The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  Haeckel wrote that the goddess of truth lived in the ‘temple of nature’. The soaring columns of the monistic ‘church’ were slender palms and tropical trees embraced by lianas, he said, and instead of altars they would have aquaria filled with delicate corals and colourful fish. From the ‘womb of our Mother Nature’, Haeckel declared, flows a stream of ‘eternal beauties’ that never runs dry.

  He also believed that the unity in nature could be expressed through aesthetics. To Haeckel’s mind, this nature-infused art evoked a new world. As Humboldt had already said in his ‘brilliant Kosmos’, Haeckel wrote, art was one of the most important educational tools as it nurtured the love for nature. What Humboldt had called the ‘scientific and aesthetic contemplation’ of the natural world, Haeckel now insisted, was essential for the understanding of the universe, and it was this appreciation that became a ‘natural religion’.

  As long as there were scientists and artists, Haeckel believed, there was no need for priests and cathedrals.

  1 Haeckel’s reputation received the harshest blows in the second half of the twentieth century when historians blamed him for providing the Nazis with the intellectual foundation for their racial programmes. In his biography The Tragic Sense of Life, Robert Richards argued that Haeckel, who died more than a decade before the Nazis came to power, was not an anti-Semite. In fact Haeckel had placed Jews next to Caucasians on his controversial ‘stem-trees’. Though not acceptable today, Haeckel’s racial theories of a progressive path from ‘savage’ to ‘civilised’ races were shared by Darwin and many other nineteenth-century scientists.

  2 Allmers replied to Haeckel that his cousin had appropriated one of the radiolarian drawings as a ‘crochet pattern’.

  3 Haeckel’s books on Darwin’s evolutionary theory were translated into more than a dozen languages and sold a greater number of copies than Darwin’s book itself. More people learned about evolutionary theory from Haeckel than from any other source.

  4 Generelle 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.

  As Muir was falling in love with botany in Madison, the Civil War ripped the country apart, and in March 1863, almost exactly two years after the first shots had been fired at Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln signed the nation’s first conscription law. Wisconsin alone had to raise 40,000 men, and most students in Madison were talking guns, war and cannons. Shocked by his fellow students’ willingness to ‘murder’, Muir had no intention of participating.

  A year later, in March 1864, Muir left Madison and avoided conscription by crossing the border into Canada – his new ‘University of the Wilderness’. For the next two years, he rambled through the countryside, taking odd jobs whenever he ran out of money. He had a knack for inventions and built machines and tools for sawmills, but his abiding dream was to follow Humboldt’s footsteps. Whenever he could, Muir went on long excursions – to Lake Ontario and towards the Niagara Falls among others. Fording rivers, wading through bogs and thick forests, he searched for plants, which he collected, pressed and dried for his growing herbarium. He was so obsessed with his specimens that he was nicknamed ‘Botany’ by one family where he lodged and worked for a month on a farm north of Toronto. As Muir scrambled through tangled roots and drooping branches, he thought of Humboldt’s descriptions of the ‘flooded forests of the Orinoco’. And he felt a ‘simple relationship to the Cosmos’ that would accompany him for the rest of his life.

  Then, in spring 1866, when a fire destroyed the mill where Muir was working in Meaford on the shore of Lake Huron in Canada, his thoughts turned home. The Civil War had ended the previous summer after five long years of fighting, and Muir was ready to return. He packed his few belongings and studied a map. Where to go? He decided to try his luck in Indianapolis because it was a railway hub and he f
igured that there would be many manufactories where he would be able to find employment. Most importantly, he said, the city was ‘in the heart of one of the very richest forests of deciduous hard wood trees on the continent’. Here he would be able to combine the necessity of having to make a living with his passion for botany.

  Muir found work at a factory in Indianapolis that produced wagon wheels and other carriage parts. The job was only temporary because Muir’s plan was just to save enough money to follow Humboldt on ‘a botanical journey’ through South America. Then, in early March 1867, as Muir tried to shorten the leather belt on a circular saw at the factory, his plans came to an abrupt end. As he undid the stitches that held the belt together with the nail-like end of a metal file, the file slipped and flung against his head, piercing his right eye. When he held his hand under the injured eye, fluid dropped on to the palm and his vision vanished.

  At first it was only the right eye but within a few hours Muir’s other eye also became blind. Darkness enveloped him. This moment changed everything. For years Muir had been ‘in a glow with visions of the glories of tropical flora’ but now the colours of South America seemed lost to him for ever. Over the next weeks as he lay in a darkened room to rest, boys from the neighbourhood visited and read books to Muir. To his doctor’s surprise, his eyes slowly recovered. At first Muir was able to make out the silhouettes of the furniture in his room, and then he began to recognize faces. After four weeks of convalescence, he was able to decipher letters and went for his first walk. When his eyesight was fully restored, nothing was going to prevent him from going to South America to see the ‘tropical vegetation in all its palmy glory’. On 1 September, six months after his accident and after a visit to Wisconsin to say goodbye to his parents and siblings, Muir bound his journal to his belt with a piece of string, shouldered his small bag and plant press, and set out to walk the 1,000 miles from Indianapolis to Florida.

  Walking south, Muir moved through a devastated country. The Civil War had left the nation’s infrastructure – roads, manufacturers and railways – ruined, while many of the neglected and abandoned farms had fallen into disrepair. The war had destroyed the wealth of the South and the country remained deeply divided. In April 1865, less than a month before the end of the war, Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated, and his successor, Andrew Johnson, struggled to unite the nation. Though slavery had been abolished at the end of the war and the first African-American men had voted in the Tennessee gubernatorial election a month before Muir left Indianapolis, freed slaves were not treated like equals.

  Muir avoided cities, towns and villages. He wanted to be in nature. Some nights he slept in the forest and awoke to the dawn chorus of birds; other nights he found shelter in a barn on someone’s farm. In Tennessee he climbed his first mountain. As the valleys and forested slopes stretched out below him, he admired the billowing landscape. While he continued his journey, Muir began to read the mountains and their vegetation zones through Humboldt’s eyes, noticing how the plants that he knew from the north grew here on the higher colder slopes while those in the valleys were becoming distinctively southern and unfamiliar. Mountains, Muir realized, were like ‘highways upon which northern plants may extend their colonies to the South’.

  During his forty-five-day walk across Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and then Florida, Muir’s thoughts began to change. It was as if with every mile that he moved away from his old life, he came closer to Humboldt. As he collected plants, observed insects and made his bed on moss-cushioned forest floors, Muir experienced the natural world in a new way. Where previously he had been a collector of individual specimens for his herbarium, he now began to see connections. Everything was important in this grand big tangle of life. There existed no unconnected ‘fragment’, Muir thought. Tiny organisms were as much part of this web as humankind. ‘Why ought man to value himself as more than an infinitely small unit of the one great unit of creation?’ Muir asked. ‘The cosmos,’ he said, using Humboldt’s term, would be incomplete without man but also without ‘the smallest transmicroscopic creature’.

  In Florida Muir was struck down by malaria but after recuperating for a few weeks, he boarded a ship to Cuba. The thoughts of the ‘glorious mountains & flower fields’ of the tropics had sustained him during his fever attacks, but he was still weak. In Cuba he felt too ill to explore the island that Humboldt had called his home for many months. Exhausted by the recurring fevers, Muir finally and reluctantly abandoned his South American plans and decided to travel to California where he hoped the milder climate would restore his health.

  In February 1868, only a month after his arrival, Muir left Cuba for New York from where he found a cheap passage to California. The quickest and safest way from the North American East Coast to the West was not overland across the continent but by boat. For forty dollars Muir bought a steerage ticket that took him from New York back south, to Colón on the Caribbean coast of Panama. From here he made the short fifty-mile rail journey across the Panama isthmus to Panama City on the Pacific coast, and saw the tropical rainforest for the first time, but only from his train carriage.1 Trees, garlanded with purple, red and yellow blossoms, rushed by at ‘cruel speed’, Muir moaned, and he could ‘only gaze from the car platform & weep’. There was no time for a botanical exploration because he had to catch his schooner in Panama City.

  On 27 March 1868, a month after he had departed from New York, Muir arrived in San Francisco, on the West Coast of the United States. He hated the city. Over the past two decades the gold rush had turned the small town of 1,000 inhabitants into a bustling city of some 150,000 people. Bankers, merchants and entrepreneurs had come with those who had tried to find their luck. There were noisy taverns and well-stocked shops, as well as full warehouses and plenty of hotels. On his first day, Muir asked a passer-by the way out of town. When questioned where he wanted to go, he replied, ‘To any place that is wild.’

  And wild it was. After one night in San Francisco Muir left and walked towards the Sierra Nevada, the mountain range that runs 400 miles from north to south through California (and some of its eastern parts through Nevada), roughly parallel to and 100 miles inland from the Pacific coast. Its highest peak is almost 15,000 feet and in its midst lies Yosemite Valley, about 180 miles east of San Francisco. Yosemite Valley was surrounded by huge granite rocks with sheer cliffs and famed for its waterfalls and trees.

  To reach the Sierra Nevada, Muir first had to cross the vast Central Valley that stretches as a great plain towards the mountain range. As he walked through high grass and flowers, he thought it was like an ‘Eden from end to end’. The Central Valley resembled one enormous flowerbed, a carpet of colour that was rolled out under his feet. All this would change within the next few decades as agriculture and irrigation transformed it into the world’s largest orchard and vegetable patch. Muir would later lament that this great wild meadow had been ‘ploughed and pastured out of existence’.

  As he walked towards the mountains, keeping away from roads and settlements, Muir bathed in colour and air so delicious, he said, that it was ‘sweet enough for the breath of angels’. In the distance the white peaks of the Sierra glistened as if they were made of pure light, ‘like the wall of a celestial city’. When he finally entered Yosemite Valley – some seven miles long – Muir was overwhelmed by the raw wilderness and beauty.

  The many tall grey granite rocks that hugged the valley looked spectacular. At almost 5,000 feet Half Dome was the tallest and seemed to watch over the valley like a sentinel. The side that was turned to the valley was a sheer cliff, the other was rounded – a dome cut in half. Equally stunning was El Capitan – with a vertical face that rose a straight 3,000 feet from the valley floor (which itself is 4,000 feet above sea level). It is so steep that scaling El Capitan remains one of the greatest challenges for climbers today. With the perpendicular granite cliffs lining the valley, it gave the impression that someone had cut a swathe through the rocks.

  It was the
perfect time of the year to arrive in Yosemite Valley, as the melting snows had fed the many waterfalls that tumbled over the rock faces. They seemed to ‘gush direct from the sky’, Muir thought. Here and there rainbows appeared to dance in the spray. Yosemite Falls plunged through a narrow gap almost 2,500 feet deep, making it the tallest waterfall in North America. There were pines in the valley and small lakes that reflected the scenery on their mirrored surfaces.

  Competing with this imposing scene were the ancient sequoias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) in Mariposa Grove, some twenty miles south of the valley. Tall, straight and stately, these giants seemed to belong to another world. They were so particular to the place that they could only be found on the western side of the Sierra. Some of the sequoias in Mariposa Grove soared almost 300 feet high and were more than 2,000 years old. The largest single-stemmed trees on earth, they are one of the oldest living things on the planet. Majestic columns with reddish vertically grooved bark and with no lower branches, the older trees extended into the sky and appeared even taller than they were. They were unlike any tree that Muir had ever seen. He was howling at vistas and darting from one sequoia to another.

  One moment Muir was lying on his belly with his head just hovering above the ground, parting the grasses of the meadow to see what he called the ‘underworld of mosses’ populated by busy ants and beetles, and the next moment he was trying to understand how Yosemite Valley might have been created. Muir zoomed from the minute to the magnificent. He was seeing nature with Humboldt’s eyes, echoing the way that Humboldt had been drawn to the majestic views across the Andes but had also counted 44,000 flowers in one single cluster of blooms on a tree in the rainforest. Now Muir counted ‘165,913’ flowers blooming in one square yard, as well as delighting in the ‘glowing arch of sky’. The big and the small were woven together.