Lunchtime Lecture: The Invention of Modern Nature

From the City of Austin –

Wednesday June 15th | 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
One Texas Center | 505 Barton Springs Road – Room 325 Austin, TX 78704

This is the 6th installment of the The Unity of Nature: The Creation, Discovery, and End of Nature series happening each month in 2016.

Join us this month to continue exploring the greatest Scientist of Nature. This is the latest installment of “The Unity of Nature: The Creation, Discovery, and End of Nature” series with Kevin Anderson, Center for Environmental Research.

Over these six lectures, Kevin will cover how Alexander Von Humboldt transformed the practice of natural history and collecting nature into the science of nature. We will look at how he balanced imagination with scientific exactitude, thereby inspiring both poets and scientists to study nature in the 19th century. In particular, his influence on Darwin was profound, both in setting Darwin’s life course and in fostering his idea of evolution. As the 19th century ended, new sciences of nature emerged, and Von Humboldt’s ideas continued to influence 20th century science and culture.

In 1798, Alexander Von Humboldt (1769-1859) was appointed by the King of Spain to make the first extensive scientific exploration of Spanish America. “I shall collect plants and fossils and make astronomic observations. But that’s not the main purpose of my expedition – I shall try to find out how the forces of nature interact upon one another and how the geographic environment influences plant and animal life. In other words, I must find out about the unity of nature.”

Equipped with the most sophisticated scientific field instruments of his time, Von Humboldt traveled through the New World mapping the biogeography of the Americas from 1799-1804. At the end of his journey, he had a new vision of nature – of isotherms, ecosystems, food webs, watersheds, climate change, and complex interconnectivity – and he had invented the concept of nature that we have today. Before returning to Europe, at the invitation of President Thomas Jefferson, he stopped in the new United States and met with Jefferson and others. Through that meeting and his subsequent writings, he opened American culture to his vision of nature.

On his return to the Old World, he became the most celebrated and influential scientist of his age. No one had a greater impact on the modern concept of the earth as a “natural whole” – a biogeochemical system open to rational explanation yet charged with imaginative potential and threatened by human mismanagement. This idea of nature – as an ordered unity, as a globally complex physical system of interconnections, as a cosmos open to imagination and wonder, as a subject for exacting scientific study, and as an object of human mismanagement – is now a familiar concept, however, in America, Von Humboldt is largely forgotten.

Brought to you by Austin Water Utility, Center for Environemntal Research, The University of Texas, Texas A&M University.

Brought to you by Nature in the City, implementing Imagine Austin’s Green Infrastructure Priority Program #4. https://www.facebook.com/ImagineAustin/