Books 2024: How a German Polymath Influenced Global Influencers to ‘Invent Nature’ 

Book: The Invention of Nature

Author: Andrea Wulf

Reviewed by: Trevor Williams, publisher, Grounded Global Media, and managing editor of Global Atlanta

In our modern age, we’ve inherited both a scientific consensus on the dangers of human activity to the planet and the idea that the Earth is, in fact, worth conserving. 

Neither would be a given without the vision and verve of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century German polymath who helped solidify international knowledge cooperation while ever maintaining a sense of romantic wonder that both fueled his intellectual pursuits and enraptured his listeners, including some of the age’s brightest luminaries. 

In The Invention of Nature, an astoundingly beautiful and informative work in its own right, Andrea Wulf describes how Humboldt, born in 1769, had become a global phenomenon by the time the term “scientist” was coined in 1834.

He came of age before the “hardening of lines” between academic subjects, perhaps perfecting what today might be called a multidisciplinary approach weaving art with science and inspiring generations of thinkers in the process. He was also multilingual and built a global network of scientific collaborators on the force of his personality and dedication.

During a time of intellectual siloes and geographic and linguistic barriers, Humboldt crossed literal and figurative borders, ingesting knowledge and synthesizing data at a rate never before seen.

He exhibited his findings in innovative visual works like his Naturegemälde, a stratified map of Chimborazo, and the sweeping five-volume Cosmos, an ambitious opus that enabled many to first understand and appreciate nature’s beauty and order. 

Born to a noble family, Humboldt held his privilege lightly, even as it catapulted him into circles of transatlantic influence. Never concerned with fame, fortune or court intrigue, he threw himself into work and seemed motivated by a single-minded desire to cure his own ignorance about the world.

Humboldt first worked as a mining geologist in Freiberg, where he began formulating ideas about the world as a collection of ecosystems based on climatic zones sharing characteristics based on elevation, geographic coordinates and weather patterns. 

On grueling expeditions to South America, he climbed peaks believed to be the world’s tallest at the time, gathering measurements that he’d later compare with mountains in Europe and Siberia, though his plans to visit the Himalayas in British-controlled India were frustrated by geopolitics of the day. 

Along the way, Humboldt discovered ocean currents, predicted widespread environmental degradation due to agriculture and formed foundational ideas about human-induced climate change that were generations before his time. Infused with an unbridled love for nature and knowledge, his work forms the basis for modern-day environmentalism.

He also exhibited a humanism that was uncharacteristically inclusive in that day, decrying slavery as an institution and showing admiration for the indigenous societies he encountered. 

While reading, I was constantly amazed by the way the glitterati of the time were entranced by Humboldt, who by all accounts simultaneously informed, impressed, bemused (and sometimes annoyed) anyone who came into contact with him. Long before the Internet, he became a global influencer of influencers. 

The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had attained his own Taylor Swift-level celebrity across Europe, was a friend and ardent admirer, spending time with Humboldt and his family in Jena, a university town turned intellectual pilgrimage site near Weimar. 

Here are just a few of the other historical figures who Wulf describes as having caught Humboldt fever — or at least having been forced to deal with the force of his intellect:  

• Venezuelan revolutionary Simon Bolivar met Humboldt in Paris and traveled with him in Europe
  
  
• Napoleon knew enough about Humboldt’s time in Paris to belittle his work and try to expel him back to Prussia, though scientific contemporaries intervened to save Humboldt, who had become an omnipresent (and important) luminary who brought notoriety to France‘s scientific community
  
  
• After receiving his works by post, President Thomas Jefferson welcomed Humboldt to the United States for multiple meetings to hear of his exploits and compare notes on botany. Humboldt also corresponded with Jefferson’s successor, James Madison.
  

• The naturalist John Muir drew a line between Humboldt’s work and his own hikes and writings, which in turn helped inspire President Theodore Roosevelt to preserve swathes of American wilderness as National Parks. 
  

• Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and romantic poets like Wordsworth credited Humboldt’s thinking with awakening their sense of natural beauty
  

• A seasick Charles Darwin, who could accurately be described as a Humboldt fanboy, read the Personal Narrative of Humboldt’s South American travels in the hull of the Beagle, lapping up inspiration to press through difficulties in order to experience the boundless diversity of tropical plant and animal life.

In 1869, a decade after his death, centennials of Humboldt’s birth were held in cities around the world including Boston and Cleveland. Countless counties, rivers, species and much more took on Humboldt’s name. 

Fifty years later, however, with the outbreak of World War I, Wulf describes how anti-German sentiment contributed to a strategic forgetting about Humboldt, especially in the Anglo-American sphere. 

This is an irony considering that Humboldt’s own family, including his long-serving Prussian diplomat brother, and benefactors considered him insufficiently nationalistic and perhaps too beholden to France as the world united in the 1810s to thwart Napoleon’s European conquest. (One fascinating undercurrent in the book is how Humboldt used his status and connections as a sort of unofficial diplomat for the sciences, helping preserve engagement during a time of polarization.)

To continue neglecting Humboldt, Wulf writes, is to hamstring our own understanding of how we arrived at our current relationship with nature — and to plug a gushing fountain of inspiration as it becomes essential for tackling global problems like climate change and pollution. 

Editor’s notes: Global Atlanta will receive a 10 percent commission on any purchase of this book through the links on this page. 

Each year, Global Atlanta asks influential readers and community leaders to review the most impactful book they read during the course of the year. This endeavor has continued annually since 2010.

See last year’s full list of books on BookShop here and see Global Atlanta’s full store, featuring Reader Picks lists going back to 2013 along with lists of books we’ve covered through stories or author talks.

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