ABSTRACT
Alexander von Humboldt was an explorer and writer. He explored the relationships between plants, climate and geography, and travelled widely, amassing data on plants, longitude and latitude, the Earth’s magnetic field, and pressure and temperature. His most influential book was Cosmos (1845), which attempted to bring together everything that was then known about the heavens and the Earth. His writing emphasised links between phenomena rather than seeing them in isolation, and promoted a holistic view of nature with humans firmly within it. Nature, he argued, was a web of organic life which could only be understood through experience. Von Humboldt thought that if we saw ourselves as part of the web, we might come to see that we had a responsibility to understand nature and nurture it. His work was widely read and was very influential, and led to the emergence of the science of ecology.
