The Invention of Nature

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 their concepts of liberty and equality but never stopped criticizing their 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’. He was confident, yet constantly yearned for approval. He was admired for his breadth of knowledge but also feared for his sharp tongue. Humboldt’s books were published in a dozen languages and were so popular that people bribed booksellers to be the first to receive copies, yet he died a poor man. He could be vain, but would also give his last money to a struggling young scientist. He packed his life with travels and incessant work. He always wanted to experience something new and, as he said, ideally, ‘three things at the same time’.

Humboldt was celebrated for his knowledge and scientific thinking, yet he was no cerebral scholar. Not content in his study or among books, he threw himself into physical exertion, pushing his body to its limits. He ventured deep into the mysterious world of the rainforest in Venezuela and crawled along narrow rock ledges at a precarious height in the Andes to see the flames inside an active volcano. Even as a sixty-year-old, he travelled more than 10,000 miles to the remotest corners of Russia, outpacing his younger companions.

Fascinated by scientific instruments, measurements and observations, he was driven by a sense of wonder as well. Of course nature had to be measured and analysed, but he also believed that a great part of our response to the natural world should be based on the senses and emotions. He wanted to excite a ‘love of nature’. At a time when other scientists were searching for universal laws, Humboldt wrote that nature had to be experienced through feelings.

Humboldt was unlike anybody else because he was able to remember even the smallest details for years: the shape of a leaf, the colour of soil, a temperature reading, the layering of a rock. This extraordinary memory allowed him to compare the observations he had made all over the world several decades or thousands of miles apart. Humboldt was able to ‘run through the chain of all phenomena in the world at the same time’, one colleague later said. Where others had to ransack their memories, Humboldt – ‘whose eyes are natural telescopes & microscopes’ as the American writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson said in admiration – had every morsel of knowledge and observation to hand at an instant.

As he stood on Chimborazo, exhausted by the climb, Humboldt absorbed the view. Here vegetation zones were stacked one on top of the other. In the valleys, he had passed through palms and humid bamboo forests where colourful orchids clung to the trees. Further up he had seen conifers, oaks, alders and shrub-like berberis similar to those he knew from European forests. Then had come alpine plants much like those he had collected in the mountains in Switzerland and lichens that reminded him of specimens from the Arctic Circle and Lapland. No one had looked at plants like this before. Humboldt saw them not through the narrow categories of classification but as types according to their location and climate. Here was a man who viewed nature as a global force with corresponding climate zones across continents: a radical concept at the time, and one that still colours our understanding of ecosystems.

The distribution of plants in the Andes (Illustration Credit prl.2)

Humboldt’s books, diaries and letters reveal a visionary, a thinker far ahead of his time. 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. Nothing, not even the tiniest organism, was looked at on its own. ‘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.