forests in northern Germany, thousands of miles away.
• Individual phenomena were only important ‘in their relation to the whole’, he explained. Depicting Chimborazo in cross-section, the Naturgemälde strikingly illustrated nature as a web in which everything was connected. On it, Humboldt showed plants distributed according to their altitudes, ranging from subterranean mushroom species to the lichens that grew just below the snow line.
• This variety and richness, but also the simplicity of the scientific information depicted, was unprecedented. No one before Humboldt had presented such data visually. The Naturgemälde showed for the first time that nature was a global force with corresponding climate zones across continents. Humboldt saw ‘unity in variety’. Instead of placing plants in their taxonomic categories, he saw vegetation through the lens of climate and location: a radically new idea that still shapes our understanding of ecosystems today.
• As they sailed from Lima towards Guayaquil, Humboldt examined the cold current that hugs the western coast of South America from southern Chile to northern Peru. The current’s cold, nutrient-loaded water supports such abundance of marine life that it is the world’s most productive marine ecosystem. Years later, it would be called the Humboldt Current.
• Jefferson’s love for botany and gardening was so well known that American diplomats sent seeds to the White House from all over the world.
• He also added two pages that focused on the border region with Mexico and in particular on the disputed area that so interested Jefferson, between the Sabine River and the Rio Grande. This was the most exciting and fruitful visit Jefferson had received in years. Less than a month later, he held a Cabinet meeting about US strategy towards Spain in which they discussed how the data they had received from Humboldt might influence their negotiations.
• More than any other plant, indigo ‘impoverishes the soil’, Humboldt had noted. The land looked exhausted and in a few years, he predicted, nothing would grow there any more. The soil was being exploited ‘like a mine’... which meant that without imports from other colonies, Humboldt said, ‘the island would starve’. This was a recipe for dependency and injustice.
• Monoculture and cash crops did not create a happy society, Humboldt said. What was needed was subsistence farming, based on edible crops and variety such as bananas, quinoa, corn and potatoes. Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment... He debated nature, ecological issues, imperial power and politics in relation to each other. He criticized unjust land distribution, monocultures, violence against tribal groups and indigenous work conditions – all powerfully relevant issues today. As a former mining inspector, Humboldt had a unique insight into the environmental and economic consequences of the exploitation of nature’s riches.
• Much like plant families, Humboldt explained, which adapted differently to their geographical and climatic conditions but nonetheless displayed the traits of ‘a common type’, so did all the members of the human race belong to one family. All men were equal, Humboldt said, and no race was above another, because ‘all are alike designed for freedom’.
• Humankind was just one small part. Nature itself was a republic of freedom.
• When he ran out of space, Humboldt used his large desk on which he carved and scribbled ideas. Soon the entire table top was completely covered with numbers, lines and words, so much so that a carpenter had to be called to plane it clean again.
• The timing could not have been better. A month later, on the evening of 12 August, as Humboldt regaled a group of Germans who were visiting Naples with stories from the Orinoco and the Andes, Vesuvius erupted in front of their eyes.
• The similarities of their coastal plants, Humboldt wrote, showed an ‘ancient’ connection between Africa and South America as well as illustrating how islands that were previously linked were now separated – an incredible conclusion more than a century before scientists had even begun to discuss continental movements and the theory of shifting tectonic plates. Humboldt ‘read’ plants as others did books
• In the mists at the rapids of the Orinoco, rainbows danced in a game of hide-and-seek – ‘optical magic’, as he called it. Humboldt created poetic vignettes when he wrote of strange insects that ‘poured their red phosphoric light on the herb-covered ground, which glowed with living fire as if the starry canopy of heaven had sunk upon the turf’. This was a scientific book unembarrassed by lyricism.
• Napoleon was a great supporter of the sciences. With reason as the reigning intellectual force of the age, science had moved to the nexus of politics. Knowledge was power and never before had the sciences been so close to the centre of government.
• Napoleon was extremely unhelpful towards Humboldt. One reason may have been jealousy because Humboldt’s multi-volume Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent was in direct competition with Napoleon’s own pride and joy: the Description de l’Égypte. Almost 200 scientists had accompanied Napoleon’s troops to Egypt in 1798 in order to collect all the available knowledge there. Description de l’Égypte was the scientific result of the invasion and,
• About 170,000 Austrians, Russians and Prussians arrived in Paris and toppled Napoleon’s statue on the Vendôme Column, replacing it with a white flag. British painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who visited Paris at the time, described the mad carnival that ensued: half-clothed Cossack horsemen with their belts stuffed with guns, next to tall soldiers from the Russian Imperial Guard ‘pinched at the waist like a wasp’. English officers with clean-scrubbed faces, fat Austrians and neatly dressed Prussian soldiers, as well as Tartars in chainmail armour with bow and arrows, filled the streets.
• Bolívar was brimming with ideas for a strong South America where all colonies would fight together rather than separately as before. In command of only a small army but reputedly equipped with Humboldt’s excellent maps, Bolívar now began a bold guerrilla offensive hundreds of miles away from home.
• The man who had been granted rare permission by Carlos IV to explore the Spanish Latin American territories went on to publish a harsh criticism of the colonial rule. His book was filled, Humboldt told Jefferson, with the expressions of his ‘independent sentiments’. The Spanish had incited hatred between the different racial groups, Humboldt accused.
• These scathing indictments of colonialism and slavery showed how everything was interrelated: climate, soils and agriculture with slavery, demographics and economics. Humboldt claimed that the colonies could only be liberated and self-sufficient when they were ‘freed from the fetters of the odious monopoly’. It was the ‘European barbarity’, Humboldt insisted, that had created this unjust world.
• Here on the icy slopes of Chimborazo, ‘the tremendous voice of Colombia cries out to me’, Bolívar ends his poem. It wasn’t surprising that Chimborazo became Bolívar’s metaphor for his revolution and destiny – even today the mountain is depicted on the Ecuadorian flag. As so often, Bolívar turned to the natural world to illustrate his thoughts and beliefs... Bolívar was at the height of his fame when he wrote ‘My Delirium on Chimborazo’ in 1822. Almost 1 million square miles of South America were under his leadership – an area much bigger than Napoleon’s empire had ever been.
• Since the mid- eighteenth century some thinkers had insisted on the ‘degeneracy of America’. One such was the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who in the 1760s and 1770s had written that in America all things ‘shrink and diminish under a niggardly sky and unprolific land’. The New World was inferior to the Old World, Buffon asserted in the most widely read natural history work of the second half of the century. According to Buffon, plants, animals and even people were smaller and weaker in the New World. There were no large mammals or any civilized people, he said, and even the savages there were ‘feeble’.
• In 1782, in the midst of the American War of Independence, Jefferson had published Notes on the State of Virginia in which the flora and fauna of the United States became the foot-soldiers of a patriotic battle. Under the banner of the-bigger-the-better, Jefferson listed the weights of bears, buffalos and panthers to prove his point. Even the weasel, he wrote, was ‘larger in America than in Europe’... Jefferson had then, at great personal expense, imported a stuffed moose from Vermont to Paris, an enterprise that in the end failed to impress the French because the moose had arrived in Paris in a sorry state of decay with no fur on the skin and exuding a foul smell. But Jefferson had not given up and had asked friends and acquaintances to send him details of ‘the heaviest weights of our animals
• Humboldt’s idea of nature as a living organism animated by dynamic forces fell on fertile ground in England. It was the guiding principle and the leading metaphor for the Romantics. Humboldt’s works, the Edinburgh Review wrote, were the best proof of the ‘secret band’ that united all knowledge, feeling and morality. Everything was connected and ‘found to reflect on each other’.
• They also discussed Humboldt’s invention of isotherms, the lines that we see on weather maps today and which connect different geographical points around the globe that are experiencing the same temperatures.1 Humboldt had come up with the design for his essay On the Isothermal Lines and the Distribution of Heat on the Earth (1817) in order to visualize global climate patterns. The essay would help Lyell to form his own theories, and also marked the beginning of a new understanding of climate – one on which all subsequent studies about the distribution of heat were based.
• Though Louis XVIII respected some liberal views, he had arrived in France from exile with a train of ultra-royalist émigrés who wanted to return to the old ways of the pre-revolutionary Ancien Régime. Humboldt had watched them coming back and had seen how they burned with hate and a desire for revenge. ‘Their tendency to absolute monarchy is irresistible,’ Charles Lyell had written to his father from Paris. Then in 1820 the king’s nephew, the Duc de Berry – third in line to the throne – was murdered by a Bonapartist. After that there was no holding back the royalist tide any more.
• Humboldt’s most exciting day, however, was spent not with scientists or politicians but with a young engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who had invited Humboldt to observe the construction of the first tunnel under the Thames... Inspired by a shipworm that bored through the toughest timber planks by protecting its head with a shell, Marc Brunel had designed a huge contraption that allowed the excavation of the tunnel while at the same time propping up the ceiling and keeping the soft clay in place.
• And though theories of shifting tectonic plates would only be confirmed in the mid-twentieth century, Humboldt had already discussed in 1807 in the Essay on the Geography of Plants that the continents of Africa and South America had once been connected. Later he wrote that the reason for this continental shift was ‘a subterranean force’. Goethe as a firm Neptunist was appalled.
• Though the brothers worked in different disciplines, their premises and approaches were similar. Often, they even used the same terminology. Where Alexander had searched for the formative drive in nature, Wilhelm now wrote that ‘language was the formative organ of thoughts’. Just as nature was so much more than the accumulation of plants, rocks and animals, so language was more than just words, grammar and sounds. According to Wilhelm’s radical new theory, different languages reflected different views of the world. Language was not just a tool to express thoughts but it shaped thoughts
• Since there were similar gold and platinum deposits in the Urals as in South America, Humboldt was sure that there were diamonds in Russia... Most people who watched him thought he was utterly mad because no one had ever found diamonds outside the tropics.
• Comparison not discovery was his guiding theme. Later, when he published the results of the Russian expedition in two books,2 Humboldt wrote about the destruction of forests and of humankind’s long-term changes to the environment. When he listed the three ways in which the human species was affecting the climate, he named deforestation, ruthless irrigation and, perhaps most prophetically, the ‘great masses of steam and gas’ produced in the industrial centres.
• Humboldt finally arrived back in St Petersburg on 13 November 1829. His endurance had been astonishing. Since their departure from St Petersburg on 20 May, his party had travelled 10,000 miles in less than six months, passing through 658 post stations and using 12,244 horses.
• Darwin modelled his own writing on Humboldt’s, fusing scientific writing with poetic description to such an extent that his journal of the Beagle voyage became remarkably similar in style and content to the Personal Narrative.
• Throughout this opening sequence, Humboldt’s flow of words did not stop once. From the moment he entered a room, everybody else fell silent. Any comment made by someone else only inspired Humboldt to make yet another long philosophical excursion. Darwin was stunned. Several times he tried to get in a word but eventually gave up. Humboldt was cheerful enough and paid him ‘some tremendous compliments’ but the old man just talked too much.
• Another American writer who loved Humboldt’s work was Edgar Allan Poe, whose last major work – the 130-page prose poem Eureka, published in 1848 – was dedicated to Humboldt and was a direct response to Cosmos.
• Humboldt’s Cosmos shaped two generations of American scientists, artists, writers and poets – and, maybe most importantly, Cosmos was also responsible for the maturing of one of America’s most influential nature writers: Henry David Thoreau.
• For years, every spring, Thoreau had observed the thawing of the sandy railway embankments near Walden Pond. As the sun warmed the frozen ground and melted the ice, purple streams of sand would be released and seep out, lacing the embankment with the shapes of leaves: a sandy foliage that preceded the leafing out of the trees and the shrubs in spring. In his original manuscript, written in the cabin at the pond, Thoreau had described this ‘blooming’ of the sand in an aside of less than 100 words. Now it stretched to more than 1,500 words and became one of the central passages in Walden. The sands, he wrote, displayed ‘the anticipation of the vegetable leaf’. It was the ‘prototype’, he said, just like Goethe’s urform.
• Walden was Thoreau’s mini-Cosmos of one particular place, an evocation of nature in which everything was connected, packed with details of animal habits, blooms and the thickness of ice on the pond. Objectivity or pure scientific enquiry did not exist, Thoreau wrote when he had finished Walden, because it was always twinned with subjectivity and the senses. ‘Facts fall from the poetic observer as ripe seeds,’ he noted. The foundation of all was observation.
• He also encouraged artists to travel to the remote corners of the globe, helping them to secure funding, suggesting routes and sometimes complaining when they failed to follow his recommendations. His instructions were exact and detailed. One German artist was equipped with a long list of plants that Humboldt had asked him to paint. He was to depict ‘real landscapes’, Humboldt wrote, rather than idealized scenes as artists had done for the past centuries.
• The Heart of the Andes, by the young American painter Frederic Edwin Church. The painting was so sensational that long lines of keen visitors snaked around the block, waiting for hours to pay a 25 cent entrance fee to see the five-by-ten-foot canvas that depicted the Andes in all their glory. The river rapids in the centre of the painting were so realistic that people could almost feel the spray of the water. Trees, leaves and flowers were all rendered so accurately that botanists were able to identify them precisely,
• The ground required to feed the animals, Marsh calculated, was much greater than the size of the fields needed for the equivalent nutritional value in grains and vegetables. Marsh concluded that a vegetarian’s diet was environmentally more responsible than that of a meat eater. In tandem with wealth and consumption came destruction, Marsh claimed.
• Humans were responsible for the extinction of animals and plants, Marsh wrote in Man and Nature, while the unrestrained use of water was just another example of ruthless greed.2 Irrigation diminished great rivers, he said, and turned soils saline and infertile. Marsh’s vision of the future was bleak. If nothing changed, he believed, the planet would be reduced to a condition of ‘shattered surface, of climatic excess … perhaps even extinction of the [human] species’. He saw the American landscape magnified through what he had observed during his travels – from the overgrazed hills along the Bosporus near Constantinople to the barren mountain slopes in Greece.
• he had found the scientific project that would make his career: they were called radiolarians. These minuscule single-celled marine organisms were about 1/1,000 of an inch and visible only under the microscope. Once magnified, the radiolarians revealed their stunning structure. Their exquisite mineral skeletons exhibited a complex pattern of symmetry, often with ray-like projections that gave them a floating appearance. Week after week, Haeckel identified new species and even new families.
• Haeckel illustrated his zoological work with his own drawings of perfect scientific accuracy but also of remarkable beauty. It helped that he could look with one eye into his microscope while the other focused on his drawing board – a talent so unusual that his former professors said they had never seen someone
• Haeckel took Humboldt’s idea of nature as a unified whole made up of complex interrelationships and gave it a name. Ecology, Haeckel said, was the ‘science of the relationships of an organism with its environment’.
• The Art Nouveau artists at the turn of the century tried to reconcile the disturbed relationship between man and nature by taking aesthetic inspiration from the natural world. They ‘now learned from nature’ and not from their teachers, one German designer commented. The introduction of these nature motifs into interiors and architecture became a redemptive step that brought the organic into the increasingly mechanical world. The famous French glass artist Émile Gallé, for example, owned Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature
• To his doctor’s surprise, his eyes slowly recovered. At first Muir was able to make out the silhouettes of the furniture in his room, and then he began to recognize faces. After four weeks of convalescence, he was able to decipher letters and went for his first walk. When his eyesight was fully restored, nothing was going to prevent him from going to South America to see the ‘tropical vegetation in all its palmy glory’.
• As he walked towards the mountains, keeping away from roads and settlements, Muir bathed in colour and air so delicious, he said, that it was ‘sweet enough for the breath of angels’. In the distance the white peaks of the Sierra glistened as if they were made of pure light, ‘like the wall of a celestial city’.
• Muir took the baton of nature writing from Humboldt who had created this new genre – one that combined scientific thinking with emotional responses to nature. Humboldt had dazzled his readers, including Muir, who then in turn became a master of this kind of writing.
• When Marsh had made his case against the destruction of forests, he had been a proponent for conservation because he was essentially arguing for the protection of natural resources. Marsh wanted the use of trees or water to be regulated so that a sustainable balance could be achieved. Muir, by contrast, interpreted Humboldt’s ideas differently. He advocated preservation, by which he meant the protection of nature from human impact.
• Another reason why Humboldt has faded from our collective memory – at least in Britain and the United States – is the anti-German sentiment that came with the First World War. In a country such as Britain, where even the royal family felt they had to change their German-sounding surname ‘Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’ to ‘Windsor’