The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World
A biography of the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), following his 1799-1804 expedition through South America — the Orinoco, the Andes, the ascent of Chimborazo — and his later decades in Paris and Berlin, and arguing that his view of nature as one interconnected living whole is the root of modern ecology. Roughly the final third traces that influence forward through Darwin, Thoreau, George Perkins Marsh, Ernst Haeckel and John Muir.
The title promises an argument the book never makes: "Wulf does not do nearly enough work to convince the skeptical reader that Humboldt's view of nature was so entirely new." You get almost no picture of how nature was understood before he showed up, so the claim floats. The science does not fill the gap either; a detractor finds her "always rather vague with Humboldt's actual scientific contributions." Then the subject dies around page 279 of the hardcover, and "this is followed by three chapters, more than 50 pages" on men who knew him only through his books. "After finishing the book, I had to remind myself I was reading a biography of Humboldt."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
