The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World

Front Cover
Alfred A. Knopf, 2015 - Biography & Autobiography - 473 pages
The acclaimed author of Founding Gardeners reveals the forgotten life of Alexander von Humboldt, the visionary German naturalist whose ideas changed the way we see the natural world--and in the process created modern environmentalism.

NATIONAL BEST SELLER

One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The James Wright Award for Nature Writing, the Costa Biography Award, the Royal Geographic Society's Ness Award, the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award

Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Kirkus Prize Prize for Nonfiction, the Independent Bookshop Week Book Award


A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, Nature, Jezebel, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, New Scientist, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, The Evening Standard, The Spectator

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was an intrepid explorer and the most famous scientist of his age. In North America, his name still graces four counties, thirteen towns, a river, parks, bays, lakes, and mountains. His restless life was packed with adventure and discovery, whether he was climbing the highest volcanoes in the world or racing through anthrax-infected Siberia or translating his research into bestselling publications that changed science and thinking. Among Humboldt's most revolutionary ideas was a radical vision of nature, that it is a complex and interconnected global force that does not exist for the use of humankind alone.

Now Andrea Wulf brings the man and his achievements back into focus: his daring expeditions and investigation of wild environments around the world and his discoveries of similarities between climate and vegetation zones on different continents. She also discusses his prediction of human-induced climate change, his remarkable ability to fashion poetic narrative out of scientific observation, and his relationships with iconic figures such as Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson. Wulf examines how Humboldt's writings inspired other naturalists and poets such as Darwin, Wordsworth, and Goethe, and she makes the compelling case that it was Humboldt's influence that led John Muir to his ideas of natural preservation and that shaped Thoreau's Walden.

With this brilliantly researched and compellingly written book, Andrea Wulf shows the myriad fundamental ways in which Humboldt created our understanding of the natural world, and she champions a renewed interest in this vital and lost player in environmental history and science.
 

Contents

Beginnings
13
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
25
In Search of a Destination
39
South America
53
The Llanos and the Orinoco
61
Across the Andes
75
Return to Berlin
189
Russia
201
Ernst Haeckel and Humboldt
298
John Muir and Humboldt
315
Epilogue
335
Illustration Credits
343
Chimborazo
348
Thomas Jefferson and Humboldt
359
Europe
372
Berlin
411

Charles Darwin and Humboldt
217
Humboldts Cosmos
235
Henry David Thoreau
249
The Greatest Man Since the Deluge
265
George Perkins Marsh and Humboldt
283
Paris
425
A Note on Humboldts Publications
431
Simón Bolívar and Humboldt
435
Maladie Centrifuge
463
Copyright

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About the author (2015)

Andrea Wulf is an English historian and writer, born in New Delhi, India in 1972. She studied design at the Royal College of Art. She is a public speaker and has lectured in the UK and USA. Her books include This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History; Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation; and Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens. Her award winning book, The Brother Gardeners, received a CBHL Annual Literature Award in 2010. The Invention of Nature: How Alexander Von Humboldt Revolutionized Our World, received the 2015 Costa Book Award in the biography category, and the 2016 Royal Society Science Book Prize for 'outstanding popular science books' written for a non-specialist audience.