Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, The

No cover — Andrea Wulf: Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, The (EBook, 2015, Alfred A. Knopf)

eBook, 473 pages

English language

Published May 6, 2015 by Alfred A. Knopf.

ISBN:: 978-0-385-35067-9
OCLC Number:: 907950084

(1 review)

From the Prologue...

When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel. After he saw the devastating environmental effects of colonial plantations at Lake Valencia in Venezuela in 1800, Humboldt became the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced climate change. Deforestation there had made the land barren, water levels of the lake were falling and with the disappearance of brushwood torrential rains had washed away the soils on the surrounding mountain slopes. Humboldt was the first to explain the forest's ability to enrich the atmosphere with moisture and its cooling effect, as well as its importance for water retention and protection against soil erosion. He warned that humans were meddling with the climate and that this could have an unforeseeable impact on ‘future generations'.

The Invention of Nature traces the invisible threads that …

From the Prologue...

When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel. After he saw the devastating environmental effects of colonial plantations at Lake Valencia in Venezuela in 1800, Humboldt became the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced climate change. Deforestation there had made the land barren, water levels of the lake were falling and with the disappearance of brushwood torrential rains had washed away the soils on the surrounding mountain slopes. Humboldt was the first to explain the forest's ability to enrich the atmosphere with moisture and its cooling effect, as well as its importance for water retention and protection against soil erosion. He warned that humans were meddling with the climate and that this could have an unforeseeable impact on ‘future generations'.

The Invention of Nature traces the invisible threads that connect us to this extraordinary man. Humboldt influenced many of the greatest thinkers, artists and scientists of his day. Thomas Jefferson called him ‘one of the greatest ornaments of the age'. Charles Darwin wrote that ‘nothing ever stimulated my zeal so much as reading Humboldt's Personal Narrative,' saying that he would not have boarded the Beagle, nor conceived of the Origin of Species, without Humboldt. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge both incorporated Humboldt's concept of nature into their poems. And America's most revered nature writer, Henry David Thoreau, found in Humboldt's books an answer to his dilemma on how to be a poet and a naturalist – Walden would have been a very different book without Humboldt. Simón Bolívar, the revolutionary who liberated South America from Spanish colonial rule, called Humboldt the ‘discoverer of the New World' and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany's greatest poet, declared that spending a few days with Humboldt was like ‘having lived several years'.

14 editions

Maia@bookwyrm.social reviewed The invention of nature by Andrea Wulf

The Invention of Nature

5 stars

One of the minds born of the Age of Enlightenment was Alexander Von Humboldt. I didn't realise before reading this book how central he is to the way we think about nature and the world. Minds such as Darwin, John Muir, Thoreau, George Marsh, Earnest Haeckel (along with the Art Nouveau movement) and so on were directly influenced by his works and worldview. This worldview saw nature and humanity as a global intertwined system which can only be understood through a combination of great leaps of the imagination (the subjective and emotional experience) as well as hard data (the scientific, empirical and objective mind) together, a radical new theory for the time. I feel after reading this book I understand my passion and profession (I am an MSc earth science student) so much more, as well as the origins of my field. I feel university and the education system in …

One of the minds born of the Age of Enlightenment was Alexander Von Humboldt. I didn't realise before reading this book how central he is to the way we think about nature and the world. Minds such as Darwin, John Muir, Thoreau, George Marsh, Earnest Haeckel (along with the Art Nouveau movement) and so on were directly influenced by his works and worldview. This worldview saw nature and humanity as a global intertwined system which can only be understood through a combination of great leaps of the imagination (the subjective and emotional experience) as well as hard data (the scientific, empirical and objective mind) together, a radical new theory for the time. I feel after reading this book I understand my passion and profession (I am an MSc earth science student) so much more, as well as the origins of my field. I feel university and the education system in general has pushed me away from the arts, suggesting that I could only pursue EITHER science OR beauty when in fact I have a love of both, and wish to see the natural world in an aesthetic as well as a scientific light. After all, what is more poetic than the communication of an entire woodland by fungal networks, or more humbling than a hundred million years in the geology of a cliff face? What underpins every scientist's passion for their subject? The beauty of it of course! This book has been a great inspiration to me. Learning about Humboldt's life and influence on the world (and thus my worldview) has been a way for me to reconnect with my subject after university education had taken some of the romance out of it. In short, I highly recommend this book, I will certainly go on to read Humboldt's "Cosmos" and "Views on nature"!