The First Environmentalist

Climate change is a hot topic. Take a look at the trailblazing scientist who first predicted it more than 200 years ago.

- Philip Ball

Back in the early 19th Century, Alexander von Humboldt, a German naturalist and explorer, warned that humans had the power to upset the delicate balance of nature. While we are familiar with this concept today, the idea was completely radical at the time, because for centuries it had been presumed that nature was explicitly created for our benefit and use. 

While trekking through the rainforests of South America, Humboldt had witnessed first-hand how human destructiveness could wreak potentially irreversible havoc with natural ecosystems and climate. And it was during his travels that he began to appreciate both the interconnectedness of life and humankind’s capacity for destroying it. Humboldt said that nature had its own laws, and it is the duty and responsibility of humans to discover them, because otherwise we risk doing catastrophic harm. These were remarkably prescient observations, and ones that echo through to our current thinking around deforestation and climate change. Yet few people have heard of him.

Observation and imagination

Humboldt’s story reads like a romantic adventure. He braved alligators, giant spiders, jaguars and vicious insects to explore the South American jungles and savanna. He climbed the mountains of the Andes and went down into the mines of Mexico. He rode with Cossacks through the steppes of Central Asia to the Mongolian border. He met Napoleon Bonaparte (who hated him), and he befriended Thomas Jefferson and the Venezuelan revolutionary leader Simón Bolívar, liberator of northern South America from Spanish rule.