The Invention of Nature

Later, in Cuba, Humboldt had noticed how large parts of the island had been stripped of their forests for sugar plantations. Wherever he went, he had seen how cash crops had replaced ‘those vegetables which supply nourishment’. Cuba produced not much other than sugar, which meant that without imports from other colonies, Humboldt said, ‘the island would starve’. This was a recipe for dependency and injustice. Similarly, the inhabitants of the region around Cumaná cultivated so much sugar and indigo that they were forced to buy food from abroad which they could easily have grown themselves. Monoculture and cash crops did not create a happy society, Humboldt said. What was needed was subsistence farming, based on edible crops and variety such as bananas, quinoa, corn and potatoes.

Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment. Again and again, his thoughts returned to nature as a complex web of life but also to man’s place within it. At the Rio Apure, he had seen the devastation caused by the Spanish who had tried to control the annual flooding by building a dam. To make matters worse, they had also felled the trees that had held the riverbanks together like ‘a very tight wall’ with the result that the raging river carried more land away each year. On the high plateau of Mexico City, Humboldt had observed how a lake that fed the local irrigation system had shrunk into a shallow puddle, leaving the valleys beneath barren. Everywhere in the world, Humboldt said, water engineers were guilty of such short-sighted follies.

He debated nature, ecological issues, imperial power and politics in relation to each other. He criticized unjust land distribution, monocultures, violence against tribal groups and indigenous work conditions – all powerfully relevant issues today. As a former mining inspector, Humboldt had a unique insight into the environmental and economic consequences of the exploitation of nature’s riches. He questioned Mexico’s dependence on cash crops and mining, for example, because it bound the country to fluctuating international market prices. ‘The only capital,’ he said, that ‘increases with time, consists in the produce of agriculture’. All problems in the colonies, he was certain, were the result of the ‘imprudent activities of the Europeans’.

Jefferson had employed similar arguments. ‘I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries,’ he said, ‘as long as they are chiefly agricultural.’ He envisaged the opening of the American West as the rolling-out of a republic in which small independent farmers would become the foot-soldiers of the infant nation and the guardians of its liberty. The West, Jefferson believed, would assure the agricultural self-sufficiency of America, and thereby the future for ‘millions yet unborn’.

Jefferson himself was one of the most progressive farmers in the United States, experimenting with crop rotation, manure and new seed varieties. His library was filled with all the agricultural books he could purchase and he had even invented a new mouldboard for a plough (the wooden part that lifts and turns the sod). He was more enthusiastic about agricultural implements than about political events. When he ordered a model of a threshing machine from London, for example, he updated Madison like an excited child: ‘I expect every day to receive it’, ‘I have not yet received my threshing machine’, and it had at last ‘arrived at New York’. He tested new vegetables, crops and fruits at Monticello, using his fields and garden as an experimental laboratory. Jefferson believed that the ‘greatest service which can be rendered any country, is to add an useful plant to its culture’. From Italy he had smuggled upland rice in his coat pockets – under the threat of the death penalty – and he had tried to convince American farmers to plant sugar maple orchards in order to end the nation’s reliance on molasses from the British West Indies. In Monticello, he grew 330 varieties of 99 species of vegetables and herbs.