It helped that Humboldt was a writer of startling clarity and concision. He is the first true naturalist as we understand that term today.

What resulted was a series of paradigm-smashing publications for both scientists and general readers. This was a time when his name was a byword for adventure on the lips of every schoolboy, even in the U.S.Īfterward Humboldt returned to Europe, settling in Paris, where he wrote up his findings. He and his team climbed volcanoes, pressed plants, murdered fascinating new animal species, reset the coordinates, often grossly incorrect, for scores of cartographic features (rivers, mountains, etc.), slept on the shores of the Orinoco River, dodged leopards, crocodiles and other predators, and were eaten alive by mosquitoes. and Europe after World War II.ĭuring his Latin American explorations (1799-1804), Humboldt was front page news in the West. But I didn't know this was generally due to anti-German sentiment so powerful in the U.S. The praises of Oliver Sacks and Stephen Jay Gould alone told me as much.

I had always known that Alexander von Humboldt’s story was a link missing from my general knowledge. Brilliantly researched and stunningly written, The Invention of Nature reveals the myriad ways in which Humboldt’s ideas form the foundation of modern environmentalism-and reminds us why they are as prescient and vital as ever.įor me, this book was - like Why Nations Fail, Guns, Germs, and Steel and Orlando Figes’s The Whisperers- a keystone narrative that linked up many formerly disparate threads of my personal reading. In this illuminating biography, Andrea Wulf brings Humboldt’s extraordinary life back into focus: his prediction of human-induced climate change his daring expeditions to the highest peaks of South America and to the anthrax-infected steppes of Siberia his relationships with iconic figures, including Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson and the lasting influence of his writings on Darwin, Wordsworth, Goethe, Muir, Thoreau, and many others. And yet the man has been all but forgotten.

In North America, Humboldt’s name still graces towns, counties, parks, bays, lakes, mountains, and a river. Among his most revolutionary ideas was a radical conception of nature as a complex and interconnected global force that does not exist for the use of humankind alone. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was the most famous scientist of his age, a visionary German naturalist and polymath whose discoveries forever changed the way we understand the natural world.

The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf