The Invention of Nature (1000 Books to Read)

Wow! I loved this book. I learned about the "Father of Environmentalism"!  He was way ahead of his time - late 1700s, early 1800s!

I like to follow journeys in books. Wikipedia was helpful for this. 

I knew that there was a county and city in California named Humboldt, and they were named after him!

Quotes:

Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force. He was, a colleague later said, the first to understand that everything was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads’. This new idea of nature was to change the way people understood the world.  (p. 87)

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

As Andrea Wulf makes clear in this marvelous biography, Alexander von Humboldt’s holistic view of nature “as a network of forces and interrelationships” played a significant role in advancing ecological thinking and thereby gave rise to modern conceptions of the environment. Detailing with verve and erudition Humboldt’s exploits as an explorer in far-flung corners of the world, Wulf also reveals the extraordinary extent of his reputation in his own lifetime. In his day (born in 1769, he died ninety years later), he was the most famous scientist in the world and an international celebrity. This long, rich, information-packed biography repays leisurely attention at the same time as it stimulates one’s thinking about fundamental issues. “Humboldt was not so much interested in finding new isolated facts but in connecting them,” Wulf writes. A reader can thankfully say the same of the author of this delightful book.

Back to ME (Carol Ann) - I am adding some popular highlights quite a while later (sorry about the narrow margin - I don't know how to fix it!) 

Humboldt gave us our concept of nature itself. The irony is that Humboldt’s views have become so self-evident that we have largely forgotten the man behind them. (p. 8). 

It was here, at Lake Valencia, that Humboldt developed his idea of human-induced climate change. (p. 57)

Timber was the oil of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and any shortages created similar anxieties about fuel, manufacturing and transport, as threats to oil production do today. (p. 58)

Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force. He was, a colleague later said, the first to understand that everything was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads’. This new idea of nature was to change the way people understood the world.   (p. 87)

Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment. (p. 105)

As long as there were scientists and artists, Haeckel believed, there was no need for priests and cathedrals.  (p. 314)