The Invention of Nature (51 page)

In April 1911, Muir left California and crossed the country on the Southern Pacific Railroad to the East Coast where he spent a few weeks working manically on the manuscripts of several books. Then, on 12 August, Muir boarded a steamer in New York. He was finally travelling towards ‘the great hot river I’ve been wanting to see’. An hour before the ship left the harbour he dashed off one last note to his increasingly distraught daughter Helen. ‘Don’t fret about me,’ he assured her, ‘I’m perfectly well.’ Two weeks later Muir reached Belém in Brazil, the gateway to the Amazon. Forty-four years after he had left Indianapolis for his walk south, and more than a century after Humboldt had set sail, Muir finally set foot on South American soil. He was seventy-three years old.

It had all begun with Humboldt and with a walk. ‘I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown,’ Muir wrote after his return, ‘for going out, I found, was really going in.’

In April 1911, Muir left California and crossed the country on the Southern Pacific Railroad to the East Coast where he spent a few weeks working manically on the manuscripts of several books, and campaigning.

1 Humboldt’s dream of a canal across the Panama isthmus had still not come to fruition. Instead, a railway now crossed the narrow stretch of land from Colón to Panama City. Completed only thirteen years previously, in 1855, it had been used by the tens of thousands of people who had gone to California during the gold rush.

2 Muir marked in his copy of Views of Nature and Cosmos the sections where Humboldt had written about the ‘harmonious cooperation of forces’ and the ‘unity of all the vital forces of nature’, as well as Humboldt’s famous remark that ‘nature is indeed a reflex of the whole’.

3 Humboldt had often explained how everything was infused with life – rocks, flowers, insects and so on. In his copy of Views of Nature, Muir underlined Humboldt’s remarks on this ‘universal profusion of life’ and the organic forces that were ‘incessantly at work’.

4 Only Muir’s stern father was displeased with his son’s nature writing. Daniel Muir, who had left his wife in 1873 to join a religious sect, wrote to John: ‘You cannot warm the heart of the Saint of God with your cold icey topped mountains.’

5 Muir had underlined a similar idea in his copy of Thoreau’s book The Maine Woods which read: ‘But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure … a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.’

6 Roosevelt kept his promise when Yosemite Valley as well as Mariposa Grove were added to Yosemite National Park in 1906.

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world. He was one of the last polymaths, and died at a time when scientific disciplines were hardening into tightly fenced and more specialized fields. Consequently his more holistic approach – a scientific method that included art, history, poetry and politics alongside hard data – has fallen out of favour. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there was little room for a man whose knowledge had bridged a vast range of subjects. As scientists crawled into their narrow areas of expertise, dividing and further subdividing, they lost Humboldt’s interdisciplinary methods and his concept of nature as a global force.

One of Humboldt’s greatest achievements had been to make science accessible and popular. Everybody learned from him: farmers and craftsmen, schoolboys and teachers, artists and musicians, scientists and politicians. There was not a single textbook or atlas in the hands of children in the western world that hadn’t been shaped by Humboldt’s ideas, one orator had declared during the 1869 centennial celebrations in Boston. Unlike Christopher Columbus or Isaac Newton, Humboldt did not discover a continent or a new law of physics. Humboldt was not known for a single fact or a discovery but for his worldview. His vision of nature has passed into our consciousness as if by osmosis. It is almost as though his ideas have become so manifest that the man behind them has disappeared.

Another reason why Humboldt has faded from our collective memory – at least in Britain and the United States – is the anti-German sentiment that came with the First World War. In a country such as Britain, where even the royal family felt they had to change their German-sounding surname ‘Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’ to ‘Windsor’ and where the works of Beethoven and Bach were not played any more, it is hardly surprising that a German scientist was no longer popular. Similarly in the United States, when Congress joined the conflict in 1917, German-Americans were suddenly lynched and harassed. In Cleveland, where fifty years earlier thousands had marched through the streets in celebration of Humboldt’s centennial, German books were burned in a huge public bonfire. In Cincinnati all German publications were removed from the shelves of the public library and ‘Humboldt Street’ was renamed ‘Taft Street’. Both world wars of the twentieth century cast long shadows, and neither Britain nor America were places for the celebration of a great German mind any more.

So why should we care? Over the past few years, many have asked me why I’m interested in Alexander von Humboldt. There are several answers to that question because there are many reasons why Humboldt remains fascinating and important: not only was his life colourful and packed with adventure, but his story gives meaning to why we see nature the way we see it today. In a world where we tend to draw a sharp line between the sciences and the arts, between the subjective and the objective, Humboldt’s insight that we can only truly understand nature by using our imagination makes him a visionary.

Humboldt’s disciples, and their disciples in turn, carried his legacy forward – quietly, subtly and sometimes unintentionally. Environmentalists, ecologists and nature writers today remain firmly rooted in Humboldt’s vision – although many have never heard of him. Nonetheless, Humboldt is their founding father.

As scientists are trying to understand and predict the global consequences of climate change, Humboldt’s interdisciplinary approach to science and nature is more relevant than ever. His beliefs in the free exchange of information, in uniting scientists and in fostering communication across disciplines, are the pillars of science today. His concept of nature as one of global patterns underpins our thinking.

One look at the latest 2014 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report shows just how much we are in need of a Humboldtian perspective. The report, produced by over 800 scientists and experts, states that global warming will have ‘severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems’. Humboldt’s insights that social, economic and political issues are closely connected to environmental problems remain resoundingly topical. As the American farmer and poet Wendell Berry said: ‘There is in fact no distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of the people. When one is abused, the other suffers.’ Or as the Canadian activist Naomi Klein declares in This Changes Everything (2014), the economic system and the environment are at war. Just as Humboldt realized that colonies based on slavery, monoculture and exploitation created a system of injustice and of disastrous environmental devastation, so we too have to understand that economic forces and climate change are all part of the same system.

Humboldt talked of ‘mankind’s mischief … which disturbs nature’s order’. There were moments in his life when he was so pessimistic that he painted a bleak future of humankind’s eventual expansion into space, when humans would spread their lethal mix of vice, greed, violence and ignorance across other planets. The human species could turn even those distant stars ‘barren’ and leave them ‘ravaged’, Humboldt wrote as early as 1801, just as they were already doing with earth.

It feels as if we’ve come full circle. Maybe now is the moment for us and for the environmental movement to reclaim Alexander von Humboldt as our hero.

Goethe compared Humboldt to a ‘fountain with many spouts from which streams flow refreshingly and infinitely, so that we only have to place vessels under them’.

That fountain, I believe, has never run dry.

During 2013, I was the British Library Eccles Writer in Residence. It was the most productive year I have ever had in my writing career. I loved every moment of it. Thank you to everybody at the Eccles Centre – in particular Philip Davis, Jean Petrovic and Cara Rodway, as well as Matt Shaw and Philip Hatfield at the British Library. Thank you!

Over the past few years, I have received so much assistance from so many people that I feel humbled by their generosity. Thank you all for making the research and writing of this book the most wonderful experience. So many shared their knowledge and research, read chapters, opened address books, followed up on my queries (many times) and made me welcome across the world – it made this a proper Humboldtian experience of global networks.

In Germany I would like to thank Ingo Schwarz, Eberhard Knobloch, Ulrike Leitner and Regina Mikosch at Humboldt Forschungstelle in Berlin; Thomas Bach at the Ernst-Haeckel Haus in Jena; Frank Holl at Münchner Wissenschaftstage in Munich; Ilona Haak-Macht at Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Direktion Museen/Abteilung Goethe-Nationalmuseum; Jürgen Hamel; and Karl-Heinz Werner.

In Britain I would like to thank Adam Perkins at the Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, University Library, Cambridge; Annie Kemkaran-Smith at Down House in Kent; Neil Chambers at the Sir Joseph Banks Archive Project at Nottingham Trent University; Richard Holmes; Rosemary Clarkson at the Darwin Correspondence Project; Jenny Wattrus for Spanish translations; Eleni Papavasileiou at the Library & Archive, SS Great Britain Trust; John Hemming; Terry Gifford and his ‘reading group’ of scholars from Bath University; Lynda Brooks at the Linnean Society; Keith Moore and the rest of the staff at the Royal Society Library and Archives, London; Crestina Forcina at the Wellcome Trust, and the staff at the British Library and London Library.

In the United States I would like to thank Michael Wurtz at Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library; Bill Swagerty at the John Muir Center, University at the Pacific; Ron Eber; Marie Arana; Keith Thomson at the American Philosophical Society; the staff at the New York Public Library; Leslie Wilson at the Concord Free Public Library; Jeff Cramer at the the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods; Matt Burne at the Walden Woods Project; David Wood, Adrienne Donohue and Margaret Burke at the Concord Museum; Kim Burns; Jovanka Ristic and Bob Jaeger at the American Geographical Society Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries; Sandra Rebok; Prudence Doherty at Special Collections Bailey/Howe Library at the University of Vermont; Eleanor Harvey at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Adam Goodheart at the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, Washington College. And at Monticello Anna Berkes, Endrina Tay, Christa Dierksheide, and Lisa Francavilla at the International Center for Jefferson Studies, the Jefferson Retirement Papers and the Jefferson Library; David Mattern at the Madison Retirement Papers at the University of Virginia; Aaron Sachs, Ernesto Bassi and the ‘Historians are Writers Group’ at Cornell University.

In South America I would like to thank Alberto Gómez Gutiérrez at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá; our guide Juanfe Duran Cassola in Ecuador and the staff at the archives of the Ministerio de Cultura y Patrimonio in Quito.

I am indebted to the following archives and libraries for their permission to quote from their manuscripts: the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; Royal Society, London; Concord Free Public Library, Concord MA; Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz; Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust; New York Public Library; British Library; Special Collections, University of Vermont.

I would like to thank the wonderful team at John Murray, including Georgina Laycock, Caroline Westmore, Nick Davies, Juliet Brightmore and Lyndsey Ng.

At Knopf I would like to thank an equally wonderful team, including Edward Kastenmeier, Emily Giglierano, Jessica Purcell and Sara Eagle.

A very special and massive thank you to my wonderful friend and agent Patrick Walsh, who has wanted me to write a book about Alexander von Humboldt for more than a decade, and who first took me to Venezuela ten years ago. You’ve worked so unbelievably hard on this – line by line. This would have been a very different book without you. And thank you for believing in me and for looking after me. Without you, I would have a lot less fun in life and be without a job.

And a huge thank you to my friends and family who patiently endured my Humboldt fever:

Leo Hollis who – as so many times before – channelled my ideas in the right direction and who summed it all up in one sentence. The title is on you!

My mother Brigitte Wulf has once again helped me with French translations and schlepped books from and to libraries in Germany for me, while my father Herbert Wulf read all the chapters in several versions. And thank you for coming to Weimar and Jena.

Constanze von Unruh worked again through the entire manuscript – leading me with honesty, cleverness and encouragement through this book. Thank you for everything and all those evenings.

Many of my friends and family have read draft chapters – editing, commenting and suggesting; thank you Robert Rowland Smith, John Jungclaussen, Rebecca Bernstein and Regan Ralph. A special thank you for Regan who is the most fabulous friend and who has given me a second home – as well as coming with me to Yosemite. Thank you so much. I would also like to thank Hermann and Sigrid Düringer for letting me stay in their beautiful flat in Berlin during my research there, and to my brother Axel Wulf for information on barometers, as well as Anne Wigger for help on Faust. A big thank you to Lisa O’Sullivan who has been a great supporter and friend … and who looked after me with steely determination when I was stranded in her apartment in New York during Hurricane Sandy. You’re now a certified member of my apocalyptic team.