The Invention of Nature

I found myself lying at night in the Venezuelan rainforest listening to the strange bellowing cry of howler monkeys, but also stuck in Manhattan without electricity during Hurricane Sandy when I had travelled there to read some documents in the New York Public Library. I admired the old manor house with its tenth-century tower in the little village of Piòbesi outside Turin where George Perkins Marsh wrote parts of Man and Nature in the early 1860s – a book inspired by Humboldt’s ideas and one that would mark the beginning of America’s conservation movement. I walked around Thoreau’s Walden Pond in deep freshly fallen snow and hiked in Yosemite, reminding myself of John Muir’s idea that: ‘the clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness’.

The most exciting moment was when I finally climbed Chimborazo, the mountain that had been so elemental to Humboldt’s vision. As I walked up the barren slope, the air was so thin that every step felt like an eternity – a slow pull upward while my legs felt leaden and somehow disconnected from the rest of my body. My admiration for Humboldt grew with every step. He had climbed Chimborazo with an injured foot (and certainly not in walking boots as comfortable and sturdy as mine), loaded with instruments and constantly stopping to take measurements.

The result of this exploration through landscapes and letters, through thoughts and diaries, is this book. The Invention of Nature is my quest to rediscover Humboldt, and to restore him to his rightful place in the pantheon of nature and science. It’s also a quest to understand why we think as we do today about the natural world.

¹ To this day many German-speaking schools across Latin America hold biannual athletic competitions called Juegos Humboldt – Humboldt Games.

PART I

Departure: Emerging Ideas

1

Beginnings

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT was born, on 14 September 1769, into a wealthy aristocratic Prussian family who spent their winters in Berlin and their summers at the family estate of Tegel, a small castle about ten miles north-west of the city. His father, Alexander Georg von Humboldt, was an officer in the army, a chamberlain at the Prussian court and a confidant of the future king Friedrich Wilhelm II. Alexander’s mother, Marie Elisabeth, was the daughter of a rich manufacturer who had brought money and land into the family. The Humboldt name was held in high regard in Berlin and the future king was even Alexander’s godfather. But despite their privileged upbringing, Alexander and his older brother, Wilhelm, had an unhappy childhood. Their beloved father died suddenly when Alexander was nine and their mother never showed her sons much affection. Where their father had been charming and friendly, their mother was formal, cold and emotionally distant. Instead of maternal warmth, she provided the best education then available in Prussia, arranging for the two boys to be privately tutored by a string of Enlightenment thinkers who instilled in them a love of truth, liberty and knowledge.

These were strange relationships in which the boys sometimes searched for a father figure. One tutor in particular, Gottlob Johann Christian Kunth, who oversaw their education for many years, taught them with a peculiar combination of expressing displeasure and disappointment while at the same time encouraging a sense of dependency. Hovering behind them and watching over their shoulders as they calculated, translated Latin texts or learned French vocabulary, Kunth constantly corrected the brothers. He was never quite satisfied with their progress. Whenever they made a mistake, Kunth reacted as if they had done so to hurt or offend him. For the boys, this behaviour was more painful than if he had spanked them with a cane. Always desperate to please Kunth, as Wilhelm later recounted, they had felt a ‘perpetual anxiety’ to make him happy.

It was particularly difficult for Alexander who was taught the same lessons as his precocious brother, despite being two years younger. The result was that he believed himself to be less talented. When Wilhelm excelled in Latin and Greek, Alexander felt incompetent and slow. He struggled so much, Alexander later told a friend, that his tutors ‘were doubtful whether even ordinary powers of intelligence would ever be developed in him’.

Schloss Tegel and the surrounding estate (Illustration Credit 1.1)