1845

Birth of Environmentalism

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859)

The history of science and exploration is replete with individuals who, working mostly on their own, have made significant advances in our understanding of the world and humanity’s place within it. Such people include Eratosthenes, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Hubble, Hawking, and many others who have been largely forgotten despite their work’s continuing to have a lasting influence on the world today. That is the unfortunate legacy of the late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who arguably gave birth to what we call the environmental movement today.

Humboldt was a polymath (good at everything he tried) from a wealthy family, with an early passion for botany, anatomy, and other sciences that eventually led him to a degree in geology and a government job inspecting mines. His work cataloguing plants, minerals, and fossils drove a wanderlust to explore, and in 1799 he set out on his own, using his family money and with the blessing of the Spanish crown, to explore and catalog the uncharted flora and fauna in new Spanish territories in today’s Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.

Humboldt brought sophisticated scientific instruments into the field and collected enormous numbers of plant, animal, and fossil samples during a series of such expeditions in the early 1800s. He made extensive, systematic observations of the physical geography, plant life, and meteorology of as-yet undocumented regions from the Amazon to the Andes. He was among the first to record and interpret the interrelationships among plants, animals, people, climate, and geology and to establish a holistic view of nature. His five-volume book Kosmos (first published in 1845) would establish an entirely new worldview: the Earth as an interconnected set of ecosystems; nature experienced through emotions; science as the path to understanding the physical world. Humboldt’s work and writings were inspirational to Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and others who would be so critical to an emerging sense of environmental responsibility in society. According to biographer Andrea Wulf, “Humboldt gave us our concept of nature itself. The irony is that Humboldt’s views have become so self-evident that we have largely forgotten the man behind them.”

Top: 1806 painting of Alexander von Humboldt (standing, left) collecting flora and fauna samples near Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador. Bottom: Humboldt’s drawings comparing different ecosystems at different mountain elevations on Chimborazo and on Mont Blanc in the Alps.