Prussian naturalist, geographer and explorer (1769-1859). His expedition through the Americas from 1799 to 1804 and his five-volume Kosmos made him the best-known scientist of his age [IC].
Contribution
Humboldt studied nature as a web of relationships, in which climate, altitude, plants, animals and human activity shape one another. His Essay on the Geography of Plants (1807) and its Naturgemälde, a single picture of a mountain’s vegetation zones, set out that view. The word “ecology” was coined later, by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, and Humboldt is widely credited as a founding influence on ecological thinking [IC]. Jonathan Rowson places him, with Goethe, among those who received the Third Earl of Shaftesbury’s aesthetic view of nature and studied it through imagination as well as measurement. The wiki traces this line on Aesthetic Education, as the root of the relational science its ecological pages descend from.
Selected works
- Essay on the Geography of Plants (with Aimé Bonpland, 1807)
- Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814-1831)
- Kosmos (1845-1862)
Related pages
Sources
- Rowson, J. (2021). What’s the Point of The Realisation Festival?
Provenance
Created 30 October 2026 with the Bildung pages, from Rowson’s account and the public record.