"The Invention of Nature" by Andrea Wulf

The core of this book is a biography of Alexander von Humboldt, a remarkable Prussian polymath who knew Goethe (and Schiller) in Jena and Weimar, who assisted the revolutionaries in the French revolution, who explored northern South America, who inspired Bolivar and Darwin and who laid the foundations of what we know know as ecology.

He must have been a remarkable man: hugely intelligent, hugely energetic, scarcely sleeping, unceasing, talking endlessly; fantastically impressive but I'm not sure he could have been a friend. He didn't really seem to empathise with people. He was glad when his mother died (partly because it released him to spend his inheritance on his passions) and a letter of consolation to his sister-in-law failed spectacularly to console. Though supposedly attractive to women he wasn't attracted by them and chose as his companions young men. But, above all, he was noted for talking non-stop and never letting anyone around him get a word in edgewise. Perhaps he was better off communicating through his hugely best-selling books (which were so expensive to publish that they ruined him).

Humboldt is important partly because of his ability to communicate his ideas through his books but mainly because of what those ideas were. He was the first to really understand the inter-connectedness of nature. This is the reason why this book is only partly a biography of Humboldt. It also explores, in a chapter for each of them, the influence of Humboldt's ideas on:

• Darwin for evolution by natural selection,
• Thoreau on the interplay of science and art: "his friend and Concord neighbour, the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, described Thoreau as 'an intolerable bore' who made him feel ashamed for having money, or a house, or writing a book that people will read." (C 19)
• George Perkins Marsh, the US pioneer of the fight against deforestation, who believed that "if nothing changed ... the planet would be reduced to a condition of 'shattered surface, of climatic excess" (C 20)
• Ernst Haeckel, who coined the word ecology
• John Muir who fought for the first US National Park as a way of preserving the wilderness.

As a young man, Humboldt lived in Jena, where Schiller worked at the university and Goethe often visited from nearby Weimar. (C 2) Goethe was interested in the underlying patterns of animals, what he called the urform. "He distinguished between the internal force - the urform - that provided the general form of a living organism and the environment - the external force - that shaped the organism itself." (C 2)

His first exploration started in Venezuela and early on he saw a lake whose water levels were falling and he realised the part that intensive agriculture and deforestation had played in that. When he got to the rain forest he realised that the animals were competing for food, predating on one another, and that even the trees were competing for light. He discovered the Brazil nut which he introduced to Europe. (C 5) In what would become Ecuador he climbed Mount Chimborazo, at the time thought to be the highest mountain in the world, as high as anyone else had at that time but he couldn't reach the summit because his way was blocked by a huge crevasse. But it was staring at the surrounding landscape from this vantage point that showed him the zones of vegetation and allowed him to later divide the wold into climate zones. (C 7)

Back in Europe he met 21 year-old Simon Bolivar, a rich, spoilt, womanising playboy; Humboldt inspired him so he would later abandon his life of pleasure and return to his native South America to lead the fight for independence from Spanish colonial rule (Bolivar later decreed that Bolivia should plant a million trees.). (C 9) He then embarked on a grand tour with another in a long line of good-looking, unmarried men, this time the chemist Gay-Lussac. (C 9) By luck, Vesuvius erupted when they arrived in Naples. (C 9) Later he met Alessandro Volta by Lake Como (C 10)

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein just four years after the publication of Humboldt's tale of exploring South America; she made the monster declare to Victor that he wanted to escape to "the vast wilds of South America". (C 13)

Coleridge was inspired by Humboldt (C 13), as was John Lyell who wrote Principles of Geology which in turn inspired Darwin (C 13); in this book he theorised that climate is affected by tectonic movements. Humboldt knew Gauss and George Canning. (C 14)

For Humboldt it was all about connections. "He connected the sudden appearance of a new island in the Azores  on 30th January 1811 to a wave of earthquakes that shook the planet for a period of more than a year afterwards, from the West Indies, the plains of Ohio and Mississippi and then to the devastating earthquake that destroyed Caracas in March 1812. This was followed by a volcanic eruption on the island of Saint Vincent in the West Indies on 30th April 1812." (C 15)

He turned sixty during his second great expedition through Russia and into Siberia. "Humboldt celebrated his sixtieth birthday with the ... man whom history would remember as Vladimir Lenin's grandfather." (C 16)

Great moments:

• "When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel." (Prologue)
• "Goethe began to fling his arms around whenever he went for a walk ... he had discovered ... that this exaggerated swinging of one's arms was a remnant from the four-legged animal." (C 2)
• "When he heard that a farmer and his wife had been killed by the lightning, he rushed over to obtain their corpses." (C 2)
• "One morning Humboldt placed a frog's leg on a glass plate and connected its nerves and muscles to different metals in sequence ... but generated only a discouraging gentle twitch in the leg. When he then leaned over the leg in order to check the connecting metals, it convulsed so violently that it leapt off the table.  ... Humboldt realised that it had been the moisture of his breath that had triggered the reaction." (C 2)
• "If everything was connected, then it was important to examine the similarities and differences without ever losing sight of the whole." (C 2)
• "Kant insisted that knowledge was a systematic construct in which individual facts needed to fit into a larger framework in order to make sense." (C 2)
• Goethe's "Faust, like Humboldt, was driven by an endless striving for knowledge, by a 'feverish unrest'." (C 2)
• "Like a wine connoisseur, he sampled the water of the various different rivers. The Orinoco had a singular flavour that was particularly disgusting, he noted, while the Rio Apure tasted different at different locations and the Rio Atabapo was 'delicious'." (C 5)
• "Humboldt had discovered the idea of a keystone species, a species that is as essential to an ecosystem as a keystone is to an arch." (C 5)
• "One particularly horrendous story involved a missionary who had bitten off his kitchen boy's testicles as a punishment for kissing a girl." (C 8)
• "Humboldt had written a book about the universe that never once mentioned the word 'God'." (C 18)
• "Neighbours reported that they saw the old man on the street, feeding the sparrows in the early morning hours." (C 20)
• "Many noticed how impossible it was for Humboldt just to sit." (C 20)
• "His finances remained precarious. He didn't even possess a complete set of his own books because it was too expensive." (C 20)
• "'Solitude', Emerson warned him, 'is a sublime mistress, nut an intolerable wife'." (C 23)

Humboldt is also explored by the BBC Radio 4 In Our Time programme in a broadcast on 28th September 2006; it can be accessed here> https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003c1c2

A little bit more than a biography. May 2020; 337 pages