Humboldtian Writing for the Anthropocene

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.