The Invention of Nature

Just polished off Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World. Alexander von Humboldt was a scientific polymath and force of nature (pun intended) whose life spanned from the late 18th to much of the 19th Century (1769-1859), which ain't chopped liver for back then. I was originally intrigued by this book because Alexander was the brother of Wilhelm von Humboldt, whom I knew as a great philologist from back then, but who it turns out was also a major diplomat and (it turns out) founder of the University of Berlin, which became the model for the western university as we know it.

So Alexander was an impressive and intense figure, whose travels through first South America and later Russia and writings thereupon formed the basis and inspiration for a whole lot of modern science, especially ecology and geology etc., less about physics and chemistry etc. More macro than micro.

But back then there weren't well or clearly defined disciplines, because there weren't institutions (either educational or governmental-policy forming) within which to house and cultivate them. It was pretty much an open field, and it took obsessive, driven dynamos like Alexander von Humboldt (and Darwin) to call them into being with their herculean efforts and promotion of their endeavor. Von Humboldt was apparently a great promoter of other scientists, an institution and discipline-builder himself (reminiscent of what Norman Borlaug did later in Mexico, Pakistan, and India).

Wulf's book won a ton of prizes, and perhaps rightly so for resurrecting a figure largely forgotten in the West (though less so in Latin America. I was reminded of the book in Guanajuato, Mexico in April when I saw a street named after Humboldt. Admittedly, we have Humboldt County, California itself well-known in my day at least for the quality of weed grown there). But ultimately I think it's a good but not quite great book, because she spends a little too much time pumping up Humboldt as the ur-thinker whose ideas ultimately gave rise to our notions of holistic environmentalism. She may be right about that, but she harped on it a little too much. The task of the historian is, I think, only partly to tie the past to the present. It is just important to dwell in the past as such, and I could have used a little more of that.

But I'm glad I read it.