Humboldt and the History of Environmental Thought
2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 96; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1931-0846.2006.tb00262.x
ISSN1931-0846
Autores Tópico(s)American Environmental and Regional History
Resumopanel session on Alexander von and the History of Environmental Thought was featured at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History, held jointly with the Forest History Society in St. Paul, Minnesota. panel was organized and chaired by Aaron Sachs, an assistant professor of history at Cornell University, and comprised four papers. Sachs and the other presenters (Laura Walls, Jason Lindquist, and myself) have been active contributors--along with numerous other scholars--to the ongoing revival of interest in and the continued rethinking of his influence on environmental and scientific ideas. This surge of interest stems in part from the renewed recognition that was arguably the most influential public intellectual of the nineteenth century. met and influenced such major political, cultural, and early environmental figures as the Liberator Simon Bolivar, U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, the biologist Charles Darwin, and the painter Frederic Edwin Church. renewal is taking place amid growing concern over the marginalization of intellectuals in public life. Another source of the expanding interest is renowned vision of nature and landscapes through a perspective of the inseparability of humans and the environment. As a result, oeuvre has regained relevance in the context of today's heightened concerns over environmental change, human-induced crises, and conservation. Aaron Sachs's paper, A Thousand-Mile Walk through the Cosmos: John Muir as Radical Humboldtian Explorer, addressed influence on Muir, widely regarded as one of the founders of American environmentalism. Muir is known to have proclaimed, How intensely I desire to be Humboldt (quoted in Sachs 2006, 27; Tsing 2005, 96), in describing his aspirations for travel and for the combined aesthetic and scientific study of nature in the Sierra Nevada of California. Sachs's presentation pointed to Muir's proclamation as one piece of evidence for far-reaching influence as a so-called cosmopolitan environmentalist. To Muir and other early environmental thinkers, represented a pinnacle of unceasing commitment and a model of accomplishment in the understanding of nature and global environments in relation to human activities, human presence, and, more generally, the human condition, relationships developed most fully in his magnum opus Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung (1846-1862). Sachs fully develops his thesis of defining influence on modern environmentalism in Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (2006; see Walls, The Search for Humboldt, Geographical Review 96 (2006): 473-477). Laura Walls's paper on Humboldt's Bridge used the well-known drawing of the natural bridge at Icononzo, a stone slab spanning a deep chasm in the Andes Mountains of what is now Colombia, as a metaphor for abiding commitment to the relationship between nature and culture. drawing is found in richly illustrated Vues des cordilleres et monumens des peuples indigenes de l'Amerique ([1810] 1989, pl. 4]). Following Walls, this bridge conveyed separation and connection as mutual and simultaneous. Walls, who is the John H. Bennett Jr. Chair of Southern Letters and a professor of English at the University of South Carolina and author of various Humboldt-related works, including Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (1995), presented a view of in which she wished to counter the overly simplistic reading of some works in postcolonial studies. She argued that various contributions of did not map, even nearly, onto the instrumentalist promotion of European interests in transatlantic commerce and political influence. Such contributions, following Walls's paper (and her in-progress book), included pioneering formulation of environmentalist discourse (in which nature is never treated as mere background) and his ideas about and the structure of his accounts of global environments and environmentalism. …
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