The Invention of Nature

A few years earlier, when working as a mining inspector, Humboldt had already noted the excessive clearing of forests for timber and fuel in the Fichtel Mountains near Bayreuth. His letters and reports from that time were peppered with suggestions on how to reduce the need for timber in mines and ironworks. He had not been the first to comment on this but previously the reasons for concern had been economical rather than environmental. Forests provided the fuel for manufacturing, and timber was not only an important building material for houses but also for ships which in turn were essential for empires and naval powers.

Timber was the oil of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and any shortages created similar anxieties about fuel, manufacturing and transport, as threats to oil production do today. As early as 1664, the English gardener and writer John Evelyn had written a bestselling book on forestry – Sylva, a Discourse of Forest Trees – in which he addressed timber shortage as a national crisis. ‘We had better be without gold than without timber,’ Evelyn had declared, because without trees there would be no iron and glass industries, no blazing fires warming homes during cold winter nights, nor a navy to protect the shores of England.

Five years later, in 1669, the French Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, had outlawed much of the communal right to use the forests in villages, and had planted trees for the navy’s future use. ‘France will perish for the want of wood,’ he had said on introducing his draconian measures. There had even been some lone voices in the vast lands of the North American colonies. In 1749 the American farmer and plant collector John Bartram had lamented that ‘timber will soon be very much destroyed’ – a concern echoed by his friend Benjamin Franklin who had also feared the ‘loss for wood’. As a solution Franklin had invented a fuel-efficient fireplace.

Now, at Lake Valencia, Humboldt began to understand deforestation in a wider context and projected his local analysis forward to warn that the agricultural techniques of his day could have devastating consequences. The action of humankind across the globe, he warned, could affect future generations. What he saw at Lake Valencia he would see again and again – from Lombardy in Italy to southern Peru, and many decades later in Russia. As Humboldt described how humankind was changing the climate, he unwittingly became the father of the environmental movement.

Humboldt was the first to explain the fundamental functions of the forest for the ecosystem and climate: the trees’ ability to store water and to enrich the atmosphere with moisture, their protection of the soil, and their cooling effect.¹ He also talked about the impact of trees on the climate through their release of oxygen. The effects of the human species’ intervention were already ‘incalculable’, Humboldt insisted, and could become catastrophic if they continued to disturb the world so ‘brutally’.

Humboldt would see again and again how humankind unsettled the balance of nature. Only a few weeks later, deep in the Orinoco rainforest, he would observe how some Spanish monks in a remote mission illuminated their ramshackle churches with oil harvested from turtle eggs. As a consequence, the local population of turtles had already been substantially reduced. Every year the turtles would lay their eggs along the river’s beach, but instead of leaving some eggs to hatch the next generation, the missionaries collected so many that with every passing year, as the natives told Humboldt, their numbers had shrunk. Earlier, at the Venezuelan coast, Humboldt had also noted how unchecked pearl fishing had completely depleted the oyster stocks. It was all an ecological chain reaction. ‘Everything,’ Humboldt later said, ‘is interaction and reciprocal.’

Humboldt was turning away from the human-centred perspective that had ruled humankind’s approach to nature for millennia: from Aristotle, who had written that ‘nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man’, to botanist Carl Linnaeus who had still echoed the same sentiment more than 2,000 years later, in 1749, when he insisted that ‘all things are made for the sake of man’. It had long been believed that God had given humans command over nature. After all, didn’t the Bible say that man should be fruitful and ‘replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over fish of the sea, and over fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’? In the seventeenth century the British philosopher Francis Bacon had declared, ‘the world is made for man,’ while René Descartes had argued that animals were effectively automata – complex, perhaps, but not capable of reason and therefore inferior to humans. Humans, Descartes had written, were ‘the lords and possessors of nature’.