The Invention of Nature

Epilogue

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world. He was one of the last polymaths, and died at a time when scientific disciplines were hardening into tightly fenced and more specialized fields. Consequently his more holistic approach – a scientific method that included art, history, poetry and politics alongside hard data – has fallen out of favour. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there was little room for a man whose knowledge had bridged a vast range of subjects. As scientists crawled into their narrow areas of expertise, dividing and further subdividing, they lost Humboldt’s interdisciplinary methods and his concept of nature as a global force.

One of Humboldt’s greatest achievements had been to make science accessible and popular. Everybody learned from him: farmers and craftsmen, schoolboys and teachers, artists and musicians, scientists and politicians. There was not a single textbook or atlas in the hands of children in the western world that hadn’t been shaped by Humboldt’s ideas, one orator had declared during the 1869 centennial celebrations in Boston. Unlike Christopher Columbus or Isaac Newton, Humboldt did not discover a continent or a new law of physics. Humboldt was not known for a single fact or a discovery but for his worldview. His vision of nature has passed into our consciousness as if by osmosis. It is almost as though his ideas have become so manifest that the man behind them has disappeared.

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’ and where the works of Beethoven and Bach were not played any more, it is hardly surprising that a German scientist was no longer popular. Similarly in the United States, when Congress joined the conflict in 1917, German-Americans were suddenly lynched and harassed. In Cleveland, where fifty years earlier thousands had marched through the streets in celebration of Humboldt’s centennial, German books were burned in a huge public bonfire. In Cincinnati all German publications were removed from the shelves of the public library and ‘Humboldt Street’ was renamed ‘Taft Street’. Both world wars of the twentieth century cast long shadows, and neither Britain nor America were places for the celebration of a great German mind any more.

So why should we care? Over the past few years, many have asked me why I’m interested in Alexander von Humboldt. There are several answers to that question because there are many reasons why Humboldt remains fascinating and important: not only was his life colourful and packed with adventure, but his story gives meaning to why we see nature the way we see it today. In a world where we tend to draw a sharp line between the sciences and the arts, between the subjective and the objective, Humboldt’s insight that we can only truly understand nature by using our imagination makes him a visionary.

Humboldt’s disciples, and their disciples in turn, carried his legacy forward – quietly, subtly and sometimes unintentionally. Environmentalists, ecologists and nature writers today remain firmly rooted in Humboldt’s vision – although many have never heard of him. Nonetheless, Humboldt is their founding father.

As scientists are trying to understand and predict the global consequences of climate change, Humboldt’s interdisciplinary approach to science and nature is more relevant than ever. His beliefs in the free exchange of information, in uniting scientists and in fostering communication across disciplines, are the pillars of science today. His concept of nature as one of global patterns underpins our thinking.

One look at the latest 2014 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report shows just how much we are in need of a Humboldtian perspective. The report, produced by over 800 scientists and experts, states that global warming will have ‘severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems’. Humboldt’s insights that social, economic and political issues are closely connected to environmental problems remain resoundingly topical. As the American farmer and poet Wendell Berry said: ‘There is in fact no distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of the people. When one is abused, the other suffers.’ Or as the Canadian activist Naomi Klein declares in This Changes Everything (2014), the economic system and the environment are at war. Just as Humboldt realized that colonies based on slavery, monoculture and exploitation created a system of injustice and of disastrous environmental devastation, so we too have to understand that economic forces and climate change are all part of the same system.

Humboldt talked of ‘mankind’s mischief … which disturbs nature’s order’. There were moments in his life when he was so pessimistic that he painted a bleak future of humankind’s eventual expansion into space, when humans would spread their lethal mix of vice, greed, violence and ignorance across other planets. The human species could turn even those distant stars ‘barren’ and leave them ‘ravaged’, Humboldt wrote as early as 1801, just as they were already doing with earth.

It feels as if we’ve come full circle. Maybe now is the moment for us and for the environmental movement to reclaim Alexander von Humboldt as our hero.

Goethe compared Humboldt to a ‘fountain with many spouts from which streams flow refreshingly and infinitely, so that we only have to place vessels under them’.

That fountain, I believe, has never run dry.