ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT

"'Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice,' [Alexander Von] Humboldt said, that 'is familiar to his soul.' These sounds were like voices from beyond the ocean that transported him in an instant from one hemisphere to another. Like the tentative pencil lines in a sketch , his new understanding of nature based on scientific observations 'and ' feelings was beginning to emerge. Memories and emotional responses, Humboldt realized, would always form part of man's experience and understanding of nature. Imagination was like 'a balm of miraculous healing properties ', he said.... "On 7 February 1800, Humboldt, Bonpland and Jose , their servant from Cumana, departed from Caracas on four mules, leaving behind most of their luggage and collections.... "And on the way from Caracas to the Aragua Valley Humboldt had noted the dry soils and bemoaned that the first colonists had 'imprudently destroyed the forest.' As the soils had become depleted and fields yielded less, the planters had moved west along a path of destruction. 'Forest very decimated,' Humboldt scribbled in his diary.... "As Humboldt described how humankind was changing the climate, he unwittingly became the father of the environmental movement.... "It was all an ecological chain reaction . 'Everything,' Humboldt later said, 'is interaction and reciprocal. "Humboldt was turning away from the human-centered perspective that had ruled mankind's approach to nature for millennia: from Aristotle, who had written that 'nature had made all things specifically for the sake of man,' to botanist Carl Linnaeus, who had still echoed the same sentiment more than 2,000 years later, in 1749, when he insisted that 'all things are made for the sake of man.' It had long been believed that God had given humans command over nature. After all, didn't the Bible say that man should be fruitful and 'replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over fish of the sea, and over fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth '? In the seventeen century the British philosopher Francis Bacon had declared, 'the world is made for man,' while Rene Descartes had argued that animals were effectively automata--complex, perhaps , but not capable of reason and therefore inferior to humans. Humans, Descartes had written, were the 'lords and possessors of nature.'... "Humboldt, however, warned that humankind needed to understand how the forces of nature worked, how those different threads were all connected ." P.61-68, "Arrival: Collecting Ideas," THE INVENTION OF NATURE, ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT'S NEW WORLD by Andrea Wulf (2015)