Author: Wulf, AndreaTitle: The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
Publisher: New York: Vintage
Date: 2016
Pages: 552
ISBN13: 9780385350662
Readership level: General, Graduate & Faculty, Undergraduate
Genre: Nonfiction
Worldcat: Worldcat persistent link.
From the author's web site:
"The Invention of Nature" reveals the extraordinary life of the visionary German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and how he created the way we understand nature today. Though almost forgotten today, his name lingers everywhere from the Humboldt Current to the Humboldt penguin. Humboldt was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether climbing the highest volcanoes in the world, paddling down the Orinoco or racing through anthrax–infested Siberia. Perceiving nature as an interconnected global force, Humboldt discovered similarities between climate zones across the world and predicted human-induced climate change. He turned scientific observation into poetic narrative, and his writings inspired naturalists and poets such as Darwin, Wordsworth and Goethe but also politicians such as Jefferson. Wulf also argues that it was Humboldt’s influence that led John Muir to his ideas of preservation and that shaped Thoreau’s ‘Walden’. Wulf traces Humboldt’s influences through the great minds he inspired in revolution, evolution, ecology, conservation, art and literature. In The Invention of Nature Wulf brings this lost hero to science and the forgotten father of environmentalism back to life.
Humboldt was, after all, as one contemporary said, ‘the greatest man since the Deluge’.
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At 18,000ft, they saw a last scrap of lichen clinging to a boulder. After that, all signs of organic life disappeared. Even the condors that had accompanied their previous climbs were absent. As the fog whitewashed the air into an eerie empty space, Humboldt felt completely removed from the inhabited world. "It was," he said, "as if we were trapped inside an air balloon." Then, suddenly, the fog lifted, revealing Chimborazo's snow-capped summit against the blue sky. A "magnificent sight", was Humboldt's first thought, but then he saw the huge crevasse in front of them – 65ft wide. But there was no other way to the top. When Humboldt measured their altitude at 19,413ft, he discovered that they were barely 1,000 feet below the peak.
No one had ever come this high before, and no one had ever breathed such thin air. As he stood at the top of the world, looking down upon the mountain ranges folded beneath him, Humboldt began to see the world differently. He saw the earth as one great living organism where everything was connected, conceiving a bold new vision of nature that still influences the way that we understand the natural world. Described by his contemporaries as the most famous man in the world after Napoleon, Humboldt was one of the most captivating and inspiring men of his time.
Born in 1769 into a Prussian aristocratic family, he discarded a life of privilege to discover for himself how the world worked. As a young man, he set out on a five-year exploration of Latin America, risking his life many times and returning with a new sense of the world. He lived in cities such as Paris and Berlin, but was equally at home on the most remote branches of the Orinoco River or on the Kazakh Steppe. During much of his long life, he was the nexus of the scientific world, writing some 50,000 letters and receiving at least double that number. Knowledge, Humboldt believed, had to be shared, exchanged and made available to everybody.
He was also a man of contradictions. He was a fierce critic of colonialism and supported the revolutions in Latin America, yet was chamberlain to two Prussian kings. He admired the United States for its concepts of liberty and equality but never stopped criticising its failure to abolish slavery. He called himself "half an American", but at the same time compared America to "a Cartesian vortex, carrying away and levelling everything to dull monotony".