The Invention of Nature Read Free

a march that was more than a mile long. President Ulysses Grant attended the Humboldt celebrations in Pittsburgh together with 10,000 revellers who brought the city to a standstill.
    In New York City the cobbled streets were lined with flags. City Hall was veiled in banners, and entire houses had vanished behind huge posters bearing Humboldt’s face. Even the ships sailing by, out on the Hudson River, were garlanded in colourful bunting. In the morning thousands of people followed ten music bands, marching from the Bowery and along Broadway to Central Park to honour a man ‘whose fame no nation can claim’ as the New York Times’s front page reported. By early afternoon, 25,000 onlookers had assembled in Central Park to listen to the speeches as a large bronze bust of Humboldt was unveiled. In the evening as darkness settled, a torchlight procession of 15,000 people set out along the streets, walking beneath colourful Chinese lanterns.
    Let us imagine him, one speaker said, ‘as standing on the Andes’ with his mind soaring above all. Every speech across the world emphasized that Humboldt had seen an ‘inner correlation’ between all aspects of nature. In Boston, Emerson told the city’s grandees that Humboldt was ‘one of those wonders of the world’. His fame, the Daily News in London reported, was ‘in some sort bound up with the universe itself’. In Germany there were festivities in Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt and many other cities. The greatest German celebrations were in Berlin, Humboldt’s hometown, where despite torrential rain 80,000 people assembled. The authorities had ordered offices and all government agencies to close for the day. As the rain poured down and gusts chilled the air, the speeches and singing nonetheless continued for hours.
    Though today almost forgotten outside academia – at least in the English-speaking world – Alexander von Humboldt’s ideas still shape our thinking. And 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. 1
    There are Kap Humboldt and Humboldt Glacier in Greenland, as well as mountain ranges in northern China, South Africa, New Zealand and Antarctica. There are rivers and waterfalls in Tasmania and New Zealand as well as parks in Germany and Rue Alexandre de Humboldt in Paris. In North America alone four counties, thirteen towns, mountains, bays, lakes and a river are named after him, as well as the Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California and Humboldt Parks in Chicago and Buffalo. The state of Nevada was almost called Humboldt when the Constitutional Convention debated its name in the 1860s. Almost 300 plants and more than 100 animals are named after him – including the Californian Humboldt lily (Lilium humboldtii), the South American Humboldt penguin (Spheniscus humboldti) and the fierce predatory six-foot Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas) which can be found in the Humboldt Current. Several minerals carry his name – from Humboldtit to Humboldtin – and on the moon there is an area called ‘Mare Humboldtianum’. More places are named after Humboldt than anyone else.
    Ecologists, environmentalists and nature writers rely on Humboldt’s vision, although most do so unknowingly. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is based on Humboldt’s concept of interconnectedness, and scientist James Lovelock’s famous Gaia theory of the earth as a living organism bears remarkable similarities. When Humboldt described the earth as ‘a natural whole animated and moved by inward forces’, he predated Lovelock’s ideas by more than 150 years. Humboldt called his book describing this new concept Cosmos, having initially considered (but