Humboldtian Writing for the Anthropocene

Abstract

Humboldt embodies the wide-ranging curiosity and fascination with nature shared by eminent nature writers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. In fact, he greatly influenced British and North American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, George Perkins Marsh, Clarence King, and John Muir, as Aaron Sachs (The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism. New York: Penguin, 2006), Laura Dassow Walls (The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Andrea Wulf (The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. New York: Knopf, 2015) have convincingly shown. Yet this essay argues that placing Humboldt in the tradition of Western, and especially Anglo-American, nature writing is ultimately problematic since it denies Humboldt’s connections to South and Central American intellectuals and scientists. Moreover, terming Humboldt a nature writer downplays his inherent concerns with human cultures and civilizations. The nature writing tradition originating in Europe and the United States delineated particular environments in romantic and nostalgic terms, denoting a position of privilege both in terms of its authors and settings described. In the Anthropocene, when the concept of “nature” as a whole has become increasingly tenuous, classifying Humboldt as a nature writer would be unjustifiably reductive.

1 A Nature Writer?

Was Alexander von Humboldt a writer of nature? Of course, as becomes readily evident if we consider the titles of his works alone, from Essay on the Geography of Plants to Ansichten der Natur, from Vue des Cordillères et monumens des peoples indigènes de l’Amérique to Kosmos. If we follow Andrea Wulf’s recent and influential assessment in her bestselling The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, “Humboldt revolutionized the way we see the natural world”(Wulf 2015, 5). Going further, Wulf credits Humboldt with the very “invention of nature,” that is “the concept of nature as we see it today” (ibid.). As Wulf’s convincing argument lays out, Humboldt emerged as one of the first naturalists who perceived the web of life, recognizing the Wechselwirkung [reciprocal interplay] of ecological processes while paying close attention to environmental harm.¹

In the common understanding of nature writing, what Michael P. Branch sees as a “modern literary subgenre of the nonfiction personal essay that sympathetically describes nature and the authorial response to it” (2004, xii–xxxi; xvii), Humboldt’s texts, in their attempt to combine scientific observation with moral education and personal infatuation, significantly contribute to the canon. As Wulf writes:

Of course nature had to be measured and analysed, but he [Humboldt] also believed that a great part of our response to the natural world should be based on the senses and emotions. He wanted to excite a “love of nature”. At a time when other scientists were searching for universal laws, Humboldt wrote that nature had to be experienced through feelings. (Wulf 2015, 3–4)

With his immediate interests in and imminent concerns about natural phenomena, ecology, and environmental matters, Humboldt could very much count as a nature writer. His multifaceted writings certainly fit the bill of a genre that describes the natural world in fiction or, more commonly, nonfiction, drawing on natural history, scientific information, personal observation, and philosophical reflection. Owing to his outstanding education, his training in geology at the Freiberg University of Mining, his botanical, zoological, and meteorological interests, and his awe of grand natural monuments such as mountains, gorges, waterfalls, Humboldt embodies the wide-ranging curiosity and fascination with nature shared by eminent nature writers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In fact, he greatly influenced British and North American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Darwin, George Perkins Marsh, Clarence King, and John Muir, as Aaron Sachs (2006), Laura Dassow Walls (2009), and Andrea Wulf have convincingly shown.

Yet this essay argues that placing Humboldt in the tradition of Western, and especially Anglo-American, nature writing is ultimately problematic since it denies Humboldt’s connections to South and Central American intellectuals and scientists. Moreover, terming Humboldt a nature writer downplays his inherent concerns with human cultures and civilizations. The nature writing tradition originating in Europe and the United States delineated particular environments in romantic and nostalgic terms, denoting a position of privilege both in terms of its authors and settings described. In the Anthropocene, when the concept of “nature” as a whole has become increasingly tenuous, classifying Humboldt as a nature writer would be unjustifiably reductive.

2 The Nature Writing Tradition and Its Challenges

In the United States, inquiries into nature writing gained currency and proliferated in the 1990s in the wake of environmental awareness and the establishment of ecocriticism as a literary field. In 1990, Robert Finch and John Elder, both distinguished New England nature writers who also taught the tradition, published Nature Writing: The Tradition in English, a comprehensive and authoritative guide on the topic, beginning with mid-eighteenth-century British writer Gilbert White and concluding with authors such as Gary Snyder, John McPhee, and Wendell Berry and in the late twentieth century. Many other anthologies and inquiries followed that same decade, acknowledging especially recognizable traditions in the United Kingdom, in New England, and the American West.²

For a contemporary reader, it is surprising that Humboldt was completely omitted from this canon, although his work seems to share many of the characteristics of nature writing and, moreover, significantly shaped many nature writers. This obvious gap underscores both the (initial) exclusive Anglo and North American focus of scholarship and Humboldt’s slip into oblivion in the twentieth century, which in turn explains his triumphant resurrection in many recent titles. With his privileged background, transdisciplinary perspectives, and multilingual texts, Humboldt exemplifies the distinctly Western canon that nature writing relies on while also highlighting the limitations of its categories. In a recent essay, Simone Schröder outlines some reasons for the often-neglected tradition of German nature writing, making a case for integrating Humboldt (along with other German-speaking authors) into the canon:

The lack of a corpus to which the nature essay could be added has affected both distribution and reception. There is no established publication channel for nature writing in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Nevertheless, there is a distinct German-speaking tradition considering the nature essay as an ecological genre, as I will make evident. (Schröder 2018, 340, my translation)

Schröder’s argumentation can be seen as part of a larger thrust to expand the category of nature writing, especially to include formerly neglected voices. John Elder himself suggested broadening the concept, and volumes such as Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism (2001) have worked toward greater inclusion of built environments and authors of diverse national, ethnic, and racial affiliation so as to avoid elitism and ghettoization (cf. Armbruster and Wallace 2001). In the UK, writers have shaped a canon of twenty-first-century so-called new nature writing, which attempts to reconfigure the genre beyond pastoral and wilderness models in light of the environmental crisis.³ At the same time, many attempts have been made at inclusivity in terms of chronology, gender, geography, race, and class, with volumes dedicated specifically to pre-eighteenth-century texts, to women’s voices, to the American South and Midwest, and to Caribbean, Chinese, and African writing, to name just a few.⁴ In his recent defense of nature writing, Robert Macfarlane (2015) admits that “more voices need to be heard from ethnic-minority writers and from a wider range of identities and backgrounds” (n.p.), though he fails to address the reasons for the missing diversity in nature writing.

However, adding Humboldt to the voices to be heard shortchanges Humboldt’s concerns and tends to confirm rather than challenge common assumptions about nature and culture in the Global North and South.

3 Tropical Natures, Cultural Legacies, Enlightenment Science

Notably, we can trace the identification of Humboldt as a nature writer back to the postcolonial critique raised by Mary Louise Pratt in her influential Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992). As Pratt argued, Humboldt helped to create a contrast between fertile nature and Western civilization, thereby participating in the colonial imperialism of his century: “As the titles of his writings suggest, Alexander von Humboldt reinvented South America first and foremost as nature. Not the accessible, collectible, recognizable, categorizable nature of the Linnaeans, however, but a dramatic, extraordinary nature, a spectacle capable of overwhelming human knowledge and understanding” (Pratt 1992, 118). Turning the critique into acclaim, Wulf (unintentionally?) capitalized on the same terminology and concept by hailing Humboldt as the inventor of nature. Both approaches tend to reduce Humboldt’s interests to the natural world, which is mirrored forcefully in the common reception of Humboldt as an explorer and naturalist.

In his incisive review of Wulf’s biography, historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra in turn contends that Wulf (and others) omit the rich history of ideas Humboldt gathered from South and Central American scholars. For instance, Cañizares-Esguerra points out that Wulf disproportionately covers Humboldt’s interactions with certain people (Thomas Jefferson versus José Celestino Mutis), places he visited (Philadelphia versus Lima), and time periods (the few days he spent in North America versus a whole year in Mexico City).⁵ This bias toward the Global North divorces Humboldt from the inspirations and interactions he drew from South and Central American intellectuals, reinforcing common stereotypes about the Global North and South. To Cañizares-Esguerra, this is a missed opportunity to point out and explore further Humboldt’s manifold connections between Europe and the Americas.

What is more, such an overarching approach, suggesting that Humboldt was stimulated and influenced by intellectual forces in the North and by natural forces in the South, not only erases the intellectual communities of South America but unwittingly reinscribes if not celebrates what Pratt precisely criticized, that is, the fascination with, awe for, and appropriation of the territories of the New World via exploring, mapping, and naming only in the name of European science. Holding up Humboldt as a nature writer only continues such an argumentative bent by placing him firmly in the European and North American tradition. Instead, I suggest adopting “Humboldtian Writing,” the term Ottmar Ette coined in order to complement Susan Faye Cannon’s concept of “Humboldtian Science” (1978). While “Humboldtian Science” distinguished the unique contributions of Humboldt’s comprehensive empirical work, “Humboldtian Writing” likewise recognizes originality but emphasizes the inherent cultural and aesthetic concerns that accompany his scientific endeavors. This definition implicitly highlights the problem in viewing Humboldt mainly through the lens of his encounter with the natural world and makes a categorization of him as a nature writer very questionable.

It is worth noting that South and Central American scholars, such as Jaime Labastida, Segundo Moreno Yáñes, and Alberto Gómez Gutiérrez, as well as many German scholars (many of them trained as Latin Americanists), such as Ottmar Ette, Tobias Kraft, and Oliver Lubrich, have long illuminated the reciprocal influences and connections Humboldt entertained with South American intellectuals. To lend more salience to this argument, I point to two examples reprinted in Rex Clark and Oliver Lubrich’s anthology Cosmos and Colonialism: Alexander von Humboldt in Cultural Criticism (2012). In his account of the Brazilian civil war at Canudos (1895–1898), Os Sertões (1902, Rebellion in the Backlands), the Brazilian journalist Euclides de Cunha credits Humboldt (rather than Hegel) with explaining the uniqueness of the Northern Brazilian Sertão (backland) and its “deeper significance” for Brazilian identity.⁶ To Cunha, Humboldt’s description of the landscape is inherently connected to Brazilian culture on its path toward independence, a reference easily missed if one reads Humboldt’s landscape description without paying close attention to the historical and political context. In a similar vein, the Mexican writer and philosopher Alfonso Reyes uses Humboldt’s concept of “reverberación” (refraction) to elucidate Mexican history, mentality, arts and culture, and even symbolism and religion as a reflection of the landscape. Specifically, Reyes reads Humboldt’s descriptions of the pyramids, market activity of Tenochtitlán, and Aztec codices as source material to promote his cultural, political, and aesthetic vision of Mexico. In his recent book Humboldt’s Mexico: In the Footsteps of the Illustrious German Scientific Traveller (2017), Canadian historian Myron Echenberg (2017) in more detail considers Humboldt’s Mexican journey to mountains, mines, the heartland, and the Gulf lowland, along with his stays in Acapulco and Mexico City, pointing out that Humboldt was especially impressed with the state of arts and science and higher education in the capital. Such multidirectional reception, outlining critical influences of Humboldt’s oeuvre in diverse cultural contexts, goes much beyond the depiction and “invention” of nature.

4 The Local and the Global

Before analyzing some concrete examples from Humboldt’s works, I would like to discuss a few more features of traditional nature writing. Since the genre so closely follows the path of Western industrialization, nature writing has been criticized for being escapist, for outlining an environment that functions as a place of solace and acquires symbolic value by highlighting, counteracting, or undercutting the effects of human civilization. Such projection harkens back to Albrecht von Haller’s didactic poem “Die Alpen” (1729), “The Alps”, hailing the mountains as a secluded space of moral virtue. Indeed, the bucolic praise of pastoral landscapes dates back to antiquity, with examples in Theocritus’s Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues. If for Virgil an idealized nature offered a temporary return to a golden age, Haller celebrated the Alpine peasants’ virtuous and healthy lifestyle precisely to vilify French gluttony and excess. The tradition of nature writing was thus from its very beginnings tied to escapist, idealizing, and nostalgic impulses.

Such impulses are notably missing in Humboldt’s work. Though Humboldt sought far-away places in order to escape his home Berlin and employment in Prussia, along with the expectations such life represented, he did not idealize or glorify any landscapes or peoples but in his travel diaries painstakingly described flora and fauna, rocks and rivers, moreover Spanish and Creole viceroys, governors, and missionaries, noblemen and women, South American scientists, Indian guides, and slaves. He spent extended periods in the political and administrative center of the Spanish Colonial Empire, Mexico City, but also in the intellectual centers Caracas, Bogotá, Lima, and Havana, as well as in villages, in missions along rivers, and in the high country. In these places, Humboldt became keenly interested in the Spanish enlightenment and science, in the local mining industry, the effects of colonialism and the history of slavery, plantations, canal and water management, local economies, and trading practices.

In his writings, too, Humboldt regarded the landscapes he encountered as embedded in culture. Ansichten der Natur (1808, Views of Nature), his second publication after his return from the American continent, aimed at providing readers with a new view of a particular landscape or cultural artifact. For Humboldt here, nature encompasses agricultural lands, mining, and livestock farming and also includes past and present civilizations. Chapters on deserts, waterfalls, and volcanoes do not merely discuss a particular landscape but compare vegetation, rocks, and fauna throughout the globe and are, moreover, complemented by a chapter on Inca ruins in the Andean highlands and a short allegorical story that represents a poetic reflection on vitality, or Lebenskraft, in plants, animals, and humans that Humboldt first published in Schiller’s journal Die Horen.

In his follow-up publication, the two-volume pictorial atlas Vue des Cordillères et monumens des peoples indigènes de l’Amérique, written in Paris in the years between 1810 and 1813, Humboldt underscores the intrinsic connection between natural and human “monuments” contained in the title. The work includes sixty-nine plates (some in color) and sixty-two essays on both natural scenes and human artifacts. In the introduction to his later published trip report, the Relation historique du Voyage aux Régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent (1814–1825, translated as Personal Narrative), Humboldt explains the scope of Vue des Cordillères as follows:

This work is intended to represent a few of the grand scenes which nature presents in the lofty chain of the Andes, and at the same time to throw some light on the ancient civilization of the Americans, through the study of their monuments of architecture, their hieroglyphics, their religious rites, and their astrological reveries. I have given in this work a description of the teocalli, or Mexican pyramids, and have compared their structure with that of the temple of Belus. I have described the arabesques which cover the ruins of Mitla, the idols in basalt ornamented with the calantica of the heads of Isis; and also a considerable number of symbolical paintings, representing the serpent-woman (the Mexican Eve), the deluge of Coxcox, and the first migrations of the natives of the Aztec race. I have endeavoured to prove the striking analogies existing between the calendar of the Toltecs and the catasterisms of their zodiac, and the division of time of the people of Tartary and Thibet, as well as the Mexican traditions of the four regenerations of the globe, the pralayas of the Hindoos, and the four ages of Hesiod … In every zone the configuration of the ground, the physiognomy of the plants, and the aspect of lovely or wild scenery, have great influence on the progress of the arts, and on the style which distinguishes their productions. (Humboldt 1872, xvii–xviii)

The lengthy description begins with an account of the cultural artifacts included, from pyramids to sculptures to visual art to calendars to linguistic symbols, before mentioning the landscapes in which these cultures developed. As Humboldt readily admits, the two subjects are inherently interrelated: One comes to understand indigenous civilizations by studying particular landscapes and vice versa. It is important to point out, however, that Humboldt does not conflate nature with indigenous societies, as is often the case in contemporary representations, when “Indians” are depicted as closer to nature and their distinct cultures become obscured. In contrast to Pratt’s (and Wulf’s) assessment, Humboldt does not invent our common conception of tropical nature but points to the development of South and Central American science, art, and tradition, so that nature writing becomes culture writing.

The atlas’s plates with the longest accompanying essays include plate XXIII depicting the Mexican calendar and plate XLIV depicting the calendar of the Muisca Indians near Bogotá. As Eberhard Knobloch (2018) elucidates, Humboldt’s essay for the latter plate goes well beyond a mere description of the calendar; rather, it analyzes, in comparative fashion, calendars, festivals, and time calculations according to astronomic formations in Aztec, Tartar, and Chinese cultures, admiring the high level of civilization in these cultures. Vue des Cordillères also highlights Humboldt’s interest in languages and linguistics. As he mentioned in the previously quoted introduction, Humboldt collected multiple dictionaries to give them to his brother. Reportedly, he took twelve books in different languages (Quechua, Otomi, Mixteca, and Caribe among them) back to Europe and made further use of these volumes for his wide-ranging project researching anthropological linguistics.

Nature writing as a form of personal reflection that combines scientific rationale with spiritual rapture has traditionally been written from a position of privilege, and Humboldt would be no exception here. Considering the worldly perspective of most authors, their praise of nature often refers to a very specific, chosen environment of intrinsic value, in a tribute that can have personal and religious tones. Haller, for instance, wrote his praise of Alpine beauty, bountiful pastoral nature, and virtuous peasants after graduating from Leiden University in 1727 and visiting London, Paris, and Strasbourg to further his studies and enjoy what these cities had to offer. Haller’s utopian vision of mountain life was thus a result of his travels, both to the mountains in Switzerland (the Valais, the Bernese Oberland, and Central Switzerland) and to Europe’s metropolises.⁷ In a similar vein, the nature writing tradition blossomed especially in Britain, home of the Industrial Revolution, before reaching continental Europe and the United States, where its parochial dimension continued in writers such as Thoreau and Muir. Even today’s well-known nature writers are overwhelmingly intellectual white men, hailing from the United States, Britain, and Europe, who write about a particular, localized environment.

Humboldt’s global concerns, in contrast, supersede parochial ideas. Indeed, Humboldt was precisely not interested in a particular landscape but always sought to relate and compare local phenomena—whether climate, vegetation, fauna, rocks, buildings, artworks, or hieroglyphs—to the global. With no particular preference for any one landscape and with no preset travel agenda, Humboldt chose travel routes and destinations on the spot, often haphazardly, and rarely revisited places he had already seen. After his journey of 1799–1804 to the Canary Islands, Venezuela, Cuba, Columbia, Ecuador, Mexico, and the United States, after living in Paris for twenty-three years and settling in Berlin in 1827, he undertook another expedition to Russia and Siberia in 1829 upon invitation of the Russian foreign minister. Upon his return, Humboldt developed the model of global isotherms that connect and determine climates across the globe. His global, transdisciplinary thinking encompassing anthropology, archeology, astronomy, climatology, cartography, linguistics, and sociology is expressed most completely in the introduction to his magnum opus, fittingly termed Cosmos:

In considering the study of physical phenomena, not merely in its bearings on the material wants of life, but in its general influence on the intellectual advancement of mankind, we find its noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other. (Humboldt 1864, ix)

This well-known quote succinctly summarizes Humboldt’s comparative, interdisciplinary, and ecological approach, seemingly anticipating our contemporary world, from the Internet to systems thinking in the Anthropocene, but leading away from local concerns in nature writing.

5 The Geography of Plants and Humboldtian Writing

While it is important to acknowledge the manifold directions of contemporary nature writing, in its initial definition the genre relied on separation and classification. In the words of Robert Finch and John Elder:

Nature writers are children of Linnaeus. Beginning with his Systema Naturae (1735) and elaborating on that general system in such volumes as Species Plantarum (1753), Linnaeus introduced a framework within which all living things could be classified and identified. (1990, 21)

Known as the father of modern taxonomy, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) described most plants known in his time and introduced a system of classification based on Genus and species (binomial nomenclature) still in use today. To Linnaeus, the system merely resembled the divine order; therefore, he claimed it was static and unchanging. Based on his botanical training, Humboldt initially followed the dominant Linnaean approach by collecting, describing, and classifying specimens. But as early as 1790, he began to revise some of Linnaeus’ classifications, initially with respect to the ferns, mosses, and lichens he found in hollows around Freiberg, publishing Observatio critica de Elymi hystricis charactere.⁸ Increasingly, Humboldt’s holistic vision of interlinked plant and animal communities came to be at odds with Linnaean thinking. As Pratt recognized, Humboldt’s romantic approach often did not fit with attempts at classification. Since he was uninterested in analysis of a particular species in isolation from its habitat, Humboldt often did not operate within the strict categories Linnaeus had established. In Ansichten der Natur (Views of Nature), for instance, he examined various plants forms—ferns, palms, orchids, cacti—in their diversity and social groups, rather than according to Linnaean taxonomy (cf. Walls 2018).

In the remainder of this contribution, I turn to Humboldt’s first publication to emerge after the five-year journey to the American continent, the well-known essay Geography of Plants (Essai sur la géographie des plantes) (1807) along with the illustration, the Tableau physique des Andes et Pays voisins, in order to illustrate Humboldt’s scientific, aesthetic, and social concerns, both local and global, depicted in mixture of genres that transcend nature writings. The Tableau physique, “in one single tableau sum of the physical phenomena present in equinoctial regions” (EGP 78),⁹ was inspired by the author’s previous work in mining and his familiarity with mining profiles and reveals a cross section of Chimborazo—at the time thought to be the highest mountain in the world—viewed from the south in the foreground and the volcano Cotopaxi in the background. It was drafted “in the very presence of the objects I was going to describe, surrounded by a powerful but even in its inner conflict benevolent nature, at the foot of the Chimborazo” (EGP 61, translation in italics is my own). With the words, “inner conflict” Humboldt hints at the dynamic interplay of ecological processes rather than an overarching harmony of nature. In the highly exaggerated image of Chimborazo, Humboldt sought to fuse image and text in order to provide scientific details in an aesthetically pleasing form. To the right, the mountain is filled with the names of plant species occurring at that elevation, giving insight to the various vegetation zones drawn into the image on the left. In the part below sea level, Humboldt inserted the names of fungi, mosses, and algae that he knew since his mining days at Freiberg. In the sky, he inserted reference points in elevation, such as the height of Mont Blanc, Vesuvius, and Pic de Teide, the elevation of Quito, Gay-Lussac’s high point of his hot-air balloon above Paris in 1804, and his own high point on Chimborazo. Eleven columns on the left and nine on the right provide information from commonly found animals to vegetation and cultivation of the soil, from barometric pressure to air temperature, from the boiling point of water to light refraction and the blueness of the sky. The lengthy essay (some 150 pages) accompanying the illustration elucidates the columns and the image as a whole, providing an overall rationale but also further measurements and data.

Even though essay and illustration were first drafted on the spot and feature the volcanoes Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, Humboldt insists that the idea of the project was conceived in his earliest youth and that, moreover, its scope far exceeds the geographical regions of both mountains: “This tableau contains almost the entirety of the research I carried out during my expedition in the tropics. It is the result of a large number of works that I am preparing for the public and in which I will develop what I can only outline here.” (EGP 79). Humboldt also emphasizes the collaborative authorship of the work: stressing his friendship and productive teamwork with his travel companion Aimé Bonpland, he points to their joint authorship of all publications emanating from the expedition and moreover acknowledges a network of experts, mentioning in particular the Spanish botanist José Celestino Mutis. The drawing itself was completed as a copperplate engraving by the well-known Austrian painter and engraver Lorenz Adolf Schönberger and French botanist and illustrator Pierre-Jean-François Turpin, both of whom are credited in the essay.

Thus both image and text in scope, time, and geographical area far exceed the personal impressions of localized nature. Indeed, Humboldt’s very theory of the “Geography of Plants,” proving the inherent relation of particular plant groups to elevation, temperature, air pressure, and other determinants rather than erecting categories for the purpose of classification and compartmentalization, goes much beyond Linnaeus. As Humboldt elucidates:

Botanists usually direct their research towards objects that encompass only a very small part of their science. They are concerned almost exclusively with the discovery of new species of plants, the study of their external structure, their distinguishing characteristics, and the analogies that group them together into classes and families. (EGP 64)

The Geography of Plants, in contrast, “concerns itself with plants in their local association in the various climates” (EGP 64), a significant expansion and evolution of Linnaean thinking. In this way, Humboldt proposes that Chimborazo represents a microcosm resembling many climatic zones found elsewhere in the world, and the essay consistently refers to mountain ranges, landscapes, flora, fauna, and civilizations in Europe, North America, and Asia.

Both image and essay include human influence in the depiction of nature by detailing the various crops grown at different altitudes. His overarching thesis here—that climate and vegetation rather than genetic make-up have determined the course of human history—anticipates some contemporary theories of US historian and anthropologist Jared Diamond, who in Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) argued that the promise of rich tropical crops led to colonial exploitation and the current north–south divide. Going further, Humboldt wonders about how plants not only influenced human history but also human culture:

Such are the factors that link the geography of plants to the political and intellectual history of mankind. [...] the man who is sensitive to the beauty of nature will also find here the explanation for the influence exerted by nature on the peoples’ taste and imagination. He will delight in examining what is called the character of vegetation, and the variety of effects it causes in the soul of the observer. These considerations are important in that they are closely related to the means by which imitative arts and descriptive poetry can affect us. (EGP 73)

These issues have become of utmost importance in the Anthropocene, as we face a radically altered planet that at once bears the effects of human impact on its entire surface and atmosphere and drives home the vulnerabilities of humans when it comes to climate change, pollution, and disease. Moreover, the “Geography of Plants” (as Humboldt admits, not an entirely fitting term [ibid.]), engenders Humboldt’s deep-seated disdain of slavery and its consequences. He opines:

Europeans introduced sugar, cotton, indigo, and coffee; but these new crops, far from being beneficial, increased the immorality and the misfortune of the human species. The introduction of African slaves, ravaging a part of the Old continent, brought discord and vengeance to the New Continent. (EGP 134)

Humboldt here points to not only the injustices of racial supremacy but an important challenge of nature writing. As Camille T. Dungy points out in her introduction to the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), the Western canon of Romantic literature relies on nature as a site of refuge, pastoral or wilderness, both tropes that were unavailable to African American slaves working in the field. She asks: “Though these poems [written from the perspective of African American workers in the field] defy the pastoral conventions of Western poetry, are they not pastorals? The poems describe moss, rivers, trees, dirt, caves, dogs, fields: elements of an environment steeped in a legacy of violence, forced labor, torture, and death” (Dungy 2009, xxi). Recognizing this dilemma, Humboldt writes the burgeoning agricultural production spurred by the slave trade into his Tableau physique, though he himself, of course, cannot provide the perspectives of those working in the fields.

In conclusion, I want to devote some space to the significance of the Tableau physique in the Anthropocene. Seeking to introduce a complex, dynamic, and multidimensional world of experience and scientific measurement to a larger audience, Humboldt invented a new genre that crossed the boundaries of aesthetics and science, something of exceeding importance in an age of climate change and the search for suitable genres. Through information provided on the flanking panels and in the image itself, the viewer gains a rich and detailed perspective on the bedrock, vegetation, and atmosphere of mountain regions, a perspective that Humboldt extended globally toward the end of the essay and in a later comparative profile, “Geographiae plantarum lineamenta” (1817) featuring Chimborazo, Mont Blanc, and Sulitelma in Arctic Lapland. Therefore, the image provides a vivid and modern sense of an Earth system where lithosphere, flora, fauna, and atmosphere are in continuous interaction. While the Earth system analysis emerged in the 1990s to connote complex, dynamic, and mutually reinforcing global-scale cycles and feedbacks, Humboldt already had endeavored to recognize such dynamic interactions. Ottmar Ette states:

In his “Geography of Plants” (1807), undoubtedly one of the most famous scientific graphics of the nineteenth century, everything interacts with each other and is in constant motion: The earth’s crust with its continents changes under the influence of smoking volcanoes just as much as snowlines in the mountains, the world of plants and animals is just as much marked by migration as that of the slaves marked by deportation, the natural landscapes change under the hand of man into agriculturally used areas, which are put into global circulation by world trade just like the mineral resources deep inside the Andes mountains, which have been since the colonization by the Iberian powers transferred into a worldwide circulation that was cartographically recorded by Humboldt.

(Alexander von Humboldt Handbuch, 2018, 3, my translation)

Significantly, human activity in the form of agriculture, extraction of resources, and exploration, all linked to colonialism, is included in the Tableau physique, as they are in an Anthropocenic understanding of an Earth wystem, where human beings and their activities are seen as integral components rather than a disconnected force. This comes to the fore in particular in the discussion of climate: In Humboldt’s ecological vision, climate, in its interaction with the atmosphere and biosphere, determines surface vegetation and, therefore, animal and human activity. Plant communities thus influence and are influenced by their environment in what later ecology recognized as mutually interlinked physical, chemical, and biological processes that cycle material and energy within the Earth system. This emphasis on dynamic cycles and feedback loops showing the inherent entanglements and dependencies of humans and their environments makes Humboldt a keen observer and writer of the advent of the Anthropocene rather than an “inventor” of nature.