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The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism
A masterly intellectual history of the impact of 19th-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt on American culture and science
The naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) achieved unparalleled fame in his own time. Today, his enormous legacy to American thought is virtually unknown. In The Humboldt Current, Aaron Sachs seeks to reverse this obscurity by tracing Humboldt’s pervasive influence on American history, specifically looking at the lives and careers of four explorers: J. N. Reynolds, the founder of the 1838–1842 U.S. Exploring Expedition; Clarence King, the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey; George Wallace Melville, chief engineer on the disastrous 1879 Jeannette expedition to the North Pole; and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. In Sachs’s view, all four of these men were alienated Romantics who used Humboldt’s notion of “unity in diversity” as a way of critiquing their increasingly industrialized society. Moreover, as Sachs argues, their examples laid the groundwork for an ecological tradition even more radical than the one that has come down to us today. Sachs’s treatment of Humboldt’s legacy also includes discussions of the writers and artists most in his debt: Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, Poe, and Frederic Church. Reminiscent of Louis Menand’s bestselling The Metaphysical Club, The Humboldt Current is a colorful, superbly written and carefully researched work that offers a fundamental reinterpretation of nineteenth century American history.
The naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) achieved unparalleled fame in his own time. Today, his enormous legacy to American thought is virtually unknown. In The Humboldt Current, Aaron Sachs seeks to reverse this obscurity by tracing Humboldt’s pervasive influence on American history, specifically looking at the lives and careers of four explorers: J. N. Reynolds, the founder of the 1838–1842 U.S. Exploring Expedition; Clarence King, the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey; George Wallace Melville, chief engineer on the disastrous 1879 Jeannette expedition to the North Pole; and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. In Sachs’s view, all four of these men were alienated Romantics who used Humboldt’s notion of “unity in diversity” as a way of critiquing their increasingly industrialized society. Moreover, as Sachs argues, their examples laid the groundwork for an ecological tradition even more radical than the one that has come down to us today. Sachs’s treatment of Humboldt’s legacy also includes discussions of the writers and artists most in his debt: Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, Poe, and Frederic Church. Reminiscent of Louis Menand’s bestselling The Metaphysical Club, The Humboldt Current is a colorful, superbly written and carefully researched work that offers a fundamental reinterpretation of nineteenth century American history.
496 pages, Hardcover
First published August 3, 2006
29 people are currently reading
227 people want to read
About the author
Aaron Sachs
10 books15 followersResearch and Teaching Interests
My general focus is on nature and culture: I wander through parks, cemeteries, and wilderness areas (often with my kids), stare at landscape paintings and photographs, and re-read Thoreau, all in an effort to figure out how ideas about nature have changed over time and how those changes have mattered in the western world. My primary appointment is in the History department, but my Ph.D. is in American Studies, and I remain fully committed to interdisciplinary work. In my graduate teaching, I regularly work with students not only in History but also in English, Science and Technology Studies, History of Architecture, Anthropology, and Natural Resources. On the undergraduate level, I teach courses ranging from an overview of environmental history to seminars on consumerism, the American West, the meanings of wilderness, and the road trip in American culture.
Another strong interest is in creative writing, and I happily serve as the faculty sponsor of a radical underground organization called Historians Are Writers, which brings together Cornell graduate students who believe that academic writing can actually be moving on a deeply human level. I also seek to support innovative history writing through a book series at Yale University Press, called New Directions in Narrative History (John Demos and I are the co-editors).
At Cornell, I’m also the founder and coordinator of the Cornell Roundtable on Environmental Studies Topics (CREST), which holds lunchtime events on campus and also sponsors evening sessions where we discuss relevant books and articles that we’ve read in common. And I’m currently serving as a house fellow at Flora Rose House on West Campus, where you’ll sometimes see me at the dining hall, trying to lasso my three young children as they attempt to lure unsuspecting undergraduates into a food fight.
My general focus is on nature and culture: I wander through parks, cemeteries, and wilderness areas (often with my kids), stare at landscape paintings and photographs, and re-read Thoreau, all in an effort to figure out how ideas about nature have changed over time and how those changes have mattered in the western world. My primary appointment is in the History department, but my Ph.D. is in American Studies, and I remain fully committed to interdisciplinary work. In my graduate teaching, I regularly work with students not only in History but also in English, Science and Technology Studies, History of Architecture, Anthropology, and Natural Resources. On the undergraduate level, I teach courses ranging from an overview of environmental history to seminars on consumerism, the American West, the meanings of wilderness, and the road trip in American culture.
Another strong interest is in creative writing, and I happily serve as the faculty sponsor of a radical underground organization called Historians Are Writers, which brings together Cornell graduate students who believe that academic writing can actually be moving on a deeply human level. I also seek to support innovative history writing through a book series at Yale University Press, called New Directions in Narrative History (John Demos and I are the co-editors).
At Cornell, I’m also the founder and coordinator of the Cornell Roundtable on Environmental Studies Topics (CREST), which holds lunchtime events on campus and also sponsors evening sessions where we discuss relevant books and articles that we’ve read in common. And I’m currently serving as a house fellow at Flora Rose House on West Campus, where you’ll sometimes see me at the dining hall, trying to lasso my three young children as they attempt to lure unsuspecting undergraduates into a food fight.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
May 10, 2012
The best books are those that make you think in a different way or from another perspective. They also pique your interest in a subject so that you want to know more.
The Humboldt Current is such a book. It takes you through many aspects of history, opening plenty of doors. Alexander von Humboldt is not very well known, and he should be, as should J.N. Reynolds, Clarence King, George Wallace Melville. Sachs added a new perspective to John Muir and the conservation movement.
It added extra appreciation to Frederick Edwin Church's painting, Chimborazo, 1864 in the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Garden.
This is not only a book about exploration, but about how we see the world. It opened my eyes wider.
To quote near the end of the book (pp 342-343)
By celebrating only faraway "wilderness" areas allegedly full of biodiversity, we tacitly endorse the industrial system that has fractured our society and devastated the environments where the majority of Americans live. We seem to have forgotten that all places are connected and, ultimately, equally valuable, that life depends on all the mutually dependent features of the cosmos.
The Humboldt Current is such a book. It takes you through many aspects of history, opening plenty of doors. Alexander von Humboldt is not very well known, and he should be, as should J.N. Reynolds, Clarence King, George Wallace Melville. Sachs added a new perspective to John Muir and the conservation movement.
It added extra appreciation to Frederick Edwin Church's painting, Chimborazo, 1864 in the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Garden.
This is not only a book about exploration, but about how we see the world. It opened my eyes wider.
To quote near the end of the book (pp 342-343)
By celebrating only faraway "wilderness" areas allegedly full of biodiversity, we tacitly endorse the industrial system that has fractured our society and devastated the environments where the majority of Americans live. We seem to have forgotten that all places are connected and, ultimately, equally valuable, that life depends on all the mutually dependent features of the cosmos.
November 16, 2023
I saw this book somewhere saw 'Humboldt' in the title and decided to take a chance. I remembered Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) from a class mainly for his early meteorology and climatology work. His expedition to South America and subsequent writing is seen as having 'laid the foundation of the sciences of physical geography, plant geography, and meteorology' (Wikipedia). The important cold current off Peru was discovered by and named for him and his work on the effects on altitude on climate/vegetation was ground breaking. His painstaking work (and detailed diagram) in 1802 on Chimborazo volcano (el. 20,549 ft.) in Ecuador was even cited in a fairly recent journal article (2015) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences--https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073.... He was also important in formulating early ecological theory and understanding human geography.
Back to the book, it apparently came out of Ph.D dissertation at Yale by the author (later a Cornell professor) on the subject of Humboldt and his influence on various strands of thought in the 19th and very early 20th century. Humboldt was one of the most influential people in the 19th century and born the same year as Napoleon Bonaparte (1769) and it might be argued that his importance was comparable in a much different (and more constructive) way. As a Prussian, he was more or less extirpated from American thought during and after World War I, when anything 'German' was erased. Kind of similar to how 'we' have tried to remove anything Russian from our conversation today.
The book focuses on four important figures of the early exploration/environment 'movement' if such a thing existed-- J.N. Reynolds (1799-1858), Clarence King (1842-1901), George Wallace Melville (1841-1912), and John Muir (1838-1914). The theme of exploratory field work unites these four and chapters on each somewhat chronological order although their lives overlap. All had interesting at times fascinating, stories and connections to 'Humboldtian' ideas are illuminated along the way. Reynolds led field trips to South America and was mainly responsible for a major expedition, the so-called U.S. Ex. Ex. (the Wilkes Expedition) 1838-1842. Reynolds also penned a story called "Mocha Dick: Or The White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal" in 1839 in The Knickerbocker. Obviously has a big influence on another writer not long after! Nathaniel Philbrick who seems to have a one-man corner on sea-faring tales (and other history too!) wrote about it in 2003 book 'Sea of Glory'. Clarence King is most famous to me as the first Director of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1879, the U.S. Weather Bureau beat it into existence by nine years! His seminal work came as chief Geologist of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, commonly known as the Fortieth Parallel Survey, in 1867. Melville (no relation to Herman of 'Moby Dick' fame) was survivor on the Jeanrette Expedition in which the ship was trapped in Arctic ice for something like two years before being crushed and the majority of crew dying as they fled into the Lena River delta of Siberia. Finally Muir, who should need no introduction for environmentalists but was a prolific writer and explorer best known for his work in the Sierra Nevada range and efforts to help create a National Park at Yosemite, CA in 1890. Other key 19th-century figures appear throughout as Sachs tries to tie the whole thing together based on the theme of Humboldt's continuing influence (hence 'Current'). Among others he invokes artists like Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman and broader intellectuals like George Perkins Marsh, Louis Agassiz, Franz Boas, and Henry Adams. It seemed a bit of a reach but credit for the effort, 3.5 stars rounded up.
Back to the book, it apparently came out of Ph.D dissertation at Yale by the author (later a Cornell professor) on the subject of Humboldt and his influence on various strands of thought in the 19th and very early 20th century. Humboldt was one of the most influential people in the 19th century and born the same year as Napoleon Bonaparte (1769) and it might be argued that his importance was comparable in a much different (and more constructive) way. As a Prussian, he was more or less extirpated from American thought during and after World War I, when anything 'German' was erased. Kind of similar to how 'we' have tried to remove anything Russian from our conversation today.
The book focuses on four important figures of the early exploration/environment 'movement' if such a thing existed-- J.N. Reynolds (1799-1858), Clarence King (1842-1901), George Wallace Melville (1841-1912), and John Muir (1838-1914). The theme of exploratory field work unites these four and chapters on each somewhat chronological order although their lives overlap. All had interesting at times fascinating, stories and connections to 'Humboldtian' ideas are illuminated along the way. Reynolds led field trips to South America and was mainly responsible for a major expedition, the so-called U.S. Ex. Ex. (the Wilkes Expedition) 1838-1842. Reynolds also penned a story called "Mocha Dick: Or The White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal" in 1839 in The Knickerbocker. Obviously has a big influence on another writer not long after! Nathaniel Philbrick who seems to have a one-man corner on sea-faring tales (and other history too!) wrote about it in 2003 book 'Sea of Glory'. Clarence King is most famous to me as the first Director of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1879, the U.S. Weather Bureau beat it into existence by nine years! His seminal work came as chief Geologist of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, commonly known as the Fortieth Parallel Survey, in 1867. Melville (no relation to Herman of 'Moby Dick' fame) was survivor on the Jeanrette Expedition in which the ship was trapped in Arctic ice for something like two years before being crushed and the majority of crew dying as they fled into the Lena River delta of Siberia. Finally Muir, who should need no introduction for environmentalists but was a prolific writer and explorer best known for his work in the Sierra Nevada range and efforts to help create a National Park at Yosemite, CA in 1890. Other key 19th-century figures appear throughout as Sachs tries to tie the whole thing together based on the theme of Humboldt's continuing influence (hence 'Current'). Among others he invokes artists like Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman and broader intellectuals like George Perkins Marsh, Louis Agassiz, Franz Boas, and Henry Adams. It seemed a bit of a reach but credit for the effort, 3.5 stars rounded up.
November 24, 2018
Nov. 23
121. Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism [2006] 496 pages
A history of the influence of Alexander von Humboldt on the science and culture of nineteenth-century America, with special reference to exploration (although art and literature are dealt with as well). The book is divided into four parts: the first is an account of Humboldt's ideas and their direct influence in the United States; the second deals with J.N. Reynolds and the project to explore Antarctica (and contains some information about Captain Symmes' hollow Earth theory); the third is a life of Clarence King and his explorations in the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevadas; the fourth is about Admiral George Wallace Melville and the earlier life of John Muir, and their explorations in the Arctic. There is a final chapter and epilogue tracing the later history of the environmental movement and its failings. The Humboldtian influence becomes less as time goes on, though never quite disappearing. The information in the book was very interesting as was the author's viewpoint on the problems of modern environmentalism, although I would have liked more emphasis on the actual science of the expeditions, and I think Sachs spent too much time discussing whether the subjects were gay or not.
121. Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism [2006] 496 pages
A history of the influence of Alexander von Humboldt on the science and culture of nineteenth-century America, with special reference to exploration (although art and literature are dealt with as well). The book is divided into four parts: the first is an account of Humboldt's ideas and their direct influence in the United States; the second deals with J.N. Reynolds and the project to explore Antarctica (and contains some information about Captain Symmes' hollow Earth theory); the third is a life of Clarence King and his explorations in the Great Basin and the Sierra Nevadas; the fourth is about Admiral George Wallace Melville and the earlier life of John Muir, and their explorations in the Arctic. There is a final chapter and epilogue tracing the later history of the environmental movement and its failings. The Humboldtian influence becomes less as time goes on, though never quite disappearing. The information in the book was very interesting as was the author's viewpoint on the problems of modern environmentalism, although I would have liked more emphasis on the actual science of the expeditions, and I think Sachs spent too much time discussing whether the subjects were gay or not.
January 4, 2025
Adventure and exploration are the besting heart of this sweeping history that delves into the why even more than the what. The author is himself an explorer — charting new answers to questions about journeys that push the boundaries of what is known. How can those journeys also provide evidence of the interconnected aspect of the natural world? Through the eyes of Humboldt and those he inspired, including Muir, we find the clues to a response. Pieced together in this mosaic of images from recent centuries, the whole picture begins to take shape. Guest stars include Poe, Thoreau, and Melville. Portraits of prominent locations place readers at Mount Shasta, Yosemite, both poles, and near the peak of Chimborazo (in Ecuador). Literary, provocative, well researched — a great read.
April 24, 2020
Humboldt should be as well known as Emerson or Muir, and this book shows why. One of the first to write about interconnectedness of living things and the spiritual quality of the Universe. Sachs interprets Humboldt well by showing his influence on other, more famous scientists...like Muir. It's a rare book that I can remember 5 years after I read it, but of course I live not far from Humboldt County and Humboldt State University in California. This is home of 2 empires: Redwood and Emerald.
Read
March 26, 2024This book isn’t meant for binging. It’s good to read in increments. It gave me a headaches sometimes trying to read the small print
February 26, 2019
The writer indulges his whims too frequently. Lots of repetition in the writing, lots of romantic quotes.
Mary Louise Pratt > Aaron Sachs
Mary Louise Pratt > Aaron Sachs
September 24, 2015
Humbolt was a larger-than-life figure in the mid-1800s, but after WWI, he fell off the map. His ideas were extremely influential among major scientists, biologists, and naturalists who we still revere today, from John Muir to Charles Darwin. Humbolt's polymath approach to everything was reflected in his driving conviction that nature is an interconnected, interdependent web. He was ahead of his time. Unfortunately, once I got the author's main idea, I lost interest and didn't finish the book.
October 19, 2018
Abandoned. Just a lousy book. The author's thesis is that everything in the world is connected, and I know this because he tells us this 40 times in the first 80 pages. You're better off getting bios of the individual explorers covered in the book, or even better, getting their original published works. What a waste.
December 28, 2014
Stupendously amazing book on a long-forgotten figure in American botany, exploration, and environmentalism. First 1/3 of the book is key for all fields listed above. Other wonderful chapters on Muir, polar exploration, etc--good in and of themselves but a bit stretched in terms of the core thesis of the book. Sad it took me so long to get to this!
June 24, 2008
I loved reading about Humboldt himself -- and the connections with Whitman and Muir are fascinating. But I must confess I skimmed the last half of the book. Great footnotes. Great encouragement for integrating the social into the natural, expanding our idea of habitat to include social justice.
July 10, 2008
Interesting, but a little dry.
September 22, 2013
Learning so much from this beautifully written book...
April 15, 2009
Knocked my socks off. This is how history books should be written (ok, except for the chapter on Clarence King)...
August 29, 2012
An interesting history of Alexander von Humboldt's influence on environmental thought including a new-to-me interpretation of John Muir's environmentalism.
May 10, 2013
Made it most of the way through this book. Very riveting read about an actual explorer.
Read
February 1, 2016Sachs provides an important review of the lasting influence of the man and his ecological influence.
December 23, 2016
Nice solid review of Humboldt's influence on American explorers and thinkers
March 13, 2013
Concluding chapter was exceptional; the author tied up all of his ideas in an eloquent manner.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews