The Humboldt Current: Science, Adventure, and Environmentalism with author Aaron Sachs

The World's Fair sits down with Aaron Sachs, author of The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (Viking Press, 2006), Assistant Professor of History and American Studies at Cornell University, and environmental journalist.

The book is, like its subjects, adventurous. Sachs's voice and style are unique and his ambition is inspiring. The Humboldt Current has been widely reviewed and lauded. One of those reviews, illustrating the point, noted that "Sachs has an incredible talent for choosing gripping accounts and spinning out stories of historical non-fiction with a novelist's sense of good narrative tension, punctuated by pithy summations." The book hits on the history of science (ecology, various field sciences, and natural history, let's say), environmental history, American Studies, and Humboldtian biography. It also provides insight into the relationships between scientific knowledge making and explorer practices, with Humboldt's blend of theory and practice as a--oh hell, I can't avoid it--current throughout the work.

This is the eighth in our series of "Author-Meets-Blogger" posts, where we talk to authors about their new work. (See them all here.) What follows is part one of a three-part conversation about The Humboldt Current. Please be encouraged to post questions or comments for Professor Sachs and other readers. The second and third parts will be posted in the coming days.

THE WORLD'S FAIR: This is a book about science and environmental exploration. But what's the framework of your narrative? What do you basically talk about toward that end?

AARON SACHS: My fundamental aim is to recover a tradition of potentially radical environmental thought, a kind of ecological cosmopolitanism, that arose in the nineteenth century within the context of scientific exploration--a tradition founded by Alexander von Humboldt and carried on in especially important ways by a number of Americans. It's important that the people I'm talking about were actively rethinking science during their experiences in frontier "contact zones"--where they engaged with indigenous peoples as well as extreme environments--rather than in labs or schools in a given metropole. That observation leads me to my broadest claims from both a historical and a presentist perspective. Historically speaking, I hope that my story about Humboldt and some of his American confreres will remind us that Manifest Destiny was a contested ideology--that we cannot pass off the 19th century simply as an age of imperialism and that it can be useful to look for resistance even in the most unlikely places (i.e., among explorers, normally considered mere agents of empire). Meanwhile, I hope more present-focused readers will think of the Humboldtian tradition of socially engaged environmental thought as a possible corrective to the much more narrow tendencies of mind that developed in the twentieth century.

WF: How about your subtitle? The tree (roots) metaphor is provocative, but does it go further?

AS: When I used the phrase "The Roots of American Environmentalism" in my subtitle, I meant to suggest that 20th-century environmentalism would have been impossible without the Humboldtian tradition--but it is also part of my argument that developments in the 20th century toward scientific (and spatial) specialization have resulted in a tree with branches that are not necessarily worthy of its roots. Humboldt would always have us think about ecology in the context of social justice and cosmopolitanism--not just in terms of, say, wilderness or wildlife conservation.

WF: Who are the key characters, beyond Humboldt?

AS: I try to spend at least a bit of time on all kinds of 19th-century figures, from artists like Thomas Cole and Frederic Church to writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman to broader intellectuals like George Perkins Marsh, Louis Agassiz, Franz Boas, and Henry Adams, all of whom were influenced by Humboldt. For the sake of depth, though, I've focused on four American Humboldtians who shared Humboldt's commitment to exploratory field work: J.N. Reynolds, Clarence King, George Wallace Melville, and John Muir.

WF: I know King and Muir, but not Reynolds or Melville.

AS: Reynolds explored the South Seas on the Palmer-Pendleton expedition (1829-1831) and was the founder and primary instigator of the United States Exploring Expedition to Antarctica, led by Charles Wilkes, from 1838 to 1842. His narratives, congressional speeches, and short stories, including one called "Mocha Dick," were major influences on both Poe and Melville. George Wallace Melville, chastened by his experiences in the Arctic, expressed a deep skepticism about American expansionism and imperialism, writing evocatively about the limits of human endeavor in the face of a much more powerful nature--despite the fact that he was Chief Engineer of the U.S. Navy for 16 years. King, to clarify, was the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey and the author of several influential books and essays, in which he often pointed to nature's "harmonies of structure" as providing the basis for human society. Finally, John Muir, clearly the most famous of these Americans, and known today as the founder of the Sierra Club (1892), actually launched his environmentalist career as a Humboldtian explorer of Alaska and Siberia in the late 1870s and early 80s. It was during those years of exploration, in my opinion, that he did his most important work, focusing on native peoples and on how people could live in nature rather than merely escape to it every now and then.

By the way, I really liked that you called them "characters."

WF: I wonder what they do for you in your book. What role do they serve?

AS: I hope they come to embody different aspects of Humboldtianism, American-style. Now, I probably should have explained more clearly in the book that I did not mean to claim this as an exhaustive representation of what "Humboldtianism" meant in the nineteenth century. A few reviewers have taken me to task for not defining the term more explicitly and for downplaying the importance to Humboldt and many of his followers of simple empirical observation and categorization. But those reviewers, with all due respect, wanted my book to be something it's not--namely, a traditional history of science text.

WF: But it's not?

AS: Right. What I was going for was a broader cultural and intellectual history that sought to illuminate not some rigidly defined scientific tradition but a more mainstream current in American mentality--an attitude, you might say, rather than a philosophy. To that end, I tried to suggest how J.N. Reynolds could be seen as positing scientific exploration as the best tonic for a culture that was growing crass and stagnant, not to mention blind to the implications on the frontier of its embrace of industrialization and rapid expansion. For Reynolds, Humboldtianism meant free and open inquiry and a consistent determination to question cultural assumptions and ideologies (he should thus be read as Thoreauvian, in many ways). Clarence King, meanwhile, learned from Humboldt to immerse himself in nature and subject himself to its forces and then to respond using both scientific and artistic perspectives in as balanced a way as possible. Up in the Arctic, George Wallace Melville learned a Humboldtianism based simply on humility. And John Muir realized that Humboldt the great naturalist was ultimately concerned most crucially not with the details of nature but with the daily ins and outs of society-nature interactions.

Author-meets-bloggers I: Michael Egan, on Barry Commoner, science, and environmentalism.
Author-meets-bloggers II: Cyrus Mody on nanotechnology, ethics, and policy.
Author-meets-bloggers III: Saul Halfon on population policy, demographic science, and women's empowerment.
Author-meets-bloggers IV: Kevin Marsh on wilderness, forestry policy, and environmental politics.
Author-meets-bloggers V: David Hess on Alternative Pathways in Science and Industry
Author-meets-bloggers VI: Lizzie Grossman on e-trash and global environmental policy
Author-meets-bloggers VII: Shobita Parthasarathy on genetic medicine and the politics of Sci. and Technology.