Humboldt's 1807 essay on the geography of plants: The roots of global ecology and biogeography

Background/Question/Methods

In the early 19^th Century, Alexander von Humboldt developed a unified vision for the environmental sciences that integrated the traditional disciplines of botany, zoology, physics, and astronomy with the emerging fields of ecology, climatology, geology, geography, anthropology, and economics.  Humboldt’s synthesis was laid out in a number of technical and popular works, but reached its clearest articulation in his 1807 Essay on the Geography of Plants and the accompanying Physical Tableau featuring a comprehensive profile of equatorial Mt. Chimborazo.  Humboldt’s influence on 19^th Century science and culture is nearly impossible to exaggerate.  He inspired Charles Darwin to travel on H.M.S. Beagle, Alfred Russel Wallace to pursue a career as a naturalist, Frederic Church to develop a uniquely detailed landscape-painting style, and Walt Whitman to launch a grand poetic program encompassing nature and humanity.  His writings launched a distinctly Humboldtian style of science, comprising vast numbers of spatially and temporally referenced point observations – of temperature and moisture, of flora and fauna, of vegetation and soils, of cultural practices and geological features.  Collectively, these observations could reveal spatial and temporal patterns that would in turn reveal important underlying physical and biological processes and relationships.   This approach was employed during the epic scientific explorations of the 19^th century, from individual naturalists (Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, Gray) to highly organized, government-sponsored expeditions (Frémont’s explorations of the 1840s, the Pacific Railroad Surveys of the 1850s, the Wheeler, Hayden, and Powell Surveys).  These efforts generated a large volume of empirical information, so large as to elude synthesis except within the traditional and developing disciplines.  Amidst all the activity, Humboldt’s vision of a unified “general physics of the earth” faded through the late 19^th Century, and nearly disappeared for most of the 20^th Century.

Results/Conclusions

Humboldt’s intellectual vision has recently reemerged in the integrated sciences of the earth and environment, under various rubrics (global ecology and biogeography; earth system science; geophysics).  The names matter less than the substance.  These fields, motivated in part by urgent questions of global environmental change and in part by willingness of many scholars to work across disciplinary boundaries, combine Humboldt’s dual emphasis on local details and regional-to-global patterns with his explicit concern that knowledge be employed in the service of humankind.