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GET LOST: ON THE INTERSECTION OF ENVIRONMENTAL AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Review products

SachsAaron, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of Modern Environmentalism (New York: Viking, 2006)
WorsterDonald, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2008

SUSAN SCHULTEN
SUSAN SCHULTEN*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Denver
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Extract

I finished The Humboldt Current at noon on a glorious spring day in northern California. Sachs concludes with a call to follow the work of Alexander von Humboldt: get lost in nature, allow it to overtake you even in everyday life. So I set off from my in-laws' home in the hills of the East Bay, and made my way to the local park nestled at the top of a ridge. Just as I have for the last ten years, I passed a sign that read “No Trespassing”—a message reinforced with barbed wire. Emboldened by Sachs and the spirit of Humboldt, I defied the sign, slipped the fence, and followed a footpath to the most spectacular views of the Bay I have ever experienced. Each bend rewarded me with verdant hillsides, wildflowers, and canyons. How could I have gone so many years without taking this path?

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , April 2008 , pp. 141 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

1 Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967)Google Scholar. This idea has been treated in the extensive recent scholarship around American leisure and national parks.

2 Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 40–41Google Scholar and passim.

3 Michael F. Robinson, “Why We Need a New History of Exploration,” paper presented at the 2006 Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Washington, DC. Robinson is currently working on a cultural history of exploration in the nineteenth century, and—like Sachs—considers Humboldt a foundational figure in this story.

4 Proceedings: Alexander von Humboldt Commemoration; Joseph Thompson, Francis Lieber, Guyot, Bancroft, etc. Journal of the American Geographical and Statistical Society, 1/8, Humboldt Commemoration (Oct. 1859), 225–46.

5 I suspect that part of Humboldt's appeal had to do with his ability to graphically represent complex information. The cross-sectional and isothermal maps mentioned above are just two examples of the images he created that schoolbook authors reproduced widely for their visual appeal. Humboldt himself was intrigued by the graphic visualization of knowledge, which could “speak to the senses without fatiguing the mind.” Headrick, Daniel, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 129Google Scholar.

6 The text of the report, entitled Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability, can be found in brief form at http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM6avr07.pdf.