ABSTRACT
His brother, Wilhelm, believed that his mind was ‘made to connect ideas, detect chains of things’ (Wulf 2015: 87). When the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt went exploring the Andes, a moss that grew there reminded him of a species from the forests of Northern Germany thousands of miles away. In the mountains near Caracas he found rhododendron-like plants that he compared to flowers he had seen in the Swiss Alps. In Mexico he came across pines, cypresses and oaks that were similar to those in Canada. In the words of his modern biographer, Andrea Wulf, Humboldt believed ‘Everything was connected’ (88). Connections brought about insights but they also spelled trouble. In Venezuela, for example, in the valley of Aruga at Lake Valencia, Humboldt noticed how once fertile land was being over-exploited and turning barren. The reason? Colour. The global demand for indigo led local people to grow the plant that produced the blue dye. The plant gradually replaced maize and other edible crops grown in the valley. Indigo plants were particularly demanding of the soil so that not only were local people depriving themselves of necessary food crops but the further cultivation of the plant would soon be impossible as a result of soil exhaustion. The dye on the European tablecloth had a long tail of ecological destruction that led to the other side of the Atlantic. Translation is also ‘made to connect ideas’ and one of the ideas that has
come to the fore in the contemporary world is that of climate change. As this book was being written, over 197 countries came together in Paris to discuss an agreement on limiting carbon dioxide emissions. Between 1990 when the first report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) alerted governments to the real threat of global warming and 2015 when the governments gathered in Paris, carbon dioxide emissions had not gone down. They had, in fact, risen by 60 per cent (Anderson 2015). What the global gathering demonstrated was the extent both of our interconnectedness and our vulnerability as a species. What we will argue in this book is that translation as a body of ideas and a set of practices is central to any serious or sustained attempt to think about this interconnectedness and vulnerability in the age of human-induced climate change.
