The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism

Abstract

Aaron Sachs's first book, The Humboldt Current, is certainly ambitious. Based on his dissertation (Yale University, 2004), it seeks to correct traditional imperialistic interpretations of nineteenth-century exploration by selecting several American explorers who, he argues, followed Alexander von Humboldt's “ecological” insights to forge the beginnings of environmentalism. Thus we begin with a tall agenda, which Sachs works through by identifying Humboldt with ecology and environmental thinking, by locating several American “Humboldtians,” and by describing several explorations that had little or no connection to imperialism or empire. Fittingly, Humboldt Current opens by connecting Humboldt, ecology, and environmentalism; but this presents a set of problems to the reader. Sachs does not define his terms, which include Humboldtian ecology (p. 21), “Humboldt's efforts to see new things clearly” (p. 49), Humboldt's drive to find the “unifying interconnectedness of nature” (p. 52), Humboldt's “nascent conservation ethic” (p. 77), and Humboldt's “social ecology” (p. 94). All of those concepts are presented without explication and, more critically, without the historical apparatus to connect Humboldt to American environmentalism (part of the book's subtitle) in the nineteenth or twentieth century. Sachs does refer bibliographically to Susan Faye Cannon's influential work defining Humboldtian science, but there is no discussion of its critical historiographical position.