The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  There are Kap Humboldt and Humboldt Glacier in Greenland, as well as mountain ranges in northern China, South Africa, New Zealand and Antarctica. There are rivers and waterfalls in Tasmania and New Zealand as well as parks in Germany and Rue Alexandre de Humboldt in Paris. In North America alone four counties, thirteen towns, mountains, bays, lakes and a river are named after him, as well as the Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California and Humboldt Parks in Chicago and Buffalo. The state of Nevada was almost called Humboldt when the Constitutional Convention debated its name in the 1860s. Almost 300 plants and more than 100 animals are named after him – including the Californian Humboldt lily (Lilium humboldtii), the South American Humboldt penguin (Spheniscus humboldti) and the fierce predatory six-foot Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas) which can be found in the Humboldt Current. Several minerals carry his name – from Humboldtit to Humboldtin – and on the moon there is an area called ‘Mare Humboldtianum’. More places are named after Humboldt than anyone else.

  Ecologists, environmentalists and nature writers rely on Humboldt’s vision, although most do so unknowingly. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is based on Humboldt’s concept of interconnectedness, and scientist James Lovelock’s famous Gaia theory of the earth as a living organism bears remarkable similarities. When Humboldt described the earth as ‘a natural whole animated and moved by inward forces’, he pre-dated Lovelock’s ideas by more than 150 years. Humboldt called his book describing this new concept Cosmos, having initially considered (but then discarded) ‘Gäa’ as a title.

  We are shaped by the past. Nicolaus Copernicus showed us our place in the universe, Isaac Newton explained the laws of nature, Thomas Jefferson gave us some of our concepts of liberty and democracy, and Charles Darwin proved that all species descend from common ancestors. These ideas define our relationship to the world.

  Humboldt gave us our concept of nature itself. The irony is that Humboldt’s views have become so self-evident that we have largely forgotten the man behind them. But there exists a direct line of connection through his ideas, and through the many people whom he inspired. Like a rope, Humboldt’s concept of nature connects us to him.

  The Invention of Nature is my attempt to find Humboldt. It has been a journey across the world that led me to archives in California, Berlin and Cambridge among many others. I read through thousands of letters but I also followed Humboldt’s footsteps. I saw the ruin of the anatomy tower in Jena in Germany where Humboldt spent many weeks dissecting animals, and at 12,000 feet on the Antisana in Ecuador, with four condors circling above and surrounded by a herd of wild horses, I found the dilapidated hut where he had spent a night in March 1802.

  In Quito, I held Humboldt’s original Spanish passport in my hands – the very papers that allowed him to travel through Latin America. In Berlin, I finally understood how his mind worked when I opened the boxes that contained his notes – marvellous collages of thousands of bits of paper, sketches and numbers. Closer to home, at the British Library in London, I spent many weeks reading Humboldt’s published books, some so huge and heavy that I could scarcely lift them on to the table. In Cambridge I looked at Darwin’s own copies of Humboldt’s books – those that Darwin had kept on a shelf next to his hammock on the Beagle. They are filled with Darwin’s pencil marks. Reading these books was like eavesdropping on Darwin talking to Humboldt.

  I found myself lying at night in the Venezuelan rainforest listening to the strange bellowing cry of howler monkeys, but also stuck in Manhattan without electricity during Hurricane Sandy when I had travelled there to read some documents in the New York Public Library. I admired the old manor house with its tenth-century tower in the little village of Piòbesi outside Turin where George Perkins Marsh wrote parts of Man and Nature in the early 1860s – a book inspired by Humboldt’s ideas and one that would mark the beginning of America’s conservation movement. I walked around Thoreau’s Walden Pond in deep freshly fallen snow and hiked in Yosemite, reminding myself of John Muir’s idea that: ‘the clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness’.

  The most exciting moment was when I finally climbed Chimborazo, the mountain that had been so elemental to Humboldt’s vision. As I walked up the barren slope, the air was so thin that every step felt like an eternity – a slow pull upward while my legs felt leaden and somehow disconnected from the rest of my body. My admiration for Humboldt grew with every step. He had climbed Chimborazo with an injured foot (and certainly not in walking boots as comfortable and sturdy as mine), loaded with instruments and constantly stopping to take measurements.

  The result of this exploration through landscapes and letters, through thoughts and diaries, is this book. The Invention of Nature is my quest to rediscover Humboldt, and to restore him to his rightful place in the pantheon of nature and science. It’s also a quest to understand why we think as we do today about the natural world.

  1 To this day many German-speaking schools across Latin America hold biannual athletic competitions called Juegos Humboldt – Humboldt Games.

  PART I

  Departure: Emerging Ideas

  1

  Beginnings

  ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT was born, on 14 September 1769, into a wealthy aristocratic Prussian family who spent their winters in Berlin and their summers at the family estate of Tegel, a small castle about ten miles north-west of the city. His father, Alexander Georg von Humboldt, was an officer in the army, a chamberlain at the Prussian court and a confidant of the future king Friedrich Wilhelm II. Alexander’s mother, Marie Elisabeth, was the daughter of a rich manufacturer who had brought money and land into the family. The Humboldt name was held in high regard in Berlin and the future king was even Alexander’s godfather. But despite their privileged upbringing, Alexander and his older brother, Wilhelm, had an unhappy childhood. Their beloved father died suddenly when Alexander was nine and their mother never showed her sons much affection. Where their father had been charming and friendly, their mother was formal, cold and emotionally distant. Instead of maternal warmth, she provided the best education then available in Prussia, arranging for the two boys to be privately tutored by a string of Enlightenment thinkers who instilled in them a love of truth, liberty and knowledge.

  These were strange relationships in which the boys sometimes searched for a father figure. One tutor in particular, Gottlob Johann Christian Kunth, who oversaw their education for many years, taught them with a peculiar combination of expressing displeasure and disappointment while at the same time encouraging a sense of dependency. Hovering behind them and watching over their shoulders as they calculated, translated Latin texts or learned French vocabulary, Kunth constantly corrected the brothers. He was never quite satisfied with their progress. Whenever they made a mistake, Kunth reacted as if they had done so to hurt or offend him. For the boys, this behaviour was more painful than if he had spanked them with a cane. Always desperate to please Kunth, as Wilhelm later recounted, they had felt a ‘perpetual anxiety’ to make him happy.

  It was particularly difficult for Alexander who was taught the same lessons as his precocious brother, despite being two years younger. The result was that he believed himself to be less talented. When Wilhelm excelled in Latin and Greek, Alexander felt incompetent and slow. He struggled so much, Alexander later told a friend, that his tutors ‘were doubtful whether even ordinary powers of intelligence would ever be developed in him’.

  Schloss Tegel and the surrounding estate (Illustration Credit 1.1)

  Wilhelm lost himself in Greek mythology and histories of ancient Rome, but Alexander felt restless with books. Instead he escaped the classroom whenever he could to ramble through the countryside, collecting and sketching plants, animals and rocks. When he returned with his pockets full of insects and plants his family nicknamed him ‘the little apothecary’, but they didn’t take his interests seriously. According to family lore, one day the Prussian king, Frederick the Great, asked the boy if he planned to conquer the world like his namesake,
Alexander the Great. Young Humboldt’s answer was: ‘Yes, Sir, but with my head.’

  Much of his early life, Humboldt later told a close friend, was spent among people who loved him but who didn’t understand him. His teachers were demanding and his mother lived withdrawn from society and her sons. Marie Elisabeth von Humboldt’s greatest concern was, Kunth said, to foster the ‘intellectual and moral perfection’ of Wilhelm and Alexander – their emotional wellbeing was seemingly of no interest. ‘I was forced into a thousand constraints,’ Humboldt said, and into loneliness, hiding behind a wall of pretence because he never felt that he could be himself with his stern mother watching his every step. Expressions of excitement or of joy were unacceptable behaviour in the Humboldt household.

  Alexander and Wilhelm were very different. Where Alexander was adventurous and enjoyed being outside, Wilhelm was serious and studious. Alexander was often torn between emotions, while Wilhelm’s overriding character trait was self-control. Both brothers withdrew into their own worlds – Wilhelm into his books and Alexander on lonely walks through Tegel’s forests, great woods that had been planted with imported North American trees. As he wandered among colourful sugar maples and stately white oaks, Alexander experienced nature as calming and soothing. But it was also among these trees from another world that he began to dream of distant countries.

  Humboldt grew up a good-looking young man. He stood five feet eight, but carried himself straight and proud, so that he seemed taller. He was slight and agile – quick on his feet and nimble. His hands were small and delicate, almost like those of a woman, as one friend commented. His eyes were inquisitive and always alert. His looks very much conformed to the ideals of the age: tousled hair, full expressive lips and a dimpled chin. But he was often ill, suffering from fevers and neurasthenia which Wilhelm believed was a ‘kind of hypochondria’, for ‘the poor boy is unhappy’.

  To hide his vulnerability, Alexander built a protective shield of wit and ambition. As a boy, he had been feared for his sharp comments, with one family friend calling him ‘un petit esprit malin’, a reputation he would live up to for the rest of his life. Even Alexander’s closest friends admitted that he had a malicious streak. But Wilhelm said that his brother was never really spiteful – maybe a little vain and driven by a deep urge to shine and excel. From his youth Alexander seemed to have been torn between this vanity and his loneliness, between a craving for praise and his yearning for independence. Insecure, yet believing in his intellectual prowess, he see-sawed between his need for approval and his sense of superiority.

  Born the same year as Napoleon Bonaparte, Humboldt was raised in an increasingly global and accessible world. Fittingly, the months before his birth had seen the first international scientific collaboration when astronomers from dozens of nations had coordinated and shared their observations of the transit of Venus. The problem of calculating longitude had finally been solved, and the empty areas of eighteenth-century maps were filling up fast. The world was changing. Just before Humboldt turned seven, American revolutionaries declared their independence, and shortly before his twentieth birthday the French followed suit with their own revolution in 1789.

  Germany was still under the umbrella of the Holy Roman Empire, which, as the French thinker Voltaire once said, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. Not yet a nation, it was made up of many states – some tiny principalities, others ruled by large and powerful dynasties such as the Hohenzollern in Prussia and the Habsburgs in Austria, which continued to fight for dominance and territories. In the mid-eighteenth century, during the reign of Frederick the Great, Prussia had emerged as the greatest rival to Austria.

  By the time of Humboldt’s birth, Prussia was known for its huge standing army and administrative efficiency. Frederick the Great had ruled as an absolute monarch but nevertheless introduced some reforms including a system of primary schooling and modest agrarian reform. First steps had also been taken towards religious tolerance in Prussia. Famed for his military prowess, Frederick the Great had been known for his love of music, philosophy and learning too. And though French and English contemporaries often dismissed the Germans as coarse and backward, there were more universities and libraries in the German states than anywhere else in Europe. As publishing and periodicals boomed, literacy rates soared.

  Meanwhile Britain was marching ahead economically. Agricultural innovations such as crop rotation and new irrigation systems brought greater yields. The British were gripped by ‘canal fever’, lacing their island with a modern transport system. The Industrial Revolution had brought power looms and other machines, and manufacturing centres were mushrooming into cities. Husbandmen in Britain were turning from subsistence farming to feeding those living and working in the new urban centres.

  Man began to control nature with new technologies such as James Watt’s steam engines and also with new medical advances as the first people were inoculated against smallpox in Europe and North America. When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod in the mid-eighteenth century, humankind began to tame what had been regarded as expressions of God’s fury. With such power, man lost his fear of nature.

  For the previous two centuries western society had been dominated by the idea that nature functioned like a complex apparatus – a ‘great and complicated Machine of the Universe’, as one scientist had said. After all, if man could make intricate clocks and automata, what great things could God create? According to the French philosopher René Descartes and his followers, God had given this mechanical world its initial push, while Isaac Newton regarded the universe more like a divine clockwork, with God as the maker continuing to intervene.

  Inventions such as telescopes and microscopes revealed new worlds and with them a belief that the laws of nature could be discovered. In Germany the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz had in the late seventeenth century propounded ideas of a universal science based on mathematics. Meanwhile in Cambridge, Newton had been uncovering the mechanics of the universe by applying mathematics to nature. As a result, the world began to be seen as reassuringly predictable, as long as humankind could comprehend those natural laws.

  Maths, objective observation and controlled experiments paved this path of reason across the western world. Scientists became citizens of their self-proclaimed ‘republic of letters’, an intellectual community that transcended national boundaries, religion and language. As their letters zigzagged across Europe and the Atlantic, scientific discoveries and new ideas spread. This ‘republic of letters’ was a country without borders, ruled by reason and not by monarchs. It was in this new Age of Enlightenment that Alexander von Humboldt was raised, with western societies seemingly striding forward along a trajectory of confidence and improvement. With progress as the century’s watchword, every generation envied the next. No one worried that nature itself might be destroyed.

  As young men, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt joined Berlin’s intellectual circles, where they discussed the importance of education, of tolerance and of independent reasoning. As the brothers dashed from reading groups to philosophical salons in Berlin, learning, previously such a solitary occupation in Tegel, now became social. During the summers their mother often stayed behind in Tegel, leaving the two young brothers with their tutors at the family’s house in Berlin. But this freedom was not to last: their mother made it clear that she expected them to become civil servants. Financially dependent on her, they had to accede to her wishes.

  Marie Elisabeth von Humboldt sent eighteen-year-old Alexander to university in Frankfurt an der Oder. Some seventy miles west of Berlin, this provincial institution had only 200 students, and she had probably chosen it for its closeness to Tegel rather than its academic merit. After Alexander had completed a semester of government administration studies and political economy there, it was decided that he was ready to join Wilhelm in Göttingen, one of the best universities in the German states. Wilhelm studied law and Alexander focused on science, mathematics and languages. Tho
ugh the brothers were in the same town, they spent little time together. ‘Our characters are too different,’ Wilhelm said. While Wilhelm studied hard, Alexander dreamed of the tropics and adventures. He longed to leave Germany. As a boy Alexander had read the journals of Captain James Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville, both of whom had circumnavigated the globe, and imagined himself far away. When he saw the tropical palms at the botanical garden in Berlin, all he wanted to do was see them in their natural environments.

  This youthful wanderlust became more serious when Humboldt joined an older friend, Georg Forster, on a four-month trip across Europe. Forster was a German naturalist who had accompanied Cook on his second voyage around the world. Humboldt and Forster had met in Göttingen. They often talked about the expedition, and Forster’s lively descriptions of the South Pacific islands made Humboldt’s longing to travel even stronger.

  In the spring of 1790, Forster and Humboldt went to England, the Netherlands and France but the highlight of their journey was London, where everything made Humboldt think of distant countries. He saw the Thames choked with vessels bringing goods from all corners of the globe. Some 15,000 ships entered the port every year loaded with spices from the East Indies, sugar from the West Indies, tea from China, wine from France and timber from Russia. The whole river was a ‘black forest’ of masts. In between the large trading ships were hundreds of barges, wherries and smaller boats. Undoubtedly crowded and congested, it was also a magnificent portrait of Britain’s imperial might.