Five Stars for
The Invention of Nature:
Alexander von Humboldt's New World by Andrea Wulf
Alexander von Humboldt was an exceptionally brilliant, insightful
man. He was painstakingly thorough in his research, and he delivered his
monumental message two centuries ago. This one of a kind scientist pioneered
his research with an original approach. He saw the need for an ecological
balance between nature and mans ever encroaching plunder of new frontiers.
I loved the book’s aspects of discovery, enlightenment, and
consciousness. Andrea Wulf delivered Humboldt’s message which the world
desperately needs to heed now. This huge volume captivated my attention all the
way through and I was sad to see it come to an end...it is memorable!
Author Andrea Wulf writes of Alexander Humboldt:
"During much of his long life, he was
the nexus of the scientific world, writing some 50,000 letters and receiving at
least double that number. Knowledge, Humboldt believed, had to be shared,
exchanged, and made available to everybody. Humboldt ‘read’ plants as others
did books – and to him they revealed a global force behind nature, the
movements of civilizations as well as of landmass. No one had ever approached
botany in this way."
"Humboldt talked of ‘mankind’s mischief … which disturbs nature’s order’. There
were moments in his life when he was so pessimistic that he painted a bleak
future of humankind’s eventual expansion into space, when humans would spread
their lethal mix of vice, greed, violence and ignorance across other planets.
The human species could turn even those distant stars ‘barren’ and leave them
‘ravaged’, Humboldt wrote as early as 1801, just as they were already doing
with earth."
