Humboldt - Essay on the Geography of Plants

Resistance is pointless once you have begun to engage Humboldt. Though his personality is often remote (his Personal Narrative is anything but personal), his insatiable curiosity and intellectual power are always close at hand. Within a few months of our first meeting, Sylvie and I had agreed to work together on a complete translation of Humboldts Essai, and before the project was long underway we were both inspired to write accompanying essays.

The Essai sur la gographie des plantes, with its accompanying Tableau physique des Andes et Pays voisins, is one of Humboldts most influential works. It has long been regarded as one of the foundation texts of ecology and biogeography, but it is more than that. It is the first mature, integrated statement of Humboldts view of a unified nature, with diverse properties showing coherent patterns in space at local to global scales. The Essai (and its German equivalent, Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen) has been reprinted at various times since its first publication in 1807. But it has never appeared in an English translation.

Since the Second World War, English has emerged as the lingua franca of science. As a consequence, native-born English speakers working in the sciences no longer have to develop fluency in French, German, or other languages. In fact, scientists at universities in the United States often view foreign languages as a burden, discourage students from taking them, and even try to purge them from the required curriculum. It is an unfortunate fact that most scientists in the United States and other English-speaking nations are unable to read and appreciate Humboldts Essai.

The primary purpose of this volume, then, is to bring Humboldts Essai to an English-speaking audience at relatively low cost. But why should anyone in the early twenty-first century read a 200-year-old scientific work, however canonical? The question is obviously easy to answer for historians or humanists, but why should scientists interrupt their busy lives to read Humboldt, or any of the old masters?

Scientists have a well-deserved reputation for being focused on the here and nowthe burning questions that are at the frontier of knowledge. They tend not to be concerned with the questions and concepts of a decade ago, let alone a century. This is paradoxical, because science is inherently a historical enterprise. The body of current knowledge is built on years, decades, or centuries of previous scholarship and research, and it is subject to the same kinds of historical contingencies and artifacts as any other human endeavor. Some scientists recognize this, and acknowledge the need to step back and examine where a question or concept has come from, how it has evolved, and whether something important has been overlooked along the way. At its most fundamental level, this is good scholarship and leads to a healthy sense of humility. Furthermore, concepts tend to evolve in time, and so confusion and pointless controversy can be avoided by looking at their lineages. And occasionally, long-neglected ideas are rediscovered and brought back to life, helping to solve current puzzles or opening new avenues for discovery.

Historical examination is particularly critical for ecology, evolution, and biogeography, because these are inherently historical sciences. Obviously so, in the sense that the phenomena that they attempt to explainthe abundance and distribution of organisms across the globe, the diversity of life at local to global scales, the origin of features of organisms that fit them to their respective environment, the movement of energy and materials in space and timeall have historical components. None can be fully explained without some knowledge of history, because different processes occur at different rates, Earths environment changes through time, and system states at any given time are contingent on previous states and events.