大象传媒

This autumn sees the publication of Andrea Wulf鈥檚 new book:听 The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, The Lost Hero of Science.

Humboldt was born in 1769 and was 听the second son of a very wealthy aristocratic Prussian family in Berlin. When his parents died, he became a wealthy man. According to Andrea he bragged: 鈥業 have so much money that can get my nose, mouth and ears gilded鈥�. But, instead, he left his life of privilege and spent his inheritance on a dangerous 5 year exploration of Latin America. It was a journey that shaped his life and thinking and made him legendary across the world.

Andrea sees听 Humboldt as a visionary thinker and scientist (his contemporaries apparently considered him the most famous man in the world after Napoleon and called him 鈥楽hakespeare of Sciences鈥�). He made connections and saw how the world worked as a whole. It could be argued that he first articulated the theory which James Lovelock came to describe as Gaia theory. He might also be the first scientist to identify man-made climate change.

His books were huge international bestsellers and he wrote so many that he himself lost track what he had published and when. Knowledge, he believed, had to be shared, exchanged and made available to everybody. And so he wrote some 50,000 letters and received at least double that number.听

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Useful Reading

John Muir: The Wilderness Journeys

Edited and with an introduction by Graham White听

Helen Castor met up with Professor Tom Williamson from the University of East Anglia to hear how our ancient woodlands were once the factories of the British economy but that their classification is not straight-forward.

According to the Joint Nature Conservation Committee 鈥淭he Ancient Woodland Inventory, maintained by each country agency, records the location and extent of ancient semi-natural woodland in GB. The best examples are protected by SSSI/ASSI and SAC designations, covering approximately 21% of the ancient woodland area. The Forestry Commission also produce and maintain an .鈥�

Professor Williamson and his colleague Adam Stone argued in an edition of Landscapes (Vol. 14 No. 2, November, 2013, 141鈥�154) 鈥淭he concept of a distinct class of 鈥榓ncient woodland鈥� is often accepted in an unproblematic manner by landscape historians. Woods so defined have been managed in traditional ways, have supposedly been in existence since before c. 1600, and today feature a distinctive range of 鈥榠ndicator鈥� species. (We) argue that a significant number of the woods officially defined as 鈥榓ncient鈥� are in reality of comparatively recent origin despite displaying most, if not all, of the features usually considered to be indicative of ancient woodland. The defining aspects of 鈥榓ncient鈥� woods may result as much from their landscape context as from their antiquity per se鈥�.

Despite the possibility that some areas of this woodland might be younger than we once thought, Prof Williamson argues that its value in terms of biodiversity and amenity is just as high.

Dr Paul Warde is currently writing a book with the above title, an idea that he has already developed听 in a paper he wrote in 2011 for Modern Intellectual History. Dr Warde argued that the first use of the word 鈥渟ustainability鈥� in English is in the 20th century but that the emergence of the German equivalent, Nachhaltigkeit, which might also be expressed by the idea of 鈥渓asting-ness鈥�, can be dated to the use of the word nachhalthende by Hanns Carl von Carlowitz in his Sylvicultura oeconomica of 1713, the first great forestry manual of the eighteenth century. Part of Dr Warde鈥檚 thesis is that this is tied up with the way Germany was divided politically and economically and that competition between states required that they had to manage forestry resources much more carefully than Britain with its links to the Baltic and then, later, to its Empire.