The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf - Vintage Books (2016)
The difficult thing about being a scientist is that once your theories have been debunked, once newer, more efficient methods of experimentation have been devised, or fancy new machinery renders your entire discipline obsolete, you tend to fade from the pages of history. You become a footnote in another scientist’s biography. The lucky ones are given the condescending designation of ‘inspiration,’ which is rather like the academic equivalent of the ‘participation awards’ handed out to talentless young athletes. The unlucky ones are mocked by their contemporaries and ignored by historians. Unlike artists, whose contributions may wax and wane according to changing aesthetic tastes, it is very difficult for a scientist to be resurrected once he’s been flattened beneath the unforgiving bulldozer of progress. After all, one can prefer Michelangelo even after Warhol comes along. It is much more problematic to say ‘I prefer to believe that the world is flat’ when centuries of data prove otherwise.
Alexander von Humboldt is an unusual case of historical amnesia. Most of his theories, although rudimentary, have never been discredited. In fact, it is rather strange that most modern Americans have never heard of him, because his name can be found on nearly every page of your average atlas. In her fascinating (and beautifully illustrated) biography, The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf strives to articulate the extent of Humboldt’s influence to modern readers. It is not the first time Wulf has encouraged readers to take a closer look at the truths they ‘hold to be self-evident.’ In fact, she is a master at rediscovering the thrilling origins of some of the more mundane elements of twenty-first century life. Her 2009 book, The Brother Gardeners, examines the competitive relationships between gentlemen gardeners in the 18th century and was nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Chasing Venus, published in 2012, recalls the imperial race to calculate the distance between planets in 1761-1769, when Venus passed between the earth and the sun. The Invention of Nature has already been nominated for numerous major awards and is a New York Times bestseller. Wulf has a knack for reminding readers of the incredible discoveries and occurrences which allow us to lead our boring everyday lives. She makes gardening, astronomy, and scientific calculation as suspenseful and exciting as trench warfare. She asks us to look at the circumstances of our lives with innocent eyes. In regards to Humboldt’s diminished legacy she writes,
…while his books collect dust in libraries, his name lingers everywhere from the Humboldt Current running along the coast of Chile and Peru to dozens of monuments, parks and mountains in Latin America including Sierra Humboldt in Mexico and Pico Humboldt in Venezuela. A town in Argentina, a river in Brazil, a geyser in Ecuador and a bay in Colombia—all are named after Humboldt…Almost 300 plants and more than 100 animals are named after him…and on the moon there is an area called ‘Mare Humboldtianum’. More places are named after Humboldt than anyone else.
So why does Humboldt’s name fall into the fuzzy, half-familiar region of my brain? Perhaps, as Wulf suggests, it’s because his theories have become common sense. They seem obvious to modern readers, even though at the time of their publication, Humboldt’s ideas were as radical and controversial as those of Charles Darwin—a man greatly influenced and indebted to Humboldt. The irony, writes Wulf,
…is that Humboldt’s views have become so self-evident that we have largely forgotten the man behind them. But there exists a direct line of connection through his ideas, and through the many people whom he inspired. Like a rope, Humboldt’s concept of nature connects us to him.
Wulf uses this ‘concept of nature’ to frame her discussion and rejuvenate her forgotten hero. She digs deep to unearth his philosophical foundations, and then identifies his influence in later scientists who reflect similar underlying values. Rather than examining Humboldt’s specific experiments and discoveries, Wulf chooses to focus on his unique approach to the natural world—his singular vision. By doing so, she facilitates an easy introduction to modern readers. She locates, in Humboldt’s personal reflections, the roots of modern values and concerns. Thus, she emphasizes Humboldt’s prophetic ideas about relevant topics like environmental destruction, colonial exploitation, and the dangers of a cash crop economy. Writes Wulf,
…Humboldt revolutionized the way we see the natural world. He found connections everywhere. Nothing, not even the tiniest organism, was looked at on its own…When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel. After he saw the devastating environmental effects of colonial plantations at Lake Valencia in Venezuela in 1800, Humboldt became the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced climate change…He warned that humans were meddling with the climate and that this could have an unforeseeable impact on ‘future generations.’
That Humboldt was able to see so far into the future is incredible. Scientists in the late 1700s were never meant to extrapolate, to lift their eyes from the specimens pinned to their dissection tables. They were also never supposed to be present—as individuals—in their published findings. In order to fully appreciate Humboldt’s expansive perspective, one which spanned continents and millennia, it is necessary to remind ourselves of the volatile relationship between Romantic sentimentality and rational empiricism that fueled European debate during his life.
Humboldt lived at a time when scientific discovery and geographic exploration were the intellectual battlegrounds upon which European empires could compete—much like the ‘Space Race’ of the 20th century. Within this arena, rigid lines were drawn between those who believed that the natural world could only be experienced through direct study and should be subject to strict taxonomic categorization, and those who saw room for an emotional, subjective approach to nature. One can imagine a Kill Bill style stare-down between John Locke and William Wordsworth. Humboldt was the brave scientist who dared to adorn his empirical observations with emotional reactions. Unlike the dry, impersonal reports published by staunch empiricists, Humboldt was never afraid to gush and swoon at the sight of a particularly splendid volcano. Without sacrificing scientific accuracy (his detailed descriptions and meticulous measurements are still cited in academic journals today) Humboldt made room for love, fear, and fascination. What might seem to us like the obvious way to write about nature, was unprecedented in Humboldt’s time. Thus it was that an extraordinary number of scientists, artists, and poets referred explicitly to Humboldt in their own works. His name pops up in so many dedications because he truly ruptured the established mold in a permanent and triumphant manner. Writes Wulf,
Thomas Jefferson called him ‘one of the greatest ornaments of the age’. Charles Darwin wrote that ‘nothing ever stimulated my zeal so much as reading Humboldt’s Personal Narrative,’ saying that he would not have boarded the Beagle, nor conceived of the Origin of Species, without Humboldt. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge both incorporated Humboldt’s concept of nature into their poems. And America’s most revered nature writer, Henry David Thoreau, found in Humboldt’s books an answer to his dilemma on how to be a poet and a naturalist—Walden would have been a very different book without Humboldt. Simón Bolívar, the revolutionary who liberated South America from Spanish colonial rule, called Humboldt the ‘discoverer of the New World’ and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet, declared that spending a few days with Humboldt was like ‘having lived several years’.
At a time when exploration made the distant regions of the world suddenly tangible, but the difficulties of travel prohibited many people from seeing them firsthand, Humboldt made sure to bring the whole experience to Europe, not just the objective facts. As Wulf suggests,
One of Humboldt’s greatest achievements had been to make science accessible and popular. Everybody learned from him: farmers and craftsmen, schoolboys and teachers, artists and musicians, scientists and politicians. There was not a single textbook or atlas in the hands of children in the western world that hadn’t been shaped by Humboldt’s ideas, one orator had declared during the 1869 centennial celebrations in Boston. Unlike Christopher Columbus or Isaac Newton, Humboldt did not discover a continent or a new law of physics. Humboldt was not known for a single fact or a discovery but for his worldview. His vision of nature has passed into our consciousness as if by osmosis. It is almost as though his ideas have become so manifest that the man behind them has disappeared.
Andrea Wulf clearly admires Humboldt’s comprehensive ‘concept of nature’ because she injects its basic components into the structure of her biography. The Invention of Nature is full of facts, dates, and quotes, but it really about patterns. Wulf uses specific anecdotes and examples to illustrate a historical pattern of thought—a link between Humboldt, the famous men and women he inspired, and ordinary readers in the present. Wulf’s biography can be visualized as a chain of volcanoes, each representing a great thinker, the oldest and tallest being Alexander von Humboldt himself. Although at the surface these volcanoes might appear to be isolated geological phenomena, they all draw from a single subterranean source. Humboldt’s holistic, webbed vision of nature is that source from which we extract our modern understanding of the natural world, and its relation to mankind.
No comments:
Post a Comment