The Invention of Nature

In the eighteenth century ideas of the perfectibility of nature dominated western thinking. Humankind would make nature better through cultivation, it was believed, and ‘improvement’ was the mantra. Orderly fields, cleared forests and neat villages turned a savage wilderness into pleasing and productive landscapes. The primeval forest of the New World by contrast was a ‘howling wilderness’ that had to be conquered. Chaos had to be ordered, and evil had to be transformed into good. In 1748 the French thinker Montesquieu had written that humankind had ‘rendered the earth more proper for their abode’ – with their hands and tools making the earth habitable. Orchards loaded with fruits, tidy vegetable gardens and meadows grazed by cattle were the ideal of nature at the time. It was a model that would long rule the western world. Almost a century after Montesquieu’s assertion, the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, during a visit to the United States in 1833, thought that it was ‘the idea of destruction’ – of man’s axe in the American wilderness – that gave the landscape its ‘touching loveliness’.

Some North American thinkers even argued that the climate had changed for the better since the first settlers arrived. With every tree that was cut from the virgin forest, they insisted, the air had become healthier and milder. Lack of evidence didn’t stop them from preaching their theories. One such was Hugh Williamson, a physician and politician from North Carolina, who published an article in 1770 that celebrated the clearing of huge swathes of forests, which, he claimed, was to the benefit of the climate. Others believed that clearing the forests would increase winds which in turn would carry healthier air across the land. Only six years before Humboldt’s visit to Lake Valencia, one American had proposed that felling trees in the interior of the continent would be a useful way of ‘drying up the marshes’ along the coast. The few voices of concern remained restricted to private letters and conversations. On the whole the ‘subduing of the wilderness’, most agreed, was the ‘foundation for future profit’.

The man who had probably done most to spread this view was the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. During the mid-eighteenth century Buffon had painted a picture of the primeval forest as a horrendous place full of decaying trees, rotting leaves, parasitic plants, stagnant pools and venomous insects. The wilderness, he said, was deformed. Though Buffon had died the year before the French Revolution, his views of the New World still shaped public opinion. Beauty was equated with utility and every acre wrested from the wilderness was a victory of civilized man over uncivilized nature. It was ‘cultivated nature’, Buffon had written, that was ‘beautiful!’.

Humboldt, however, warned that humankind needed to understand how the forces of nature worked, how those different threads were all connected. Humans could not just change the natural world at their will and to their advantage. ‘Man can only act upon nature, and appropriate her forces to his use,’ Humboldt would later write, ‘by comprehending her laws.’ Humankind, he warned, had the power to destroy the environment and the consequences could be catastrophic.

¹ Humboldt later put it succinctly: ‘The wooded region acts in a threefold manner in diminishing the temperature; by cooling shade, by evaporation, and by radiation.’

5

The Llanos and the Orinoco

AFTER THREE WEEKS of intense investigations at Lake Valencia and the surrounding valley, Humboldt finished his observations. It was time to turn south towards the Orinoco, but first they had to cross the Llanos. On 10 March 1800, almost exactly a month after leaving Caracas, Humboldt and his small team entered the bleak tussocky grassland of the Llanos.

The land was crusted in dust. The plains seemed to stretch out for ever and the horizon danced in the heat. They saw clumps of dried grass and palms but not much else. The relentless sun had baked the ground into a cracked hard surface. Sticking his thermometer in the ground, Humboldt recorded a temperature of 50ºC. Having left behind the densely populated Aragua Valley, Humboldt felt suddenly ‘plunged into a vast solitude’. Some days the air stood so still, he wrote in his journal, that ‘everything seems motionless’. With no clouds to shade them as they trekked across the hardened soil, they stuffed their hats with leaves as insulation against the burning heat. Humboldt wore loose-fitting trousers, a waistcoat and simple linen shirts. He had a coat for colder climates and always wore a soft white necktie. He had chosen the most comfortable European clothes available at the time – light and easily washable – but even dressed like this, he found it unbearably hot.