Top Highlights

• He saw the earth as one great living organism where everything was connected, conceiving a bold new vision of nature that still influences the way that we understand the natural world.
• Knowledge, Humboldt believed, had to be shared, exchanged and made available to everybody.
• compared America to ‘a Cartesian vortex, carrying away and levelling everything to dull monotony’. He was confident, yet constantly yearned for approval.
• At a time when other scientists were searching for universal laws, Humboldt wrote that nature had to be experienced through feelings.
• When nature is perceived as a web, its vulnerability also becomes obvious. Everything hangs together. If one thread is pulled, the whole tapestry may unravel. After he saw the devastating environmental effects of colonial plantations at Lake Valencia in Venezuela in 1800, Humboldt became the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced clima...