20 Quotes by Andrea Wulf

We can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble in the ocean of organic life,’ Marsh wrote.

Nature is the domain of liberty,’ Humboldt said, because nature’s balance was created by diversity which might in turn be taken as a blueprint for political and moral truth. Everything, from the most unassuming moss or insect to elephants or towering oak trees, had its role, and together they made the whole. Humankind was just one small part. Nature itself was a republic of freedom.

Nature itself was a republic of freedom.

Knowledge, Humboldt believed, had to be shared, exchanged and made available to everybody.

In the late eighteenth century scientists had begun to suggest that the earth must be older than the Bible, but they couldn’t agree on how the earth had formed.

Unlike Christopher Columbus or Isaac Newton, Humboldt did not discover a continent or a new law of physics. Humboldt was not know for a single fact or a discovery but for his worldview. His vision of nature has passed into our consciousness as if by osmosis. It is almost as though his ideas have become so manisfest that the man behind them has disappeared.

Humboldt wrote about the destruction of forests and of humankind’s long-term changes to the environment. When he listed the three ways in which the human species was affecting the climate, he named deforestation, ruthless irrigation and, perhaps most prophetically, the ‘great masses of steam and gas’ produced in the industrial centres. No one but Humboldt had looked at the relationship between humankind and nature like this before.

Nature every where speaks to man in a voice,’ Humboldt said, that is ‘familiar to his soul’.

Nature must be experienced through feeling,’ Humboldt.