An extraordinary book series, penned in the early 19th Century came into the world in nine volumes: Cosmos written by Alexander von Humboldt.
Humboldt, a polymath, explored the Americas from the Amazon to Mexico as a young man. Imagine it is the 18th century, being in only your second decade of life, and striking off to explore the Amazon rainforest, climb 22,000 foot volcanoes, all with no specialized survival gear, prey to huge, voracious mosquitos, being the prey of jaguars and pythons! Later meeting with Thomas Jefferson – the then American President – at the end of his exploration to show the President what he had learned. Jefferson had just aquired a huge territory (Mexico including California and most of what we know as the West tody) which Humboldt meticulously mapped and accurately measured. He showed the relevance of his discoveries to Jefferson in terms of understanding the limits and possibilities of settlement and economic activities for the young America.
Carting large instruments up volcanoes and down ravines, recording plants in all these different environments, von Humboldt meticuously mapped what we now know as biomes and launched the field of biogeography. He demonstrated that across similar landscapes, certain plants appear in similar environments forecasting today’s understanding of the world’s ecosystems and how they form. With meticulous mapping and measurements, he mapped bioregions.
Today we understand that in each region there is a keystone species signifying a particular biome. He showed how this phenomenon is similar across the world (later mapping in Asia). But, this is a relatively recent understanding. By including an aesthetic understanding, being inspired by the magnificense of the Creation he presaged James’s Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis which understands the Earth’s living systems as self-regulating.
Why is Humboldt important and how does it relate to the Return to Nature and Beauty?
A major theme in Cosmos is the unity of science and human esthetic appreciation of the Creation: science, interrelatedness of life and geology, art and wonder. Later historians categorized this perspective on nature as a romantic conception of science. Today we know it as ecology.
Actually, Humboldt was the first person to present an early understanding of ecology: the extraordinary webs of life that occur all across the globe in similar environments and which are governed by a dynamic process. Below is a Smithsonian short animation of Humboldt’s life and accomplishments.
Andrea Wulf and The Invention of Nature
An extraordinary biography of von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature, was published to great exclaim in 2015. Andrea Wulf, its author, is a talented biographer and writer on nature, science (in particular geology) and the men and women who created or recorded the world’s greatest beauty, design in great botanical gardens of the world, and the men and women who brought these aesthetic experiences and deeper understanding of natural science to the world community. There are three presentations below which explore Alexander von Humbolt’s life and his amazing accomplishments and contributions to our insight into nature.
Susan Feathers 