Alexander von Humboldt

Our first Men's Book Club choice for 2016 is Andrea Wulf's new biography of Alexander von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World (2015). It was a near unanimous choice for the first book of the year, and fits well with the mix of scientists and humanists in our group. Humboldt was one of those figures in the background that I kept encountering in my literary studies, especially of the English Romantics and American Transcendentalists, but I never really looked any deeper into who he was, other than a very influential natural philosopher, an early man of science who had gained a following among poets and other men of letters. So I welcomed the chance finally to learn more, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book and the way Wulf took the time to trace Humboldt's far reaching influence as well as the trajectory of his life and work.

There were many things I took away from my reading of this well researched and well written book, but two stand out from the others. The first is that Alexander von Humboldt was able not only to study and master such a wide range of fields that were even in his time becoming areas of specialization requiring specific training and expertise, but also that he managed to see the myriad connections between and among so many fields -- from geology, to botany, to meteorology, and astronomy -- as well as to contribute in significant ways to emerging areas like evolution and ecology. The second thing that stands out for me is the profoundly disappointing realization that despite Humboldt's amazing discoveries and contributions to human knowledge, dating back to the beginning of the 19th century, we have managed to ignore so much that he discovered, particularly with respect to the vast destruction being wrought by humans to our own environment. It's almost as if we have grown in ignorance rather than in wisdom since Humboldt's day.

Another important take away, and an appealing aspect of Wulf's book, is the recovery of von Humboldt's importance in the lives of others: Goethe, Simon Bolivar, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, Ernst Haeckel, and John Muir. Humboldt inspired others with his passion to explore the natural world and to record accurately what he saw, the many direct observations that enabled him to see the connections between geological formations, climate and weather, and the distribution of plant and animal species. He also saw clearly the impact that human habitation and agriculture were having on the environment, and predicted correctly that the destruction of forests and plant and animal habitats were already having considerable implications for human existence, even as the vast exploitation of fossil fuels was scarcely underway.

But perhaps his greatest achievement was his ability to see that everything in existence is connected to everything else. His great magnum opus, Cosmos, demonstrated these interconnections in a way that could scarcely be repeated by later men of science who lacked his breadth of interests and knowledge of the natural world as well as the worlds of politics and letters. In that respect Humboldt was at the end of one tradition as well as the beginning of another. He was among the last of the great philosophers, like Aristotle, who sought to encompass all human knowledge and organize it into one vast integrated system. But he was also present at and an influential part of the emergence of new scientific fields and the kind of specialization that was transforming knowledge and study and leading to a split between poetry and science, a division abhorred by Humboldt as well as by many of his friends and disciples, from Goethe to Thoreau and Muir.

Finally, I was thankful to Wulf for leading me back to some authors I'd been meaning to take up but hadn't got around to, particularly John Muir. Like Humboldt, Muir was one of those naturalists who knew and influenced many others, and left behind a legacy of insights into the fragile nature of the environment that sustains human existence. The truths they uttered have often gone unheeded, but that makes them no less profound and disturbing. It hardly matters whether we believe or disbelieve their observations and warnings, for the consequences will not be determined by what we believe, but by the immutable laws of nature which they so painstakingly revealed to us quite some time ago.