[balti]

Humboldt had addressed the same issues. Nature, the undaunted explorer explained, should be described with scientific accuracy but without being “deprived thereby of the vivifying breath of imagination.” The same man who had carried 42 scientific instruments along on his five-year exploration of Latin America, from 1799 to 1804, also wrote that “what speaks to the soul, escapes our measurements.” To Goethe he later said, “Nature must be experienced through feelings.”

Out of Humboldt’s extensive travels and intensive investigation of similarities, differences, and interrelationships among organisms—and among humans and the world they inhabit—emerged his vision of what he called “a wonderful web of organic life,” today a given, but then a sweeping new insight. In this interwoven world where “everything is interaction and reciprocal,” Humboldt wrote, humans were bound to leave their mark on nature. Half a century before Thoreau wrote about the preservation of the wilderness, Humboldt warned that mankind was “raping nature,” and described the devastating environmental effects caused by monoculture, irrigation, and deforestation.