The Invention of Nature

For Humboldt, the days they had spent travelling from Quito and then climbing up Chimborazo had been like a botanical journey that moved from the Equator towards the poles – with the whole plant world seemingly layered on top of each other as the vegetation zones ascended the mountain. The plant groups ranged from the tropical species down in the valleys to the lichens that he had encountered near the snow line. Towards the end of his life, Humboldt often talked about understanding nature from ‘a higher point of view’ from which those connections could be seen; the moment when he had realized this was here, on Chimborazo. With ‘a single glance’, he saw the whole of nature laid out before him.

When they returned from Chimborazo, Humboldt was ready to formulate his new vision of nature. In the Andean foothills, he began to sketch his so-called Naturgemälde – an untranslatable German term that can mean a ‘painting of nature’ but which also implies a sense of unity or wholeness. It was, as Humboldt later explained, a ‘microcosm on one page’. Unlike the scientists who had previously classified the natural world into tight taxonomic units along a strict hierarchy, filling endless tables with categories, Humboldt now produced a drawing.

‘Nature is a living whole,’ he later said, not a ‘dead aggregate’. One single life had been poured over stones, plants, animals and humankind. It was this ‘universal profusion with which life is everywhere distributed’ that most impressed Humboldt. Even the atmosphere carried the kernels of future life – pollen, insect eggs and seeds. Life was everywhere and those ‘organic powers are incessantly at work’, he wrote. Humboldt was not so much interested in finding new isolated facts but in connecting them. Individual phenomena were only important ‘in their relation to the whole’, he explained.

Depicting Chimborazo in cross-section, the Naturgemälde strikingly illustrated nature as a web in which everything was connected. On it, Humboldt showed plants distributed according to their altitudes, ranging from subterranean mushroom species to the lichens that grew just below the snow line. At the foot of the mountain was the tropical zone of palms and, further up, the oaks and fern-like shrubs that preferred a more temperate climate. Every plant was placed on the mountain precisely where Humboldt had found them.

Humboldt’s first sketch of the Naturgemälde (Illustration Credit 7.2)

Humboldt produced his first sketch of the Naturgemälde in South America and then published it later as a beautiful three-foot by two-foot drawing. To the left and right of the mountain he placed several columns that provided related details and information. By picking a particular height of the mountain (as given in the left-hand column), one could trace connections across the table and the drawing of the mountain to learn about temperature, say, or humidity or atmospheric pressure, as well as what species of animals and plants could be found at different altitudes. Humboldt showed different zones of plants, along with details of how they were linked to changes in altitude, temperature and so on. All this information could then be linked to the other major mountains across the world, which were listed according to their height next to the outline of Chimborazo.

This variety and richness, but also the simplicity of the scientific information depicted, was unprecedented. No one before Humboldt had presented such data visually. The Naturgemälde showed for the first time that nature was a global force with corresponding climate zones across continents. Humboldt saw ‘unity in variety’. Instead of placing plants in their taxonomic categories, he saw vegetation through the lens of climate and location: a radically new idea that still shapes our understanding of ecosystems today.

From Chimborazo they travelled 1,000 miles south to Lima. Humboldt was interested in everything, from plants and animals to Inca architecture. Throughout his travels across Latin America, Humboldt would often be impressed by the accomplishments of the ancient civilizations. He transcribed manuscripts, sketched Inca monuments and collected vocabularies. The indigenous languages, Humboldt said, were so sophisticated that there wasn’t a single European book that could not be translated into any one of them. They even had words for abstract concepts such as ‘future, eternity, existence’. Just south of Chimborazo, he visited an indigenous tribe who possessed some ancient manuscripts that described volcano eruptions. Luckily, there was also a Spanish translation which he copied into his notebooks.