Did the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt "invent" ecology?

• The German Alexander von Humboldt was the first to "tell" the Earth as a living organism, according to our partner The Conversation.

• This precursor indeed described, as early as 1801, how capable – and guilty – humans were?

  – to “ravage the Earth”.

• This analysis was conducted by Gilles Fumey, teacher-researcher in cultural geography of food at Sorbonne University.

At the time when humans experimented with the first balloon ascents, the first steam navigations on the water and when the first engineers invented the trains, the European explorers crisscrossed the planet to fill the terrae incognitae of the map of the world.

Between 1780 and 1830, how did they trace their furrows?

By the most rudimentary means: navigation and walking.

The map of the world that is drawn in the offices of topographers is that of scientists who connect the stars to the Earth, and use triangulation to spread out their calculations on sheets.

These measurement enthusiasts, these technicians offer their services to political powers eager to know the riches of their subsoil and to draw borders.

These adventurers are fearless.

At the end of the 18th century, the roughness of the physical world did not dispel doubts.

The sky has indeed been emptied of its divinities by Copernicus, Galileo and other Newtons, but the Earth?

The oceans ?

Mountains ?

Forests ?

Who can well explain by reasoned physics how this very complex machine that is the planet Earth works?

The Earth as a Living Organism

Whoever wants to give the first account of an Earth as a living organism is Alexander von Humboldt.

Unlike Christopher Columbus or Isaac Newton, Humboldt did not discover new continents, he did not formulate new laws of physics, but he brought a new view of the world.

And as such, for Juliette Grange, he is indeed the father of ecology.

According to his biographer Andrea Wulf, his ideas became so mainstream that he disappeared behind their obviousness.

To understand the current serious ecological crisis, we need Humboldt.

Already in 1801, the German scientist perceived how much humans were capable of "ravaging" the Earth.

“The general equilibrium which reigns in the midst of disturbances is the result of an infinity of mechanical forces and chemical attractions which balance each other”.

The Earth, he continued, is “a natural entity moved and animated by the same impulse”.

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​Forgotten at the end of the 19th century

While Alexander von Humboldt was adored during his lifetime, he was forgotten at the end of the 19th century.

In France, where he nevertheless spent more than a third of his life, he was very close to all scientists without belonging to the academic world and he refused any position of responsibility.

Historian David Blankenstein thinks that he is one of "those many Germans erased from the French perspective after the defeat of 1871" while he is for the American Ralph Waldo Emerson "the most famous man of his time after Napoleon”.

He gave his name to a famous marine current in the Pacific, to multiple mountain ranges in China, South Africa, Oceania, Mexico and Venezuela, to dozens of rivers, waterfalls, parks, geysers and bays.

We find his name even on the Moon with a Mare Humboltianum.

More than ten cities (thirteen in North America) and counties borrow their name from it.

A name found on approximately three hundred plants and one hundred animals, as well as on dozens of minerals.

Alexander von Humboldt breaks the world record for toponyms commemorating a name, surpassing all presidents, kings, scholars – including Leonardo da Vinci and Louis Pasteur, Newton and Einstein – and artists.

In his long, almost biblical life – he died at the age of ninety – he spent most of his time confronting the physical world in order to know the Earth.

If the masters of the colonial world of the 19th century, the English, prevented him from setting foot in South and South-East Asia where he would have liked to explore the Himalayas, he managed to make two great trips.

Alone, he organized the first from 1799 to 1804 with the support of King Charles IV of Spain, an expedition that lasted five years in the tropics of Latin America.

Another was offered to him by the Russian Tsar Nicolas I in Northeast Asia to the foot of Altai for seven months in 1829.

A founding journey

The account of his first voyage has known an exceptional posterity;

he enriched Humboldt's whole life.

Kenneth White thinks it was neither an adventure nor a wandering but a real "work plan, a life plan".

The detailed account of these

inspired young scholars like Charles Darwin who paid his debt to Humboldt by quoting him as much as possible.

This expedition has never ceased to be analyzed, so dense and ambitious is it.

With the current ecological crisis, it has kept all its relevance.

His time might have come again.

Did not Humboldt, from his observations of Lake Valencia in Venezuela in 1800, rail against the damage caused by colonial plantations?

He deplored the sterilization of the soil linked to brutal deforestation, the disappearance of vegetation linked to intensive use of water.

He saw in it what is now called a negative feedback loop, with the rainforest playing a central role in the water cycle and the global warming caused by the disruption of what in the 20th century would be called the geochemical carbon cycle.

Is this not formulating, in a clear way, the role of human activities in climate change which has opened a new era in geological time called the Anthropocene?

"Each canton of the globe is a reflection of all of nature"

Humboldt gave himself considerable technical means to achieve his goal because, he says, “my attention is the harmony of competing forces, the influence of the inanimate universe on the animal and vegetable kingdom.

He must track down and name these "forces."

In tropical America, he never visited any place without noting in his notebooks the evolution of the temperature, the pressure and the electricity of the air, the boiling point of water, the atmospheric gaseous mixtures, the magnetic field, the blue of the sky, species of plants and animals and their associations, and rocks.

While marveling at the landscapes, he behaves like a physicist who has taken his instruments out of the laboratory.

For Jérôme Gaillardet, he goes further than our common sense, he “mathematizes” the world to imagine a physics of the globe, by relating his measurements of the gradients in the hope of creating causal relationships.

“Each canton of the globe is the reflection of all of nature,” Humboldt wrote in

.

By comparing the world map of the magnetic field that he had drawn up with the one revealed today – with the help of satellites – we are amazed by the accuracy of the measurements of this 19th century Eratosthenes.

During his years in Paris, Alexander von Humboldt lived in a magic triangle of the Latin Quarter, between the Observatory, the Institute and the Museum, visiting or working with scientific luminaries such as Monge, Gay-Lussac, Cuvier, Berthollet, Arago, Thénard, Vauquelin, themselves recalling the filiations with Lavoisier, Lamarck, Chaptal, Jussieu, Delambre, Laplace... He does not miss a session of the science class at the Institut de France, where he does no less three readings in the course of 1798 and the Academy of Sciences paid him a solemn homage in 1806. writing their Voyage to the equinoctial regions of the New Continent,eleven folio volumes and four hundred engravings and seventy maps.

Alexander von Humboldt knew how to "beat the drum", which for the Germanist Christian Helmreich, "is part of the profession of an intellectual".

By vibrating in the most posh salons of Paris, by advising the kings of France and Prussia, by organizing major conferences open to the general public in Berlin, he knew how to install landscapes with brilliant words, to develop an author's geography.

Brilliant orator, no one dared argue with him.

Humboldt was educated by the German elite, from Goethe to Werner.

But because of the French origins of his mother, Marie-Elisabeth Colomb, he writes a large part of his work in French, in a language that allows him to better express his "geopoetic" ideas.

At that time, German Romanticism was very strong.

But it is marked by mechanistic and vitalist conceptions, the belief in reason and this "war machine" that is the

.

This gives him a very clear mind and Kenneth White adds a "vigor of thought, an enlightened encyclopedicism, a transnational impetus and a desire for unity".

He confines the ideas of religions to what were called at the time "treaties of manners" and which he calls, not without irony, "little historical novels" or even "geological dreams like those of a genesis of Earth ".

Without having integrated any scientific institution, he nevertheless exchanged with hundreds of researchers all over the world.

He succeeds in developing the notion of a dynamic system in which different compartments interact and contribute to the stability of the whole.

For Jérôme Gaillardet, “we are not so far from the way in which the first chemists Lavoisier, Bersélius, Bischof, Ebelmen… and the first geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky began to describe the cycles on the surface of the Earth […].

Humboldt arrived too early to see in the recycling of matter on Earth, one of the mechanisms linking together the things he observed, but he clearly inspired Vernadsky and, in his line, Lovelock, the father of the theory Gaia”.

​Preserving the commons

This is how Alexander von Humboldt is a scholar to re-read today.

To enter into the complexity of his thought, the

– the physical themes of which we relate here – is the best possible door.

Because Humboldt takes the oceanic and river routes, he crosses passes in the equatorial Andes of which he climbs the volcanic peaks, he passes from deserts to evergreen forest and snow-capped peaks.

Hydrologist, geologist, volcanologist, ecologist, he asks the question of the sustainability of this thin film of the globe on which we live that geochemists call "the critical zone".

How to preserve these common goods that are water, air, soil?

We are no longer in the scientific facts to understand the planet Earth.

We are in moral or political values.

We have entered the Anthropocene...

Our "ECOLOGY" file

In his

, a book he cherished among all those he wrote, he explains that "the forces of nature ''cooperate''", wanting to engage the imagination, the knowledge of things in their hidden configurations and deep plastic relationships and, ultimately, to enrich life with new ideas.

For Kenneth White, “Humboldt is a scientist, an intellectual with a vision”.

Man is part of nature.

His all-encompassing vision is the basis of his trip to tropical lands and his

project , at the end of his life, which takes us from canyons to stars and planets.

This analysis was written by Gilles Fumey, teacher-researcher in cultural geography of food at Sorbonne University.

The original article was published on The Conversation website.

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