The ultimate "other": Post-colonialism and Alexander Von Humboldt's ecological relationship with nature

History and Theory

Volumn 42, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 111-135

  Sachs, Aaron ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 33751082808     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1046/j.1468-2303.2003.00261.x     Document Type: Article

References (158)

1. On environmentalism, see, for example, Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000);
2. on post-colonialism, see, for example, Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001).
3. On the overlap between environmentalism and post-colonialism, which is partly captured in the phrase "sustainable development" and which has been much more pronounced ever since the 1992 "Earth Summit" (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, or UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, see, for example, Deane Curtin, Chinnagounder's Challenge: The Question of Ecological Citizenship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999);
4. Ramachandra Guha and J. Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London: Earthscan, 1997);
5. and Environmental Ethics: A Dialogue of Cultures, ed. R. P. Misra (New Delhi: Sustainable Development Foundation and Gandhi Bhavan, Delhi University, 1992).
6. For powerful critiques of American environmentalism, see, for example, Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995);
7. The Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Environmental Justice Movements in the United States, ed. Daniel Faber (New York: Guilford Press, 1998);
8. and Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995).
9. Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968)
10. and Lester R. Brown, Who Will Feed China? Wake-Up Call for a Small Planet (New York: Norton, 1995).
11. Alan Durning, How Much Is Enough? The Consumer Society and the Future of the Earth (New York: Norton, 1992), statistics on 50;
12. also see, for example, Ethnographies of Conservation: Environmentalism and the Distribution of Privilege, ed, David G. Anderson and Eeva Berglund (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002).
13. Grove explains that most post-colonial writers tend to "attach exclusively utilitarian and/or exploitative and hegemonic motivations to the early development of science in the colonial . . . context and ignore the potential for contradictory reformist or humanitarian motivations." See Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environ-mentalism, 1600-1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), quotation on 8;
14. and also Grove, "Colonial Conservation, Ecological Hegemony, and Popular Resistance: Towards a Global Synthesis," in Imperialism and the Natural World, ed. John M. Mackenzie (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester University Press, 1990), 15-51.
15. Among Bookchin's key works are: Our Synthetic Environment (New York: Harper and Row, 1962; published under the pseudonym Lewis Herber);
16. Post-Scarcity Anarchism [1971] (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986);
17. and The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy [1982] (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991).
18. Also see Janet Biehl, with Bookchin, The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998).
19. My investigation of this tradition is clearly a presentist project, but no more so than the post-colonialist project of holding figures from the past up to current standards of political correctness. I believe that the genealogy of social ecology goes back at least as far as Jean-Jacques Rousseau: "But," Rousseau explains in his Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men,"from the instant one man needed the help of another, and it was found to be useful for one man to have provisions enough for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became necessary, and vast forests were transformed into pleasant fields which had to be watered with the sweat of men, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and flourish with the crops," Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, transi. Maurice Cranston [1755] (London: Penguin, 1984), 116.
20. I'm grateful to archivist Rob Cox for facilitating my research in the excellent collection of Humboldt materials at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Many of the documents in this collection were gathered and organized by Helmut de Terra in the 1950s. See de Terra, Humboldt: The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt, 1769-1859 (New York: Knopf, 1955).
21. Another useful biography is Douglas Bolting, Humboldt and the Cosmos (London: Michael Joseph, 1973).
22. De Terra also published a few extremely helpful articles based on his work at the Philosophical Society, including: "Alexander von Humboldt's Correspondence with Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103 (December 1959), 783-806;
23. "Studies of the Documentation of Alexander von Humboldt," (two articles with the same title) Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102 (February and December 1958), 136-141 and 560-589;
24. and "Motives and Consequences of Alexander von Humboldt's Visit to the United States (1804)," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 104 (June 1960), 314-316.
25. The first quotation is Humboldt, in William H. Goetzmann, New Lands, New Men: America and the Second Great Age of Discovery [1986] (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1995), 59. The second quotation is Humboldt (my translation), in a letter written to the King of Spain in 1799 in explanation of his scientific goals in the colonies. The document, written in French and dated March 11, 1799, can be found at the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, Sectión Estado, legajo 4709. The expert on Humboldt's time in Madrid is Miguel Ángel Puig-Samper, who just discovered this document a few years ago, and for whose help I am grateful. I also could not have navigated the Madrid archives without the aid of archivist Pilar Castro and of my wife, Christine Evans. Note that Puig-Samper has reprinted this document in an article: "Humboldt, un Pruisano en la Corte del Rey Carlos IV," Revista de Indias 59 (May-August 1999), quotation on 354.
26. Humboldt wrote to the Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane that he was "so devoted to America in heart and mind as to think of it as a second homeland," and he often called himself "half American"-referring specifically to the United States and the democratic, republican values he shared with this country. (American Philosophical Society, Elisha Kent Kane Papers [B:K132], letter of March 8, 1853 [in French; my translation]; also see Philip S. Foner, "Alexander von Humboldt on Slavery in America," Science and Society 47 [Fall 1983], 330-342, "half American" quotation on 335.)
27. One of the foremost experts on Humboldt's relationship to the United States is Ingo Schwarz of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and I am grateful to Dr, Schwarz for his generous assistance. See, for instance, his article, "Alexander von Humboldt's Visit to Washington and Philadelphia, his Friendship with Jefferson, and his Fascination with the United States." in Proceedings: Alexander von Humboldt's Natural History Legacy and Its Relevance for Today, Special Issue 1 of Northeastern Naturalist (2001), 43-56.
28. On Jefferson, see also Felix M. Wasserman, "Six Unpublished Letters of Alexander von Humboldt to Thomas Jefferson," Germanic Review 29 (October 1954), 191-200, as well as de Terra, "Alexander von Humboldt's Correspondence."
29. Gallatin's book is A Synopsis of the Indian Tribes within the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1836).
30. Emerson is quoted in Louis Agassiz, Address Delivered on the Centennial Anniversary of the Birth of Alexander von Humboldt; Under the Auspices of the Boston Society of Natural History; with an account of the evening reception (Boston: Boston Society of Natural History, 1869), 71-72, in the "account of the evening reception" section.
31. On Thoreau and Humboldt, see Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 65;
32. and perhaps the most sophisticated recent analysis of Humboldt written in English, Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 76-166.
33. On Whitman, see, for instance, the late poem "Kosmos": "Who includes diversity and is Nature/Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibirum also," in Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Signet Classic, 1980), 310 "Kosmos" is from "Autumn Rivulets," originally added to Leaves of Grass in 1881. In "Song of Myself" (1855), the poet proclaims himself "Walt Whitman, a kosmos," 67. In the English translations of Humboldt's work, "Kosmos" is usually rendered as "Cosmos": I've used the translation by E, C. Otté, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, 5 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849, 1851, 1852, and 1870). There are several editions in English, published both in Europe and America, including a slightly earlier translation by Mr, and Mrs, Edward Sabine (vols. 1 and 2 came out in London in 1846 and 1848). The original German edition, in five volumes, with an index of more than 1000 pages, was published between 1845 and 1861. Note that the British editions were just as common as the American in the United States.
34. On the centenary, see the New York Times, September 15, 1869, 1. Getting the whole front page at a time when the entire paper consisted of only eight pages must be considered fairly significant.
35. "It is doubtful," lamented David McCullough in a 1973 essay, "that one educated American in ten today could say who exactly Humboldt was or what he did." McCullough's essay is "Journey to the Top of the World," in McCullough, Brave Companions: Portraits in History (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 5. The essay was first published as "The Man Who Rediscovered America," Audubon 75 (September, 1973), 50-63.
36. Humboldt was first called "The Rediscoverer of the Americas," apparently, by the German geographer Carl Ritter. See D. A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492-1867 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 534. Brading's book includes a full chapter on Humboldt, 514-534.
37. This argument is made at length in Aaron Sachs, "When Science Went Astray: Social Darwinism, Specialization, and the Forgotten Legacy of Alexander von Humboldt," World Watch 8 (March/April 1995), 28-38.
38. For example: L. Kellner, Alexander von Humboldt (London: Oxford University Press, 1963);
39. Anne M. Macpherson, "The Human Geography of Alexander von Humboldt," Ph.D. dissertation. University of California, Berkeley, 1972;
40. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ensayos Sobre Humboldt (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1962);
41. Hanno Beck, Alexander von Humboldt, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1959 and 1961 );
42. (this is one of the more authoritative works on Humboldt, but it has never been translated from the German); Charles Minguet, Alexandre de Humboldt, Historien et Géographe de l'Amérique espagnole, 1799-1804 [1969] (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997); and also see the previously cited works by Botting, de Terra, and McCullough.
43. On "in-between" figures, see Frances Karttunen, Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1994);
44. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1993);
45. and Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), especially 119-151.
46. James Clifford's book is Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997);
47. see 17-46 on "traveling cultures," reference to Humboldt on 35, quotation on 33. Other relevant sources include Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, ed, Steve Clark (London: Zed Books, 1999)
48. and Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, ed. Chris Rojek and John Urry (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
49. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 1.
50. Edward W. Said, Orientalism [1978] (New York; Vintage, 1994);
51. see also Said's sequel, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994).
52. Bruce Robbing, "Colonial Discourse: A Paradigm and its Discontents," Victorian Studies 35 (Winter 1992), 210.
53. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Much of this essay is a response to Pratt's critique, which has achieved canonical status in the field. Her influence is clear, for instance, in the introductions to the new (1997) paperback editions of volumes one and two of Cosmos written by Nicolaas A. Rupke and Michael Dettelbach, The new editions, by the Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore and London), are excellent, accessible volumes that reprint an American edition of 1858 by Harper and Brothers.
54. Humboldt, in Lateinamerika am Vorabend der Unabhä ngigkeitsrevolution: eine Anthologie von Impressionen und Urteilen, aus seinen Reisetagebüchern, ed. Margot Faak (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1982), 63. This is a scholarly compilation of excerpts from Humboldt's travel journals. All the commentary is in German, but the journal entries are given in their original language, usually French, as is the case with this quotation (my translation).
55. I've used the John Black translation, edited by Mary Maples Dunn: Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain [1811] (New York; Knopf, 1972). 34;
56. hereafter cited as Political Essay. Note that Pratt even goes so far as to impugn Humboldt simply because the ship he happened to sail on from Spain was called the Pizarro (Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 116).
57. Humboldt, letter of June 12, 1809, in de Terra, "Alexander von Humboldt's Correspondence," 790. Pratt and those scholars who have followed her lead seem not to take these kinds of explanations seriously. See, for instance, Dettelbach, "Introduction" to volume two of the 1997 edition of Cosmos, xi, where he echoes Pratt in insisting that "Humboldt was quite sincere in his dedication" to the Spanish monarch.
58. Goetzmann, New Lands, New Men, 421.
59. Humboldt, Cosmos, II, 370.
60. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (New York: HarperPerennial, 1984), 250. Lawrence Buell, in his new study of culture and the environment, emphasizes the importance of "maintaining a nonessentialist dualistic conception of nonhuman nature as an 'other' entitled to respect, notwithstanding the necessity of recognizing the actual inseparableness of the 'natural' from the fabricated."
61. See Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, Mass,: Harvard University Press, 2001), 269.
62. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 124, 31.
63. For Romantics, Nature was something to worship rather than control. Jás Eisner and Joan-Pau Rubiés hint at the power of Humboldt's creative combination of Enlightenment and Romantic thought when they note that he "decisively married empirical observation with imaginative speculation." See their introduction to Voyages and visions; Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 51.
64. The first historian of science to distinguish "Humboldtian science" as the avant-garde transformation of Baconian empiricism that became the dominant paradigm in the first half of the nineteenth century was Susan Faye Cannon, Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period (New York: Dawson and Science History Publications, 1978), 73-110.
65. Cannon's position is now Cannonical, as it were, in her field, though her views have been elaborated and refined by other scholars-see, for instance, Michael Dettelbach, "Humboldtian Science," in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 287-304;
66. Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 1-48;
67. and Geography and Enlightenment, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), especially the "Introduction" (1-28) and chapters by Anne Marie Claire Godlewska (236-275), Dorinda Outram (281-294), Paul Carter (295-318), and Nicolaas Rupke (319-339). General descriptions of Humboldtian science tend to emphasize Humboldt's attempts to gather together measurements of temperature and terrestrial magnetism from all over the world and thus make generalizations about the global climate and atmosphere.
68. One essay that comes closer to recognizing how crucial Romanticism was in tempering Humboldtian science is Malcolm Nicolson, "Alexander von Humboldt and the Geography of Vegetation," in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 169-185.
69. Nicolson suggests the extent to which Humboldt accepted the critique of pure rationality popularized by his friends Goethe and Schiller. Also useful are Nicolson's "Historical Introduction" and Jason Wilson's "Introduction" to the Penguin Classics abridgement of Humboldt's Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (London: Penguin. 1995), ix-lxxii,
70. Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, 1799-1804, 3 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1852-1853), I, x-xi. Hereafter cited as Personal Narrative. I've used the translation by Thomasina Ross; as with most of Humboldt's works, there were several other editions. The original text was in French, published in stages between 1814 and 1825.
71. In Cosmos Humboldt explained further: "This science of the Cosmos is not. however, to be regarded as a mere encyclopedic aggregation" (I, 36). And yet Humboldt himself classified about 60,000 plant species. . . . (This figure cited in de Terra, Humboldt, 375.)
72. Humboldt, Views of Nature: or Contemplations on the Sublime Phenomena of Creation; with Scientific Illustrations (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1850), x. I've used the translation by E. C. Otté and Henry G. Bohn from the German of the third edition, published in Stuttgart and Tübingen in 1849. Views of Nature was originally written in German and published in 1808; note that in another widespread English translation of this work, originally called Ansichten der Natur, the title is rendered as Aspects of Nature: translated by Mrs. Sabine (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1849).
73. Most of the quotations in this article are from Views, but I occasionally use passages from Aspects when they seem to me to have been translated more elegantly or evocatively. The second quotation is from Cosmos, I, 56;
74. and the last quotation in the paragraph is Humboldt, in Goetzmann, New Lands, New Men, 59, my emphasis, Another translation yields Humboldt's original German as "the extravagant idea of describing in one and the same work the whole material world";
75. see Humboldt, Letters of Alexander von Humboldt to Varnhagen von Ense, from 1827 to 1858, translated from the second German edition by Friedrich Kapp (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1860), 35.
76. Along these same lines, Humboldt elaborated, in Cosmos: "Experimental sciences, based on the observation of the external world, cannot aspire to completeness; the nature of things, and the imperfection of our organs, are alike opposed to it." And: "The attempt perfectly to represent unity in diversity must therefore necessarily prove unsuccessful. . , . If then nature (understanding by the term all natural objects and phenomena) be illimitable in extent and contents, it likewise presents itself to the human intellect as a problem which cannot be grasped, and whose solution is impossible" (I, 56 and 63).
77. And, in his Critical Examination of the History of the Geography of the New Continent (5 vols., 1836-1839), he wrote, about "the extension of the sphere of knowledge": "Feeble spirits at each epoch believe that humanity has arrived at its culminating point of its progressive march; they forget that, by the intimate connection of all truths, with each step that we advance, the field to traverse reveals itself to be that much vaster, bordered by a horizon that endlessly retreats."
78. See Humboldt, Examen Critique de l'Histoire de la Géographie du Nouveau Continent (Paris: Librairie de Gide, 1837), III, 154, my translation (this work has never been published in English to my knowledge).
79. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 120 and 140; and see Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (London: Yale University Press, 1993), quotation on 36 but also see 24-38, 104-115, 166-169, and 183-188. Pagden in many ways subscribes to Pratt's post-colonial model, but, especially at the end of his book, he comes to a more nuanced conclusion about the potential for elite Europeans to challenge their home cultures and even to achieve a reasonably deep understanding of "other" cultures.
80. See, for instance, Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996);
81. Benedict Anderson, "Census, Map, Museum," in Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 1991), 163-185,
82. and Clifford, Routes, especially 197-219.
83. Humboldt, Political Essay, 185.
84. Humboldt, letter of February 3, 1800, to the Baron von Forell, in Lettres Américaines d'Alexandre de Humboldt (1798-1807), ed. E. T. Hamy (Paris: Librairie Orientale et Américaine, 1904), 65, my translation. There is a fascinating and expanding literature on the problem of determining to what extent fieldwork might actually force explorers to abandon some of their cultural baggage. Particularly nuanced studies include Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000)
85. and Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York: Knopf, 1987).
86. Carter emphasizes the explorer's creative "engagement" with the land. In The Road to Botany Bay and also his later book, The Lie of the Land (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), Carter asserts the need to distinguish between such different (and differingly colonialist) modes of landscape experience as discovery, exploration, surveying, and settlement. Better than anyone else, he has captured the ambivalence of explorers and their flexible, "dynamic" way of understanding what they observe-an approach not only encouraged by their intellectual backgrounds but also, quite often, necessitated by the physical conditions of exploring, by fog and sweat and insects and waterfalls.
87. For a useful application of Carter's theoretical model, see D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
88. On his trip to England in 1790, Humboldt had heard Edmund Burke speak in Parliament, and was well acquainted with the British statesman's theory of the sublime. Where he differed with him was on the question of whether the well-informed naturalist could have a sublime response to nature: "I cannot, therefore, agree with Burke when he says, 'it is our ignorance of natural things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions'" (Cosmos. I, 19).
89. Letter to his brother Wilhelm of November 25, 1802, Lettres Américaines, 132, my translation;
90. Personal Narrative, II, 273;
91. Cosmos, I, 3. Humboldt was sometimes more emotional in his letters, just because they were less public than his books. But his correspondents were also the people he thought of as the main audience for his publications, so there is generally a close correlation between the rhetorical tropes of his published works and the language of letters he wrote while in the field.
92. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 125;
93. Personal Narrative, I, xiv, my emphasis.
94. See also Margarita Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1981 ), passim. Bowen's book is one of the very few positive treatments of Humboldt written in the last two decades. It argues compellingly for Humboldt's science as a tenable model for contemporary geography.
95. Cosmos. III, 1. This approach is analyzed especially well in Nicolson. "Alexander von Humboldt and the Geography of Vegetation."
96. For Humboldt's condemnation of Cuban slavery see his Personal Narrative, III, 153-284, esp, 228-284. This long section is also sometimes referred to as the "Political Essay on the Island of Cuba."
97. Quotations from Pratt, Imperial Eyes, are on 131, 136, and 140;
98. quotation from Humboldt is in his Political Essay, 145;
99. and see the chapter on "The Indians," 45-70, as evidence of just how much history and culture Humboldt included in this work.
100. Political Essay, 141, 142, 145, and 183.
101. Pratt, Imperial Eyes. 134;
102. Pratt emphasizes that this disparagement often took the form of unfavorable comparisons with Mediterranean civilizations, yet even this is not completely true. In the Political Essay, for instance, Humboldt noted that the native Mexicans made calendrical calculations "with more accuracy than the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians" (Political Essay, 54).
103. The short quotations about native groups are my translations of letters written on November 24, 1800, and December 23, 1800, to Citizen Delambre and D. Guevara Vasconcellos, in Lettres Américaines, 92 and 105.
104. Thelast quotation of the paragraph is from Humboldt's Personal Narrative, II, 377.
105. On cannibals, Humboldt wrote (on February 21, 1801, to Karl Ludwig Wildenow, Lettres Américaines, 112, my translation): "What a delight it is to live in these forests of the Indians, where we meet so many independent Indian peoples, in whose domains we find traces of Peruvian culture! Here one sees nations of people who effectively cultivate the earth, who are hospitable, who appear mild and humane, much like the inhabitants of Tahiti," Only as an afterthought did he mention that some of these particular Indians ate other people.
106. Humboldt, letter of November 25, 1802, to Wilhelm von Humboldt, in Lettres Américaines, 135-136;
107. and Personal Narrative, 1, 310-330, quotation on 328.
108. Humboldt's appreciation of native languages clearly flouts what J. M. Blaut, in a classic work of post-colonial geography, has called "the colonizer's model of the world": "Closely connected to this theory [of the 'primitive mind']." Blaut writes, "was the notion that there are 'primitive languages,' languages incapable of expressing higher theoretical and abstract thought. This old notion (which had been used in one form by William [Wilhelm] von Humboldt) was joined to the proposition that people cannot think beyond the limitations of their natural language, and so a primitive language entails a primitive mind." See J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York; Guilford Press, 1993), 97.
109. On the complexity of pre-Columbian civilizations, see the letter of November 25, 1802, to Wilhelm von Humboldt, in Lettres Américaines, 136,
110. and Humboldt's Political Essay, 48-49 and 53-70.
111. In the Personal Narrative, he notes that the natives "whom we designate under the name of savages, are probably the descendants of nations highly advanced in cultivation" (I, 293).
112. Vues des Cordillères, II, 331, my translation. Of course, despite Humboldt's clear respect for many native cultures, it is important to remain aware of the ways in which his methods of cataloguing and analyzing them did contribute to a colonialist program of simplification and regulation. See, for instance, Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, and James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
113. I, 300;
114. and II, 346.
115. Personal Narrative, III, 272 and 271;
116. quoted in Foner, 342;
117. Cosmos, I, 368, my emphasis.
118. Cosmos, I, ix.
119. on plant geography, Humboldt is quoted in Richard Hartshorne, "The Concept of Geography as a Science of Space, from Kant and Humboldt to Hettner," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 48 (1958), 100. (This quotation is actually from an article Humboldt published, in Latin, in 1793.)
120. Most histories and textbooks credit Ernst Haeckel, a German Darwinian, with founding the science of ecology in the 1860s. See, for instance, Worster, Nature's Economy, 192.
121. and Anna Bramwell, Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 39-63.
122. See Nicolson, "Alexander von Humboldt and the Geography of Vegetation."
123. Humboldt, Cosmos, I, 3, And see Grove. Green Imperialism, 364-379. Herder is cited on 370. Also see Alexander Gode-von Aesch, Natural Science in German Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 89-135 and 183-208.
124. Humboldt, Cosmos, I, 2, ray emphasis;
125. I, 22;
126. and Personal Narrative, II, 287-288 and 276.
127. On ecosystems, which he usually referred to as geographical "regions," he wrote: "the character of different regions of the earth may depend upon a combination of . . . The outline of mountains and hills, the physiognomy of plants and animals, the azure of the sky, the forms of the clouds, and the transparency of the atmosphere"; quoted in Nicolson, "Historical Introduction." On biodiversity, he also wrote of the need to respect "the universal profusion of life," and he constantly insisted that any real understanding of the cosmos depended on opportunities "to contemplate nature in all her variety"; see Views of Nature, 210, and Personal Narrative, I, 2.
128. Quotation is from Personal Narrative, I, 105.
129. Also see Personal Narrative, I, 81 and 114-121;
130. Humboldt, Essai sur la Géographie des Plantes (Paris: F. Schoell, 1807), passim, with its accompanying plate, published separately and entitled Géographie des Plantes Équinoctiales;
131. Malcolm Nicolson, "Alexander von Humboldt, Humboldtian Science and the Origins of the Study of Vegetation," History of Science 25 (June 1987), 167-194;
132. and Klaus Dobat, "Alexander von Humboldt as a Botanist," in Alexander von Humboldt: Life and Work, ed. Wolfgang-Hagen Hein (Ingelheim am Rhein: C. H. Boehringer Sohn, 1987), 167-193: the English edition of this book, which I consulted, is translated from the German original (Ingelheim am Rhein: C. H. Boehringer Sohn, 1985) by John Cumming and edited by Peter Newmark and is extremely useful in making some relatively recent German scholarship on Humboldt available to a much wider audience.
133. Note, also, that it was thanks to Humboldt's requests that observation outposts were established throughout Russia, the United States, and the British Empire in the 1830s for the tracking of meteorological, climatolog-ical, and geomagnetical trends on a global basis. See Botting, Humboldt and the Cosmos, 253-254.
134. Pratt, 130;
135. On occasion, Humboldt in fact did go beyond a basic sustainability argument and advocate a profound respect for all natural things regardless of their usefulness to human beings: "The view of nature ought to be grand and free, uninfluenced by motives of . . . relative utility" (Cosmos, I, 66).
136. Of course, today's environmentalism is not founded on as pure a faith in nature's balance as Humboldt had. Indeed, change is now seen as one of nature's central characteristics. Yet modern chaos theory has demonstrated that beneath almost every manifestation of disorder lurks some sort of pattern or equilibirum: in the end, Humboldt has been vindicated, at least to a certain extent. As Daniel Botkin, author of Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), has noted, "certain rates of change are natural, desirable, and acceptable, while others are not" (12).
137. On conservation, see, for instance, Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge. Mass,: Harvard University Press, 1959). Also note Grove's treatment of earlier European conservationists in Green Imperialism.
138. Cosmos, I, 33.
139. Quoted in Pierre Gascar, Humboldt L'Explorateur (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 38, ray translation.
140. Throughout his life, Humboldt made a point of supporting the rights of Jews and lobbying for their equal treatment not only before the law but in society. His principle of unity was truly meant to include all social groups. For one example from his correspondence with Varnhagen von Ense, see his Letters, 120-121: "In the last number of the Journal des Débats there is a strong and very fine article against the abominable Jew Bill, with which we are threatened, and against which I have already protested.....The bill is a violation of all the principles of a wise policy of unity." On this topic, also see E. R. Brann, The Political Ideas of Alexander von Humboldt: A Brief Preliminary Study (Madison, Wise.: Littel Printing, 1954), 44-46.
141. For an elaboration of the Anatole France quote, see the wonderful collection of essays by Evan S. Connell, A Long Desire (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1979).
142. On the theme of the explorer's escape from society see Paul Zweig, The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World [1974] (Pleasantville: Akadine Press, 1999),
143. A classic statement of the exploration-as-mas-culinist-alternative position can be found in Lisa Bloom, Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar Expeditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
144. I think exploring expeditions, in some nineteenth-century cases, may have functioned more like fraternal organizations, as described, for instance, by Mark C. Carnes, in Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)
145. and "Middle-Class Men and the Solace of Fraternal Ritual," in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 37-66.
146. Moreover, the very concept of "fraternity" offered men a chance to express long-stifled emotions, and some, like Humboldt (and Walt Whitman), decided never to accept the mantle of male stoicism, and lived out their lives in the exclusive company of affectionate men. This theme is developed in a few recent studies in the history and literature of sexuality. For instance: Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
147. Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001);
148. and Leila J. Rupp, A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
149. It makes sense, as Leila Rupp suggests, that "if not all men in fact forgot their male friends in the interests of marriage and manhood . . ., the persistence of such attachments began to shade into more questionable behavior." Rupp also notes that, while it is incredibly difficult to interpret the evidence of sexual behavior in times past, "it would be a mistake , , , to assume that the social acceptance of romantic friendship means that sexual acts never occurred between romantic friends." See Rupp, A Desired Past, 48-50.
150. Quoted in de Terra, Humboldt, 207;
151. see also Views of Nature, 173, for a slightly different translation.
152. Humboldt, Aspects of Nature, vi and 170, and Personal Narrative, I, 216.
153. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950 [1958] (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 30.
154. In his introduction to the new edition of this book, Williams went on to note that "What had been confidently analyzed, and in some cases dismissed, as the merely romantic critique of industrialism or industrial capitalism [has] returned ... to make startling connections with the new-ecological and radical-ecological movements" (Culture and Society, xi).
155. Jonathan Bate has made a similar argument with regard to Wordsworth in his compelling study, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991).
156. On travel writing as being more than escapism, Paul Zweig argues that, simply because the traveler comes back to tell his tale, "his escape from society is a profoundly socializing act." After all, the traveler's tales have the potential of "providing alternative lives, modes of possibility." See Zweig, The Adventurer, 96 and 83.
157. Todorov, The Conquest of America, 165.
158. Todorov, The Conquest of America, 250, 249.