THE INVENTION OF NATURE: ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT'S NEW WORLD by Andrea Wulf ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

For about a year, I lived on Humboldt Street in Brooklyn, NY. The question of who it was named after never really crossed my mind (at least not as much as where I lived before on Suydam Street). I assumed it was probably a random wartime general or some New York City bigwig from the past and moved on.

Turns out, it was the guy that basically created the notion of “nature” and how we interact with it. A guy that left a mark worldwide and influenced generations of scientists, yet somehow we don’t remember him today. And he wasn’t even from the States.

Alexander von Humboldt was a German scientist that felt more himself in the wild than at home. He obsessed over volcanoes and bogs, exploring and pushing himself to the limit well into his sixties. Every now and then I get a similar itch to hang around more trees than buildings. That must be just a small piece of what burned through him as he took up years long expeditions away from everything and everyone he knew. He dove into uncharted territory across oceans to find rivers that didn’t have a reliable map and vegetation that only grew at altitudes higher than most people climb. And through these adventures, he discovered the groundbreaking notion that everything on Earth is connected in one large, living, breathing system. He discovered that the effect humanity has on its environment can be devastating at a time when that idea was unfathomable. Funny how similar things can be across two centuries, huh?

After a summer when extreme weather patterns are showcasing the changes we’ve dreaded, I couldn’t believe how topical this was to read. Many of us (or at least the sane and scared ones) see the heat rising and the planet changing before our eyes and wonder if it’s too late. If we missed our chance to fix things. I’d never heard of Humboldt or his work, but I now realize it’s been a slow two-hundred-year long slog to wake the world up.

While he was a polymath and a genius and an adventurer, covering topics from plate tectonics to language and poetry, he spent a great deal of energy explaining the catastrophe that comes from over-farming and abusing our land. How without taking precaution, we tend to do more harm than good, and eventually it robs us of the things we need to survive. He saw things from a wider lens than anyone had before, and he saw the devastation coming even before the industrial age accelerated his argument.

History can be mind-blowing, and I was mind-blown reading this book. Humboldt was a celebrated man of science in his day, his death memorialized with parades and events around the world. Famous explorers and scientists worshipped his legacy, people like Charles Darwin and John Muir keeping and quoting his work as they made their own observations about nature. To think I was this close to the proof of his real world influence and still had no clue he existed.

Reading about climate change can be draining, especially to those of us with kids. This book enlightened me, and the world should still be studying and learning from this guy. Makes me wonder if Lin is available to make a new musical about another Alexander H. 🤔