On the Origin of David Attenborough

[mtvessel]

Oct 2017
The Invention of Nature - Andrea Wulf – John Murray, 2016
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Alexander von Humboldt should be a hero for Guardian readers. Like James Cook he was a scientist-explorer, and his books were a strong influence on Charles Darwin. Unlike Cook, he genuinely seemed to like and respect the native people he met. He loathed slavery and supported radical political causes, meeting and corresponding with Thomas Jefferson and Simon Bolivar. He was probably either gay or asexual - he never married and his surviving correspondence shows that his close emotional relationships were with men, but he claimed that he "didn't know sensual needs". His holistic view of nature led to the establishment of ecology as a discipline, and inspired John Muir who in turn was influential in the creation of National Parks in the United States. I think it is safe to say that without Humboldt, there would have been no David Attenborough.

He was born in 1769 to a wealthy Prussian family. His father died when he was nine and his stern mother expected him to become a civil servant. But science was his first love - he even experimented on himself while studying galvanism - and he longed to travel. He finally got his chance after the death of his mother, when he managed to sweet-talk the King of Spain into giving him the necessary permissions to travel to South America. With Aimé Bonard, a French naturalist, as a travelling companion, he spent five years travelling down the Orinoco in Venezuela, across the Andes to Quito and Lima, then Mexico City and finally the United States, where he met Thomas Jefferson. During his travels he formulated his thesis that nature is an interconnected web, most strikingly illustrated by the Naturgemälde, an annotated depiction of Mount Chimborazo showing the different distributions of plants and animals according to altitude. It was the first time that anyone had thought to classify them by the environment in which they lived.

On his return to Europe he lionised the salons and scientific societies of post-revolutionary Paris and London and published a number of coffee-table books, but was unable to get permission to mount another expedition (the East India Company blocked his application to visit the subcontinent, probably because of his opposition to colonialism and support for revolutionaries). It was not until he was 60 that he was able to travel again, this time to the Urals and Siberia at the invitation of Tsar Nicholas II. This gave him the scientific data he needed to complete Kosmos, his magnum opus that presented astronomical, geological and biological understandings of the world as a unified and ordered whole - tellingly, without mention of a deity. He continued to work on it for the rest of his life, becoming a celebrity scientist much like Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking in the twentieth century. He died in 1859 - the year that Darwin published On The Origin of Species - and his funeral was attended by thousands.

Wulf's telling of the story is excellent, with compelling quotes from the man himself and carefully placed chapters on his influences that do not impede the chronological flow. The last few chapters, tracing Humboldt's post-mortem influence on Haeckel, the inventor of the word "ecology", and John Muir, the sage of Yosemite and founder of the Sierra Club, are interesting, but feel like filler. It is surprising that Wulf does not trace Humboldt's influence on German history and culture; to me his reverence for nature has clear parallels in the works of Mahler and Wagner, even if there is no direct textual evidence.

But his longest lasting influence could be in the romantic notion of the oneness of nature that so many of us feel, as evidenced by Attenborough's Planet Earth television series and the strong emotional resonance of the famous blue marble image taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts. And those feelings could, perhaps, be what saves us from our ecologically destructive ways. Certainly scientific rationalism hasn't. Humboldt's romanticism may be out of fashion, but we need it more than ever.