Andrea Wulf ’s account of Alexander von Humboldt’s life is told through his travel and adventures, his discoveries and accomplishments, his renowned cadre of friends in academia, the arts and high places, and the still reverberating reach of his legacy.
According to Wulf, Humboldt was acknowledged as “the most influential and acclaimed scientist of all time.” Later dubbed “The world’s first environmentalist,” and the “Father of ecology,” he was the last great polymath and one of the most influential men to ever walk on our planet.
Humboldt was lucky to have been born into the Prussian aristocracy in 1769. His family home was a castle outside Berlin, neither warm nor happy. As children, both Alexander and older brother Wilhelm were privately tutored by enlightened scholars hired by their widowed mother, to foster “intellectual and moral perfection” for her sons, and to “instill in them a love of truth, liberty and knowledge.”
Alexander and Wilhelm progressed to the best of Europe’s emerging universities and joined Berlin’s intellectual circles in the Age of Discovery. Wilhelm followed their mother’s script, but Alexander chafed against the limitations placed upon him, wanting nothing more than to indulge his interest in science, to travel and experience foreign lands, and to understand the mysteries of the natural world.
After completing a business course at the Academy of Trade in Hamburg, where he spent all his free time delving into scientific treatises, at the age of 21 Alexander made a compromise with his mother. He agreed to enroll in the new prestigious mining academy in Freiberg, which she saw as an entrée to a career in the Prussian Ministry of Mines, and which allowed him to indulge his interest in science and geology.
The university was the first of its kind, teaching science’s latest practices and theories via practical application to mining. It provided a thriving community of the best students and professors from across Europe. Alexander worked ferociously and completed the three-year course in eight months. On the side, he collected thousands of botanical specimens and investigated the effects of light on plants. The hard work paid off when he became Prussia’s youngest mining inspector.
The position finally allowed him to travel thousands of miles, evaluating soils, mines and ores. His career soared and his interests widened to include advocacy for worker safety. He invented a breathing mask and a lamp that worked in the deepest oxygen-deprived mining shafts.
During the 18th century, subjects of natural sciences were evolving from topics within philosophy and metaphysics to distinctly separate disciplines, focusing on minutiae while ignoring the global view that would become the hallmark of Humboldt’s work.
The death of his mother in 1796 and a large inheritance freed Alexander to launch into the broader travel and scientific exploration that had fueled his dreams since childhood. The political climate in war-torn Europe created roadblocks. Perseverance finally brought Humboldt ashore in 1799 at Cumana, a city founded by the Spanish in 1523, off the coast of what is now Venezuela. This was, Wulf describes, “The beginning of a new life, a period of five years in which Humboldt would change from a curious and talented young man into the most extraordinary scientist of his age.”
Humboldt set off with a zealous belief that the natural world was deeply connected to humankind through a web of codependence and shared vulnerabilities. He believed humans have universally similar potential and are not the center of the universe, being no more important than any other species. His cross-disciplinary understanding of science, unique mind with a facility for spotting patterns in nature, and his indefatigable energy made him uniquely qualified to decode nature’s secrets.
The time spent in South America (with sojourns to both Cuba and the nascent United States) cemented his understanding of connectivity and the importance of all aspects of nature to the health of the planet. He also bore witness to the cruel treatment and enslavement of indigenous people and imported slaves and to the degradation of nature that accompanied Europe’s plunder of the New World. All of this even as he scaled 21,000-foot high mountain peaks, carrying his own scientific equipment.
Humboldt studied human migrations, climate zones, plants and animals. He collected specimens and made comparisons. He discovered and identified keystone species, and the major current off the west coast of South America. He discovered the Earth’s magnetic center and defined the foundations foretelling the theory of plate tectonics, discovered in 1967. When he returned to Europe in 1805 with trunks filled with journals of measurements, data, observations and drawings, and 60,000 specimens, he brought an egalitarian zeal for sharing the lessons gleaned from his journey and observations.
Later travel through Russia led to a total of 33 published books and began the new discipline of nature writing with Humboldt’s two most widely published and translated works, “Personal Narrative” and “Cosmos,” the opus of his life. Both engaged the masses and advanced scientific interest and comprehension by quantum leaps.
No one on Earth has more things named after them than Alexander Humboldt, and no scientist has had a greater reach, Wulf said. Charles Darwin carried Humboldt’s writings with him on the Beagle and adopted his microscopic and telescopic way of looking at nature to understand the world in a new way. Humboldt’s “Cosmos” shaped two generations of American scientists, artists, writers and poets, and matured the thinking of one of America’smost influential nature writers, Henry David Thoreau.
“Humboldt’s insights that social, economic and political issues are closely connected to environmental problems remain resoundingly topical,”
Wulf writes. “As the American farmer and poet Wendell Berry said: ‘There is in fact no distinction between the fate of the land and the fate of people. When one is abused, the other suffers.’ ” Just as Humboldt realized that colonies based on slavery, monoculture and exploitation created a system of injustice and disastrous environmental devastation, we must understand that economic forces and climate change are part of the same system.
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