At a time when we have so much information thrown at us, how do we make sense of it all? We jump from blizzards in New Mexico to flooding along the Mississippi River to landslides in China while not necessarily seeing how these events could be part of a larger phenomenon. Similarly, we draw distinctions between events in the natural world and science and the ways in which we express ourselves artistically as if they are completely separate worlds.
As an educator, historian, and as a parent, I often wonder if these feelings of separate domains between science and art or between what may seem like isolated natural occurrences are unique to our age, or if every generation experiences life in this way.
In an era when many of our students receive instant updates on their phones and when specialization is so highly prized, how do we help them see the “trees” and the “forest”? What can we do to enable them to see that not only are events connected, but so are also seemingly unrelated fields of study, like art and science?
Maybe it’s the geeky historian in me, but perhaps one place to look is in the past. In her new biography of the 19th century science writer Alexander Von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World, Andrea Wulf portrays this often overlooked explorer-author who revolutionized the way people looked at their world. In elegant prose, Wulf explains how Humboldt merged the worlds of science and art to offer his readers a Romantic view of scientific phenomena. Humboldt not only studied the flora and fauna of places in South America, Russia, and beyond, but he also wrote about them in a way that allowed his readers to see their place in the natural world. One of the revelations in the book is Humboldt’s discussion of the ways in which human activity in a rapidly industrializing world may be affecting climate in the short- and long-term.
In addition, Humboldt discovered the connections among natural phenomena all over the world, like the plant life he observed in Central Asia and the Andes in South America. A friend of Thomas Jefferson, a mentor to Charles Darwin, and an influence on Henry David Thoreau, Humboldt enabled others to see how ostensibly disconnected events in one part of the world actually may have ties to another seemingly isolated area, and that as human beings, we need to put ourselves in nature to discover this.
Wulf eloquently evokes Humboldt’s love for the outdoors and his passion for exploration in a way that stimulates the reader to imitate his adventurousness. Humboldt’s insatiable curiosity led him to seek out knowledge empirically and share his findings poetically. As Wulf says at the end of the book, “In a world where we tend to draw a sharp line between the sciences and the arts, between the subjective and the objective, Humboldt’s insight that we can only truly understand nature by using our imagination makes him a visionary.”
A hiking buddy of mine has a line he often says when visiting the same place again and again: “That wasn’t here five minutes ago!” While whatever we’re seeing may not have changed that much since our last hike, the fact that we’re seeing it at a different time or from an alternative angle provides us with a perspective that we didn’t have the last time we were there, and so, in fact, it is new to us.
In today’s chaotic and frenzied world, perhaps the greatest lesson we can take from Wulf’s beautiful biography of Humboldt is to reach out and grab the opportunities to spend time in nature to understand it at a deeper level and thus help our children see their world as more interconnected than they may have realized or appreciated. In this way, they can “connect the dots” for themselves.
If you’d like to explore more on this topic of interconnection, there is an exhibition at 516 ARTS, “HABITAT: Exploring Climate Change Through the Arts,” featuring local artists Scott Greene and Beau Carey until January 9, 2016.
