O
Brasil, infelizmente, aparece pouco, ou quase nada, nos trabalhos de Alexander
Von Humboldt, pois as autoridades portuguesas deram ordens aos seus agentes
aduaneiros nas fronteiras norte do país para justamente impedir o seu ingresso
no território português do Brasil, por volta de 1800, quando ele se encontrava
na Venezuela, querendo passar do Orenoco ao Amazonas. Mais uma vez, ou
precocemente, ficamos fora da história, como agora mesmo por exemplo, quando os
companheiros nos deixam às margens da economia mundial. Os companheiros são os
portugueses restritivos da atualidade.
Paulo
Roberto de Almeida
The Very Great Alexander von Humboldt -
by
Andrea Wulf
Knopf,
473 pp., $30.00
by
Jedediah Purdy
Harvard
University Press, 326 pp., $29.95
Museo de la Ciudad
de México/Gianni Dagli Orti/Art Archive/Art Resource
Alexander
von Humboldt, 1803
Humboldt’s hog-nosed skunk, the
Humboldt penguin, the Humboldt squid, and more than a hundred other animal
species; Humboldt’s Lily, Humboldt’s Schomburgkia, and three hundred other
plant species; the minerals Humboldtit, Humboldtilith,
and Humboldtin; Humboldt Limestone, Humboldt Oolite, the Humboldt
Formation, the Humboldt Current; Humboldt Redwoods State Park, Humboldt-Toiyabe
National Forest, Parque Nacional Alejandro de Humboldt; Mont Humboldt, Humboldt
Mountain, Humboldt Peak, and Humboldt ranges in China, South Africa, and
Antarctica; Humboldt Falls, Humboldt Glacier, Humboldt Bay, the Humboldt River,
the Humboldt Sink, the Humboldt Salt Marsh; four Humboldt counties and thirteen
Humboldt towns in North America alone, the Humboldt crater and Mare
Humboldtianum on the moon, and asteroid 54 Alexandra, orbiting the sun.
The Prussian naturalist Alexander von
Humboldt (1769–1859) is all around us. Yet he is invisible. “Alexander von
Humboldt has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world,” writes
Andrea Wulf in her thrilling new biography. “It is almost as though his ideas
have become so manifest that the man behind them has disappeared.” Wulf’s book
is as much a history of those ideas as it is of the man. The man may be lost
but his ideas have never been more alive.
Humboldt’s legacy appeared certain at
the time of his death, when he was the most famous scientist in the world. His
funeral in Berlin was the grandest ever accorded to a private German
individual; a procession of tens of thousands of mourners followed for a mile
behind his hearse, pulled by the king’s horses. American newspapers eulogized
him as the “most remarkable man ever born” and lamented the end of the “age of
Humboldt.” His portrait hung on the walls of state
buildings from London to Bangkok.
A decade later, on the centennial of
Humboldt’s birth, parades, concerts, and firework shows were held in Moscow,
Alexandria, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Melbourne, and dozens of American
cities. Fifteen thousand marched in Syracuse, President Ulysses Grant joined a
huge celebration in Pittsburgh, and 25,000 assembled in Central Park, in the
midst of a euphoric citywide bonanza. The New York Times devoted
its entire front page to the global festivities.
Times changed. Anti-German sentiment
after World War I, the specialization and Balkanization of the sciences, and
the passage of time conspired to dilute Humboldt’s public standing,
particularly in the United States. He was eclipsed by devoted disciples—among
them Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, Ernst Haeckel, and John Muir—who developed
his insights in new ways. But times have changed again. In our Anthropocene age
Humboldt’s theories read like prophecy. More important, they offer wisdom about
the way forward. It is impossible to read The Invention of Nature without
contracting Humboldt fever. Wulf makes Humboldtians of us all.
Humboldt was born during the era in which human beings
stopped fearing nature and began to control it. The steam engine, the smallpox
vaccine, and the lightning rod were rapidly redefining man’s relationship with
the natural world. Timekeeping and measuring systems became standardized, and
the few blank spaces remaining on world maps were quickly filling in. In New
England, the colonists spoke of “reclaiming” North America from the wilderness,
a project inextricable from the propagation of democracy. The jurist James
Kent, seeking a legal basis for seizing land from Native Americans, argued that
the continent was “fitted and intended by Providence to be subdued and
cultivated, and to become the residence of civilized nations.” Explorers like James
Cook and Louis Antoine de Bougainville circumnavigated the globe and published
their journals, which Humboldt read avidly as a boy.
Humboldt’s father was a chamberlain in
the Prussian court and a confidant to the future king, who was godfather to
Humboldt; his mother, the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer and member of the
Prussian civil service, was of Huguenot descent. Alexander and his older
brother Wilhelm spent winters in Berlin and summers at the family castle in
Tegel but their childhoods were lonely. Their father died when Alexander was
nine and their mother was severe and cold. Though the brothers were close, and
remained so their entire lives—Wilhelm would become a linguist and
philosopher—their only companions were the private tutors who gave them a
rigorous education in the classics.
Humboldt was desperate to escape this
claustrophobic environment but afraid to abandon his mother. “There is a drive
in me,” he wrote in a letter, “that often makes me feel as if I’m losing my
mind.” He likened this drive to being chased perpetually by “10,000 pigs.”
After university he became an inspector in the Ministry of Mines, a job that
satisfied his mother’s desire for him to ascend the ranks of the Prussian civil
service, while allowing him to travel widely across the kingdom and conduct
personal experiments in geology, anatomy, and electricity. It was not until his
mother’s death of cancer in 1796, when he was twenty-seven, that he felt free.
He did not attend her funeral.
Supported by the windfall of his
inheritance, he abandoned his mining career and planned a “great voyage” to a
distant location. The destination did not seem to make much difference—he
considered the West Indies, Lapland, Greece, and Siberia, before settling on
South America, once he was offered a passport to the Spanish colonies from King
Carlos IV himself. Nor did he have any specific object of study. He would
analyze everything, from wind patterns and cloud structures to insect behavior
and soil composition, collecting specimens, making measurements, and taking
temperatures. He wanted no less than to discover how “all forces of nature are
interlaced and interwoven.” He took as the premise of his expedition that the
earth was “one great living organism where everything was connected.” The
insights that followed from this premise would be worth more than all of the
discoveries he made.
This is not to discount the value of
those discoveries, which were later collected in his thirty-four-volume Voyage
to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, published between 1807 and
1826. On his voyage Humboldt explored Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, and
Peru, visiting many regions never before observed by a scientist. He identified two thousand new plant
species at a time when only six thousand species were known. (More plants,
animals, minerals, and places are named after Humboldt than anyone else.) He
discovered the magnetic equator. He was the first European to explore and
map the Casiquiare River, the only natural canal on earth to link two major
river systems, the Orinoco and the Amazon. He was the first to conduct
experiments on electric eels, which he dissected and held in his hands,
enduring violent shocks.
Humboldt carried this kind of hands-on
experimentation to manic extremes in his voracious quest for total knowledge.
He drank river water (the Orinoco was particularly disgusting, while the
Atabapo was “delicious”), chewed bark, copied and translated scientific
manuscripts, made astronomical observations, gauged the blueness of the sky
with a cyanometer, transcribed the vocabularies of indigenous tribes, and
sketched Incan monuments and hieroglyphs of ancient civilizations deep in the
Amazonian rainforest. He studied his own lice with a microscope.
At times The Invention of
Nature reads like pulp explorer fiction, a genre at least partially
inspired by Humboldt’s own travelogues. On the Chimborazo volcano, 17,000 feet
above sea level, we find Humboldt crawling along a two-inch-wide ridge between
a sheer icy cliff and a thousand-foot drop with “almost perpendicular
walls…covered with rocks that protruded like knife blades.” Humboldt bathes in
the Orinoco among crocodiles, gigantic boa constrictors, herds of capybaras,
and jaguars. He contracts fevers, dysentery, blood infections, and nameless
horrific Amazonian diseases. With his companion, the naturalist Aimé Bonpland,
he scales every peak he can see in the Andes. When his shoes disintegrate, he
continues barefoot. While traveling from Cuba to the Atlantic seaboard he sails
straight into a hurricane, which lingers overhead for six days, inundating the
ship so that the passengers must swim through the captain’s cabin, while sharks
circle in the turbid waters.
Wulf, a design historian at the Royal College of Art in
London and the author of two histories of gardening, seems liberated to have
exited the garden. She has gone to near-Humboldtian lengths to research her
book: traversing the Venezuelan rainforest, walking around Walden Pond “in deep
freshly fallen snow,” hiking in Yosemite, and even climbing Chimborazo. She
visited archives in California, Berlin, and Cambridge, where she read
Humboldt’s dozens of books in German, Darwin’s copies of Humboldt’s books, and
his personal files. (Humboldt, as manic in his correspondence as in all else,
wrote more than 50,000 letters and received more than twice as many.) Wulf
sought out, 12,000 feet high on Ecuador’s Antisana volcano, the dilapidated hut
where Humboldt spent a night in 1802, and in Quito she found his original
Spanish passport.
Rediscovering Humboldt is by this
point a subgenre unto itself—recent entrants include Humboldt’s
Cosmos (2004) by Gerard Helferich, Laura Dassow
Walls’s The Passage to Cosmos (2011), and Aaron Sachs’s
valuable The Humboldt Current (2006), which traces Humboldt’s
influence on American environmental thought. But Wulf offers a more urgent
argument for Humboldt’s relevance. The Humboldt in these pages is bracingly
contemporary; he acts and speaks in the way that a polyglot intellectual from
the year 2015 might, were he transported two centuries into the past and set
out to enlighten the world’s benighted scientists and political rulers.
After his five-year voyage through
Latin America, Humboldt landed in the United States in May 1804. He spent a
week in Washington, regaling President Jefferson, Secretary of State James
Madison, and Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin with information about the
Spanish colonies, which to that point had largely been closed to American
contact. Jefferson was then in a border dispute with Spain over the land
between the Sabine and Rio Grande rivers. Humboldt convinced Jefferson that the
land—today the state of Texas—despite its deserts and savanna, was worth
fighting for. “We have little knowledge” of the Spanish colonies, a grateful
Jefferson told Humboldt, “but through you.”
Humboldt settled in Paris, where he
set to writing and lecturing about his voyage. He skipped meals and barely
slept. His hand couldn’t keep up with his brain: he crammed the margins of his
handwritten pages with ideas for other chapters and essays. When he ran out of
space, he continued to write on his desk itself, carving his thoughts into the
wood. He delivered a series of widely attended talks at the Académie des
Sciences, in which he “jumped so quickly from one subject to another that
nobody could keep up.” The Jardin des Plantes exhibited some of his botanical
specimens, but not all: he had brought back 60,000. His maps, political essays
about the colonies, and the data he collected about agriculture, manufacturing,
geology, botany, zoology, fluviology, and meteorology revolutionized each of
those fields.
He met often with politicians,
scientists (including Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck), and the
aristocracy. He appears to have been nearly universally adored, with one
exception. “Napoleon,” wrote Humboldt, “hates me.” Wulf suggests that Napoleon
might have envied Humboldt’s success. Voyage to the Equinoctial Regions
of the New Continent was published at nearly the same time as Napoleon’s Description
de l’Égypte, a twenty-three-volume study compiled by two hundred scientists
who had accompanied Napoleon’s troops during the 1798 invasion of Egypt.
Humboldt had achieved more on his own.
Wellcome Library, London
Alexander
von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland collecting plants at the foot of Chimborazo in
today’s Ecuador; aquatint from Humboldt’s Vue des Cordillères et monuments
des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique, 1810–1813
Humboldt’s most consequential findings, however, derived
from his conception of the world as a single unified organism. “Everything,” he
said, “is interaction and reciprocal.” It seems commonplace today to speak of
“the web of life,” but the concept was Humboldt’s invention. Into the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thinkers like René Descartes, Francis
Bacon, and Carl Linnaeus were still echoing Aristotle’s view that “nature has
made all things specifically for the sake of man.”
Particularly heterodox was the
implication that the decline of one species might have cascading effects on
others. The possibility that animal life might not be inexhaustible had been
proposed by the German anatomist J.F. Blumenbach (who taught Humboldt at the
University of Göttingen), but was not widely accepted. “Such is the œconomy of
nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race
of her animals to become extinct,” declared Thomas Jefferson in 1784, an
opinion shared by most naturalists. Convinced to the end of his life that
mastodons still existed in North America, most likely in the “unexplored and
undisturbed” regions of the continent, Jefferson urged Lewis and Clark to look
for them during their expedition.
Humboldt traveled so far, saw so much,
and observed so closely that he began to notice similarities across continents.
Rhododendron-like plants on the mountains near Caracas reminded him of alpine
trees in the Swiss Alps; a sea of cacti, seen from the distance, recalled the
grasses in the marshes of northern Europe; a moss in the Andes resembled a
species he had found growing in German forests.
This comparative approach allowed him
to take staggering intellectual leaps. He looked beyond the characteristics of
organisms and tried to determine the structures underlying nature, leading him
to formulate the idea of ecosystems. He was the first to understand that
climate emerged from the “perpetual interrelationship” between land, ocean,
wind, elevation, and organic life. He introduced the idea of classifying plants
by climate zones instead of taxonomy, taking into account altitude,
temperature, and other conditions related to location. He invented isotherms,
the lines used on maps to connect regions with the same average temperature and
atmospheric pressure. The similarity of the coastal plants in Africa and South
America led him to postulate an “ancient” connection between the continents,
anticipating plate tectonic theory by more than a century. He also studied how
different systems interacted with one another. Nobody before Humboldt, for
instance, had been able to explain how forests, by releasing oxygen, storing
water, and providing shade, have a cooling effect on climate.
In the Llanos, the vast grasslands
that stretch from the Andes to the Amazon River, Humboldt noticed with wonder
how many species found food or protection from the occasional Mauritia palm
tree. It sheltered insects and worms from the wind, provided fruit to monkeys
and birds, retained moisture and soil, and generally spread “life around it in
the desert.” The Mauritia palm was what, two centuries later, would come to be
known as a “keystone species,” an organism on which the health of an entire ecosystem
depends.
If everything in nature interacted,
then it stood to reason that the natural world was not stable but prone to
dynamic changes. It followed that man, by disrupting the natural order, might
inadvertently bring about catastrophe. Humboldt was among the first to write of
the perils of deforestation, irrigation, and cash crop agriculture, asserting
that the brutal repercussions of man’s “insatiable avarice” were already
“incalculable.” During his yearlong expedition to Russia in 1829, he gave a
speech at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg calling for a vast
international collaboration in which scientists around the world would collect
data related to the effects of deforestation, the first global study of man’s
impact on climate, and a model for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, assembled 160 years later.
The idea that human beings might be interfering with the
natural order of things was a radical rejection of prevailing views about man’s
dominion over nature. These views were most forcefully expressed by the French
naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who wrote with disgust of
primeval nature; his Natural History is replete with words
like “grotesque,” “filth,” “nauseous,” “pestilential,” and “terrible.” Buffon’s
views echoed those of William Bradford, the first governor of the Plymouth
Colony, who described the new world as “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full
of wild beasts and wild men,” and the English naturalist John Ray, who wrote of
man’s duty to bring nature in line with God’s design through settlement and
cultivation. To Humboldt, however, man was “nothing” in the larger scheme of
things. Wulf notes that nowhere in his five-volume magnum opus, Cosmos—his
attempt to summarize his thinking on the natural world, the universe, and the
entirety of human history—does Humboldt mention God.
By casting aside religious and
political ideology, Humboldt was able to diagnose plainly the cruelties of
colonial rule. The sight of the slave markets in the Spanish colonies made him
a fervent abolitionist. He told Americans (though not Jefferson himself) that
slavery was a “disgrace” and that the oppression of Native Americans was a
“stain” on the nation. Humboldt was the first to make the correlation between colonialism,
with its crude emphasis on extracting resources and disregard for indigenous
populations, and ecological devastation.
Humboldt wrote figuratively, with high
emotion, of the beauty he found in wilderness. Wulf calls his rhapsodic Views
of Nature “a blueprint for much of nature writing today.” Just as his
scientific views influenced Darwin and Marsh (who warned in Man and
Nature that “climatic excess” might lead to the “extinction of the
[human] species”), Humboldt’s lyricism served as a model for Thoreau, Haeckel,
and Muir. Wulf dedicates a chapter to each of these figures, all of whom
idolized Humboldt and drew liberally from his work.
Darwin stands out as the most slavish
of his acolytes, writing in his journal that Humboldt “like another Sun illumines
everything I behold.” Darwin wrote that it was Humboldt’s Personal
Narrative, a seven-volume subsection of Voyage, that inspired
him “to travel in distant countries, and led me to volunteer as naturalist in
her Majesty’s ship Beagle.” He brought his copy of the Personal
Narrative on the Beagle with him and read in it Humboldt’s discussion
of the “gradual transformations of species.” Humboldt wrote that plants and
animals “limit each other’s numbers” through “long continued contest” for
nourishment and territory, with only the strongest surviving—an idea, Wulf
notes with some understatement, “That would become essential to Darwin’s
concept of natural selection.” Wulf also points out that the final, crowning
paragraph of Origin of Species is a nearly verbatim plagiarism
of a passage in Personal Narrative.
Humboldt also exerted a profound influence on Goethe
(with whom he had a deep friendship), Charles Lyell, William Wordsworth, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, Jules Verne, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Flaubert, Pushkin, Emerson, Poe, Whitman,
Aldous Huxley, Ezra Pound, Erich Fried, Justus Liebeg, James Lovelock, and Rachel Carson, yet
Humboldt makes only a passing appearance in Jedediah Purdy’s otherwise
instructive After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Purdy, a
professor of law at Duke, sets out to do two things in his monograph. He first
charts the history of modern man’s relationship to the natural world, focusing
on the American perspective—a recapitulation of Roderick Nash’s classic Wilderness
and the American Mind (1967) and William Cronon’s “The Trouble with
Wilderness” (1995).
Second, and more ambitiously, Purdy
attempts to imagine a political system that might be capable of addressing the
urgent, existential questions posed by our current environmental crisis. That
we need a new way to think about the natural world is indisputable: despite
best intentions and righteous rhetoric, global carbon emissions continue to
rise precipitously. Naomi Klein and others have argued persuasively that
capitalist democracies are uniquely incapable of resolving these problems.
Authoritarian governments have fared worse. What is to be done?
Purdy defers those questions in the
first four fifths of his book, which he devotes to his American history of
“nature”—a concept that “has been a vessel for many inconsistent ideas.” His
survey begins with John Evelyn, John Ray, and the argument that man had a
providential duty to transform wilderness—originally a pejorative term,
synonymous with “waste”—into orderly agricultural plots. Land cultivation was
codified in colonial law, which “deployed Americans as an army of
development…through a scheme of opportunity and reward.” Claiming land from
nature, and exploiting it for profit, was enshrined as a foundational American
right—a view that persists to this day.
It was not until John Muir (“How
intensely I desire to be a Humboldt”) popularized Thoreau’s romantic views of
the natural world that Americans began in large numbers to see wilderness as a
spiritual and meditative refuge from the bustle of modern life. But this
idealization of nature was counterproductive, protecting “a few cathedrals”
like Yosemite and Yellowstone while devaluing the more pedestrian swathes of
nature that made up most of the continent. The preservation movement was
eclipsed by the more pragmatic conservation movement. Figures like Theodore
Roosevelt, Walter Weyl, an editor of The New Republic, and Gifford
Pinchot, first chief of the United States Forest Service, proposed a
bureaucratic, utilitarian approach, designed to ensure that the natural world
was accessible for both recreation and the extraction of resources. But when
these two interests came into conflict, preservationists lost—most notably in
the battle over the Tuolumne River in Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley, dammed in
1923 to provide water to San Francisco.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, the
politics of nature evolved to reflect a growing (Humboldtian) awareness of
ecology. Concerns over air and water pollution, land development, resource
extraction, species extinction, drought, wildfires, and even roadside littering
were consolidated under the single rubric of “the environment.” “Once
invented,” writes Purdy, “the environmental crisis could encompass many
crises.” This view still dominates environmental politics, though it has been complicated
by a new appreciation of the profound ways in which man has reconfigured the
natural world to our own specifications. In political calculations about the
environmental crisis, romantic appeals to nature’s glory have been supplanted
by a rigid cost-benefit analysis. Echoes of the Hetch Hetchy debate can be seen
in the battle over the Keystone Pipeline, new EPA methane and carbon
dioxide emission regulations, and drilling in the Arctic Circle.
In his final chapters, Purdy identifies the familiar
challenges we face. He explains, for instance, why cost-benefit analysis breaks
down when applied to the climate: the cost of meaningful, long-term change will
fall heavily on the people trying to solve the problem, while the benefits will
be reaped by generations not yet born. Concerns over hotter summers may trouble
consciences but they don’t stop people from driving cars.
Purdy proposes that we have a moral
obligation to the natural world and that “a clean environment…should not be
negotiable in terms of the marginal dollar.” He argues that our democracy is too
beholden to the influence of money, that the processes we use to produce energy
and food should be made more transparent to the public, and that technological
solutions are unreliable and will not bring about the greater change of
consciousness that is necessary to solve our most pressing problems. He urges an ethic of self-restraint and a
new worldview in which human beings are no longer “the figure at its center.” Most environmentalists already share these
views.
Purdy is slightly more audacious in
his suggestion that we must think with greater imagination about our
relationship to the natural world. It is crucial, he writes, that we imagine
“alternative landscapes, alternative economies, alternative ways of living.”
More specifically, he proposes that we embrace “an aesthetics of damage,”
defined as “a way of living with harm and not disowning the place that is
harmed.” Elsewhere he describes this as accepting the “uncanniness” of our
fallen world and our uncertain future. A source of this uncanniness is the
knowledge that there is no longer such a thing as true wilderness—no acre of
the world has escaped the presence of man. Our fingerprint has entered the
fossil record, inscribed in cesium, plutonium, and plastic.
An aesthetics of the uncanny already
exists—you can see it, for instance, in Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of
industrial landscapes, the eerie underwater reef sculptures of Jason deCaires
Taylor, and Margaret Atwood’s futuristic MaddAddam novel trilogy. But Purdy’s
uncanniness can also be detected in new technologies, such as the use of
genetic tools to bring back extinct species, create drought- and pest-resistant
crops, and grow artificial human organs in a lab. Purdy doesn’t try to imagine
exactly what the future we’re creating will look like. But someone will have to
do it. It may take a new Humboldt. Until then, the original Humboldt will do
fine.
