The Invention of Nature

⁴Generelle Morphologie also provided a general scientific overview to counterbalance the hardening divisions between the disciplines. Scientists, Haeckel wrote, had lost the understanding of the whole – the huge number of specialists had thrown the sciences into ‘Babylonian confusion’. Botanists and zoologists might be collecting individual building blocks but they had lost sight of the blueprint of the whole. It was one great ‘chaotic pile of rubble’ and no one had a clue any more – except for Darwin … and Haeckel, of course.

⁵ Haeckel had long been steeped in ecological thinking. In early 1854, as a young student in Würzburg reading Humboldt, he had already thought of the environmental consequences of deforestation. Ten years before George Perkins Marsh published

Man and Nature, Haeckel wrote that the ancients had felled the forests in the Middle East which in turn had changed the climate there. Civilization and the destruction of forests came ‘hand in hand’, he said. Over time it would be the same in Europe, Haeckel predicted. Barren soils, climate change and starvation would eventually lead to a mass exodus from Europe to more fertile lands. ‘Europe and its hyper-civilisation will soon be over,’ he said.

⁶ Haeckel built his villa exactly on the spot from where Goethe had sketched Friedrich Schiller’s Garden House in 1810. From his window, Haeckel could see across the small River Leutra to Schiller’s old house – the place where the Humboldt brothers, Goethe and Schiller had spent many evenings in the early summer of 1797.

23

Preservation and Nature

John Muir and Humboldt

HUMBOLDT HAD ALWAYS walked, from his boyhood rambles in Tegel’s forests to his trek through the Andes. Even as a sixty-year-old, he had impressed his travel companions in Russia with his stamina, walking and climbing for hours. Voyages on foot, Humboldt said, taught him the poetry of nature. He was feeling nature by moving through it.

In the late summer of 1867, eight years after Humboldt’s death, twenty-nine-year-old John Muir packed his bag and left Indianapolis, where he had worked for the previous fifteen months, to make his way to South America. Muir travelled lightly – a couple of books, some soap and a towel, a plant press, a few pencils and a notebook. He only had the clothes he wore and some spare underwear. He was dressed plainly but neatly. Tall and slender, Muir was a handsome man with wavy auburn hair, and clear blue eyes which constantly searched his surroundings. ‘How intensely I desire to be a Humboldt,’ Muir said, desperate to see the ‘snow-capped Andes & the flowers of the Equator’.

Once he had left the city of Indianapolis behind, Muir rested under a tree and spread out his pocket map to plan his route to Florida from where he wanted to find passage to South America. He took out his empty notebook and wrote on the first page, ‘John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe’ – asserting his place in Humboldt’s cosmos.

Born and brought up in Dunbar on the east coast of Scotland, John Muir had spent his early boyhood in the fields and along the rocky seashore. His father was a deeply religious man who had forbidden any pictures, ornaments or musical instruments inside the house. Instead Muir’s mother had found beauty in their garden, while the children roamed the countryside. ‘I was fond of everything that was wild,’ Muir recalled, remembering how he would escape from a father who forced him to recite the entire Old and New Testaments ‘by heart and by sore flesh’. When not outside, Muir had read about Alexander von Humboldt’s voyages and had dreamed himself to exotic places.

When Muir was eleven, the family emigrated to the United States. Muir’s zealous father Daniel had grown increasingly dismissive of the established Church in Scotland and hoped to find religious freedom in America. Daniel Muir wanted to live according to pure biblical truth, untainted by organized religion, and be his own priest. And so the Muir family purchased some land and settled in Wisconsin. Muir marched through the meadows and forests whenever he could to get away from the farm work, nurturing the wanderlust that would persist throughout his life. In January 1861, aged twenty-two, he enrolled in the ‘scientific curriculum’ at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Here he met Jeanne Carr, a talented botanist and the wife of one of his professors. Carr encouraged Muir in his botanical studies and opened her library to the young man. They became close friends and later lively correspondents.