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Sunday, April 7, 2013
Grand Elder Raymond Robinson is on a full hunger strike
Grand Elder Raymond Robinson’s Video Message to Canadians
April 6th Statement
Grand Elder Raymond Robinson is on a full hunger strike and has not consumed any food or water since April 3rd, 2013 at 9:00am.
Raymond will remain on hunger strike until Prime Minister Stephen
Harper agrees to meet with First Nations leaders on a Nation-to-Nation
basis;On Friday Raymond met with Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt only to have the Minister literally laugh in his face and refuse his request without any negotiation. Raymond offered to end his hunger strike in return for a meeting between First Nations Chiefs and the Prime Minister on a Nation to Nation basis.
Grand Elder Raymond Robinson is putting his LIFE on the line, his demands are not unreasonable, and Stephen Harper must ACT NOW to save his life.
Monday morning will mark Grand Elder Raymond’s 5th day without food or water. It is unbelievable, and unacceptable, that this country has come to a point where First Nations Peoples are literally starving themselves just to get a meeting from a Prime Minister who is enacting radical genocidal legislation taking aim at First Nations, the environment, and the Canadian people.
Join us Monday night for candle light vigils across the country to send a strong message to Harper that Canada needs to begin to heal the wounds of hundreds of years of colonial, assimilationist, and paternal legislation.
Let’s stay peaceful, raise awareness, and come together as one in these difficult times that will un undoubtedly mark Canadian history forever.
Host an event in your town. 1) Pick a spot, 2) Create an event using this text 3) Send us the link
Take ACTION NOW!
RaymondRobinson.org
Communique 6 Avril
Grand Elder Robinson est en grève de la faim complète et n’a pas consommé de nourriture ni d’eau depuis le 3 Avril 2013 à 9:00 am.
Raymond restera en grève de la faim jusqu’à ce que le Premier ministre Stephen Harper accepte de rencontrer les chefs des Premières nations sur une base de nation à nation;
Vendredi, Raymond a rencontré le ministre des Affaires autochtones Bernard Valcourt. Celui ci lui a littéralement ri dans la figure et a refusé d’accéder à sa requête sans aucune négociation. Raymond a offert de mettre fin à sa grève de la faim en échange d’une rencontre entre les chefs des Premières nations et le Premier ministre sur une base de nation à nation.
Grand Elder Raymond Robinson met sa VIE en jeu, ses demandes ne sont pas irraisonables, et Stephen Harper doit AGIR MAINTENANT pour sauver sa vie.
Lundi matin marquera le 5e jour sans nourriture ni eau de Grand Elder Raymond. Il est incroyable, et inacceptable, que ce pays soit rendu au point où les peuples des Premières Nations se laissent littéralement mourrir de faim juste pour obtenir une rencontre d’un Premier ministre qui met en vigueur une législation génocidaire radicale ciblant les Premières nations, l’environnement, et le peuple canadien.
Joignez-vous à nous lundi soir pour des vigiles à la chandelles à travers le pays, afin de signaler clairement à Harper que le Canada doit commencer à soigner les blessures causées par des centaines d’années de législation coloniale, assimilationiste et paternaliste.
Restons pacifiques, éveillons les consciences, et unissons-nous en ces temps difficiles qui marqueront sans aucun doute l’histoire canadienne à jamais.
AGISSONS maintenant!
RaymondRobinson.org
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Statement from Grand Elder Raymond Robinson
For immediate release, Friday, April 5th 2013
Grand Elder Raymond Robinson will be meeting with the
Minister of Aboriginal Affairs Bernard Valcourt this afternoon. He will
be arriving at 2:00 pm, 30 minutes before the meeting which is scheduled
for 2:30 pm. He will also be available for comment immediately
following the meeting.
Grand Elder Robinson is praying for two things. The first
is that Prime Minister Harper remove new sections added to First
Nation’s comprehensive funding agreements that seek to implement recent
changes in government policy including bills C-38 and C-45. He is
unhappy that First Nations are being “blackmailed” into signing the
agreements or risk having their funding cut off.
The second is for the government of Canada to begin a
meaningful “Nation to Nation” relationship and dialogue. Grand Elder
Robinson also points out that Prime Minister Harper has not followed
through on the commitments made in the January 11th meetings. PM Harper
has not met with First Nations leadership “in the coming weeks” as
promised, nor did he send a representative from the PMO to the AFN’s
Treaty Forum held in saskatchewan last week.
By 2:30 this afternoon Grand Elder Robinson will have been
without food or water since April 3ed at 9:00am, which will bring the
hour count to 53.5
Today’s meeting will be held at:
Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada
Terrasses de la Chaudière
10 Wellington, North Tower
Gatineau, Quebec
Postal Address:
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0H4
More Information: RaymondRobinson.org
Twitter: @GERayRobinson
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GrandElderRaymondRobinson
Friday, April 5, 2013
Murder in the Amazon (Documentary)
Murder in the Amazon (Documentary): Part 1/2
Murder in the Amazon (Documentary): Part 2/2
Murder in the Amazon (Documentary): Part 2/2
Thursday, April 4, 2013
The Life and Brutal Death of Sister Dorothy, a Rainforest Martyr On the Lawless Fringe of Brazil's Amazon Jungle - Where Illegal Loggers Have Devastated the Rainforest - the American Nun Dorothy Stang Defended the Poor,Then the Gunmen Came for Her
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by Andrew Buncombe
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Sister Dorothy Stang lived among those who wanted her dead. When they finally
came for her she read passages from the Bible to her killers. They listened
for a moment, then fired. Her body was found face down in the mud, blood
staining the back of her white blouse.
The town of Anapu, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, is
most notable for the dust that clogs its streets and for the number of
shops selling chain-saws. It is also the place that Sister Dorothy
called home for more than 30 years and where she organised her efforts
to try to protect the rainforest and its people from disastrous and
often illegal exploitation by logging firms and ranchers. Now Anapu will
be known as the place where Sister Dorothy is buried.
It has also highlighted the problem for the Brazilian government of balancing a desire to protect the rainforest with pressure to open tracts of forest to support strong economic growth as demanded by the International Monetary Fund, which loaned Brazil billions of dollars following a recession in 2002. Such a conflict of interests has hindered attempts by the authorities to fulfil the promise of the left-leaning President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to find homes for 400,000 landless families. The promise is badly off target and showing no signs of rapid improvement. The President immediately ordered a full-scale investigation into Sister Dorothy's death and dispatched two members of his cabinet to the region, an area that is notorious for violence, crime and slave labour. One of those who was sent, Nilmario Miranda, the government's secretary for human rights, said before setting off: "Solving this crime and apprehending those who ordered and committed it is a question of honour for us. This is intolerable." Sister Dorothy was in the Boa Esperanca settlement when she was killed. She was travelling with two peasants to a meeting to discuss a settlement for the area, which has apparently been granted to peasants by the federal government but which is sought by loggers. The two men travelling with her escaped unhurt and may be able to identify the killers to police, reports suggest. While the suspects' names have not yet been released, Sister Dorothy's supporters say there is little doubt as to who was responsible. While the local people called her Dora or "the angel of the Trans-Amazonian", loggers and other opponents called her a "terrorist" and accused of supplying guns to the peasants. The Pastoral Land Commission of the Roman Catholic Church, which she worked for, said in a statement: "The hatred of ranchers and loggers respects nothing. The reprehensible murder of our sister brings back to us memories of a past that we had thought was closed." Sister Dorothy was originally from Dayton, Ohio, where she attended Julienne High School. It was while she was a student that she decided to become a nun and when she left school she joined the convent of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur in Cincinnati. The order, founded in France in the early 18th century by Marie Rose Julie Billiart, is an proponent of liberation theology and social justice. Its mission statement dedicates the order to "take our stand with poor people especially women and children, in the most abandoned places". Her beliefs took her to Brazil in the 1960s and it was there, in the vast Para region, which encompasses large tracts of rainforest, that she found her calling - despite the obvious dangers she faced. Just two weeks ago, Sister Dorothy met Mr Miranda, the human rights secretary, and told him of the death threats that she and others had received and asked for the government's help and protection. Sister Elizabeth Bowyer, a senior nun at the Cincinnati convent, said yesterday that she believed Sister Dorothy may have realised she was going to be killed at some point even though she told her friends and colleagues that her status as a nun would offer a level of protection. "She knew she was on the death list. She said she would be protected because of her age and because she was a nun - she was wrong," she said. "We don't know who hired the gunmen but we know the loggers and ranchers were very upset by what she was doing. She was working with the human rights people to protect the small farmers who have been given the right to the land." The stakes could not have been higher. Greenpeace estimates that 90 per cent of the timber in Para is illegally logged. The danger of speaking out against such exploitation could barely have been greater. Campaigners say Para has the country's highest rate of deaths related to land battles. Greenpeace said that more than 40 per cent of the murders between 1985 and 2001 were related to such disputes. The Brazilian human rights group Justica Global said 73 rural workers were murdered in 2003 - 33 of them in Para. Last year 53 were killed. Of those, 19 were killed in Para. "The government is simply not giving adequate protection," said the group's director, Sandra Carvalho. "We think its actions in the region are extremely weak. The government put together a programme to deal with these problems but it is being carried out at such a slow pace. The government has not managed to carry out the land reforms it spelt out before coming to power. What they have done is far below what we anticipated." She added: "There is constant conflict with very few convictions because there is a culture of impunity. Generally these conflicts involve landowners and landless rural workers ... Dora was killed because she stood up to these people." And yet this fight appeared to energise the sprightly 74-year-old. Samuel Clements, 24, a student film-maker from Britain who spent the summer of 2003 filming Sister Dorothy's work, said she seemed to become a different, more animated person once she left dusty Anapu and travelled into the jungle to meet with the small farmers and peasants. In addition to fighting to preserve the rainforest she was helping encourage small-scale, sustainable agriculture. In a recent letter to Mr Clements, she wrote: "Our forest is being overtaken by the others daily ... Together we can make a difference." Mr Clements also believed Sister Dorothy may have had a premonition of the fate that awaited her and yet she still looked for the best in people. "She said once 'Humanity is like a fruit bowl, with all the different fruit - black, white and yellow - so different and yet all part of it'. She had incredible energy even though she was fighting incredible battles," he said. L�cio Flavio Pinto, an investigative journalist in the region who produces a weekly newspaper, Jornal Pessoal, knew Sister Dorothy since the 1970s. He has also been campaigning against the same people she was taking on and has also been on the receiving end of threats. "There were many people who wanted to kill Sister Dorothy," he said yesterday, speaking from the city of Belem, the state capital. It was to Belem that Sister Dorothy's body was taken on Sunday for a post-mortem examination and where dozens of supporters gathered outside the mortuary singing hymns and holding placards calling for an end to the rampant crime. Claudio Guimaraes, director of the state's forensic science institute, said it appeared that the gunmen were about 18 inches away from Sister Dorothy when they shot her. In Ohio she was remembered at a series of services which recalled her dedication and courage. "Sister Dorothy in her ministering to the poor remained faithful. We honour those who die for their faith," said Father Dennis Caylor, pastor at St Rafael church in the suburb of Springfield. And from those who worked with the nun, there were promises that the effort she had undertaken would continue despite her death. Mariana Silva, president of Brazil's National Institute for Settlement and Agrarian Reform said: "We won't step back even one millimetre from our projects in Para because of this. They want to intimidate us but they won't succeed." |
Conservation Refugees
When protecting nature means kicking people out
by Mark Dowie
Published in the November/December 2005 issue of Orion magazine
Photograph by Joy Tessman/National Geographic, used with permission
A LOW FOG ENVELOPS THE STEEP and remote valleys of southwestern Uganda most mornings, as birds found only in this small corner of the continent rise in chorus and the great apes drink from clear streams. Days in the dense montane forest are quiet and steamy. Nights are an exaltation of insects and primate howling. For thousands of years the Batwa people thrived in this soundscape, in such close harmony with the forest that early-twentieth-century wildlife biologists who studied the flora and fauna of the region barely noticed their existence. They were, as one naturalist noted, “part of the fauna.”
In the 1930s, Ugandan leaders were persuaded by international conservationists that this area was threatened by loggers, miners, and other extractive interests. In response, three forest reserves were created—the Mgahinga, the Echuya, and the Bwindi—all of which overlapped with the Batwa’s ancestral territory. For sixty years these reserves simply existed on paper, which kept them off-limits to extractors. And the Batwa stayed on, living as they had for generations, in reciprocity with the diverse biota that first drew conservationists to the region.
!Kung San, Botswana
Photograph | Peter Johnson, Corbis
These forests are so dense that the Batwa lost perspective when they first came out. Some even stepped in front of moving vehicles. Now they are living in shabby squatter camps on the perimeter of the parks, without running water or sanitation. In one more generation their forest-based culture—songs, rituals, traditions, and stories—will be gone.
It’s no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture. But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler cause: land and wildlife conservation. Today the list of culture-wrecking institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Even the more culturally sensitive World Conservation Union (IUCN) might get a mention.
Wai Wai, Guyana
Photograph | John Martin / Conservation International
Later that spring, at a Vancouver, British Columbia, meeting of the International Forum on Indigenous Mapping, all two hundred delegates signed a declaration stating that the “activities of conservation organizations now represent the single biggest threat to the integrity of indigenous lands.” These rhetorical jabs have shaken the international conservation community, as have a subsequent spate of critical articles and studies, two of them conducted by the Ford Foundation, calling big conservation to task for its historical mistreatment of indigenous peoples.
“We are enemies of conservation,” declared Maasai leader Martin Saning’o, standing before a session of the November 2004 World Conservation Congress sponsored by IUCN in Bangkok, Thailand. The nomadic Maasai, who have over the past thirty years lost most of their grazing range to conservation projects throughout eastern Africa, hadn’t always felt that way. In fact, Saning’o reminded his audience, “...we were the original conservationists.” The room was hushed as he quietly explained how pastoral and nomadic cattlemen have traditionally protected their range: “Our ways of farming pollinated diverse seed species and maintained corridors between ecosystems.” Then he tried to fathom the strange version of land conservation that has impoverished his people, more than one hundred thousand of whom have been displaced from southern Kenya and the Serengeti Plains of Tanzania. Like the Batwa, the Maasai have not been fairly compensated. Their culture is dissolving and they live in poverty.
“We don’t want to be like you,” Saning’o told a room of shocked white faces. “We want you to be like us. We are here to change your minds. You cannot accomplish conservation without us.”
Although he might not have realized it, Saning’o was speaking for a growing worldwide movement of indigenous peoples who think of themselves as conservation refugees. Not to be confused with ecological refugees—people forced to abandon their homelands as a result of unbearable heat, drought, desertification, flooding, disease, or other consequences of climate chaos—conservation refugees are removed from their lands involuntarily, either forcibly or through a variety of less coercive measures. The gentler, more benign methods are sometimes called “soft eviction” or “voluntary resettlement,” though the latter is contestable. Soft or hard, the main complaint heard in the makeshift villages bordering parks and at meetings like the World Conservation Congress in Bangkok is that relocation often occurs with the tacit approval or benign neglect of one of the five big international nongovernmental conservation organizations, or as they have been nicknamed by indigenous leaders, the BINGOs. Indigenous peoples are often left out of the process entirely.
Curious about this brand of conservation that puts the rights of nature before the rights of people, I set out last autumn to meet the issue face to face. I visited with tribal members on three continents who were grappling with the consequences of Western conservation and found an alarming similarity among the stories I heard.
Hmong, Thailand
Photograph | Jeremy Horner / Corbis
“The government has no idea who I am,” she says. “The only person in the village they know by name is the ‘headman’ they appointed to represent us in government negotiations. They were here last week, in military uniforms, to tell us we could no longer practice rotational agriculture in this valley. If they knew that someone here was saying bad things about them they would come back again and move us out.”
In a recent outburst of environmental enthusiasm stimulated by generous financial offerings from the Global Environment Facility, the Thai government has been creating national parks as fast as the Royal Forest Department can map them. Ten years ago there was barely a park to be found in Thailand, and because those few that existed were unmarked “paper parks,” few Thais even knew they were there. Now there are 114 land parks and 24 marine parks on the map. Almost twenty-five thousand square kilometers, most of which are occupied by hill and fishing tribes, are now managed by the forest department as protected areas.
“Men in uniform just appeared one day, out of nowhere, showing their guns,” Kohn Noi recalls, “and telling us that we were now living in a national park. That was the first we knew of it. Our own guns were confiscated . . . no more hunting, no more trapping, no more snaring, and no more “slash and burn.” That’s what they call our agriculture. We call it crop rotation and we’ve been doing it in this valley for over two hundred years. Soon we will be forced to sell rice to pay for greens and legumes we are no longer allowed to grow here. Hunting we can live without, as we raise chickens, pigs, and buffalo. But rotational farming is our way of life.”
A week before our conversation, and a short flight south of Noi’s village, six thousand conservationists were attending the World Conservation Congress in Bangkok. At that conference and elsewhere, big conservation has denied that they are party to the evictions while generating reams of promotional material about their affection for, and close relationships with, indigenous peoples. “We recognize that indigenous people have perhaps the deepest understanding of the Earth’s living resources,” says Conservation International chairman and CEO Peter Seligman, adding that, “we firmly believe that indigenous people must have ownership, control and title of their lands.” Such messages are carefully projected toward major funders of conservation, which in response to the aforementioned Ford Foundation reports and other press have become increasingly sensitive to indigenous peoples and their struggles for cultural survival.
Financial support for international conservation has in recent years expanded well beyond the individuals and family foundations that seeded the movement to include very large foundations like Ford, MacArthur, and Gordon and Betty Moore, as well as the World Bank, its Global Environment Facility, foreign governments, USAID, a host of bilateral and multilateral banks, and transnational corporations. During the 1990s USAID alone pumped almost $300 million into the international conservation movement, which it had come to regard as a vital adjunct to economic prosperity. The five largest conservation organizations, CI, TNC, and WWF among them, absorbed over 70 percent of that expenditure. Indigenous communities received none of it. The Moore Foundation made a singular ten-year commitment of nearly $280 million, the largest environmental grant in history, to just one organization—Conservation International. And all of the BINGOs have become increasingly corporate in recent years, both in orientation and affiliation. The Nature Conservancy now boasts almost two thousand corporate sponsors, while Conservation International has received about $9 million from its two hundred fifty corporate “partners.”
Maasai, Tanzania
Photograph | Tim Graham / Getty Images
During the 1990s the African nation of Chad increased the amount of national land under protection from 0.1 to 9.1 percent. All of that land had been previously inhabited by what are now an estimated six hundred thousand conservation refugees. No other country besides India, which officially admits to 1.6 million, is even counting this growing new class of refugees. World estimates offered by the UN, IUCN, and a few anthropologists range from 5 million to tens of millions. Charles Geisler, a sociologist at Cornell University who has studied displacements in Africa, is certain the number on that continent alone exceeds 14 million.
The true worldwide figure, if it were ever known, would depend upon the semantics of words like “eviction,” “displacement,” and “refugee,” over which parties on all sides of the issue argue endlessly. The larger point is that conservation refugees exist on every continent but Antarctica, and by most accounts live far more difficult lives than they once did, banished from lands they thrived on for hundreds, even thousands of years.
John Muir, a forefather of the American conservation movement, argued that “wilderness” should be cleared of all inhabitants and set aside to satisfy the urbane human’s need for recreation and spiritual renewal. It was a sentiment that became national policy with the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act, which defined wilderness as a place “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” One should not be surprised to find hardy residues of these sentiments among traditional conservation groups. The preference for “virgin” wilderness has lingered on in a movement that has tended to value all nature but human nature, and refused to recognize the positive wildness in human beings.
Expulsions continue around the world to this day. The Indian government, which evicted one hundred thousand adivasis (rural peoples) in Assam between April and July of 2002, estimates that 2 or 3 million more will be displaced over the next decade. The policy is largely in response to a 1993 lawsuit brought by WWF, which demanded that the government increase PAs by 8 percent, mostly in order to protect tiger habitat. A more immediate threat involves the impending removal of several Mayan communities from the Montes Azules region of Chiapas, Mexico, a process begun in the mid-1970s with the intent to preserve virgin tropical forest, which could still quite easily spark a civil war. Conservation International is deeply immersed in that controversy, as are a host of extractive industries.
Tribal people, who tend to think and plan in generations, rather than weeks, months, and years, are still waiting to be paid the consideration promised. Of course the UN draft declaration is the prize because it must be ratified by so many nations. The declaration has failed to pass so far mainly because powerful leaders such as Tony Blair and George Bush threaten to veto it, arguing that there is not and should never be such a thing as collective human rights.
Sadly, the human rights and global conservation communities remain at serious odds over the question of displacement, each side blaming the other for the particular crisis they perceive. Conservation biologists argue that by allowing native populations to grow, hunt, and gather in protected areas, anthropologists, cultural preservationists, and other supporters of indigenous rights become complicit in the decline of biological diversity. Some, like the Wildlife Conservation Society’s outspoken president, Steven Sanderson, believe that the entire global conservation agenda has been “hijacked” by advocates for indigenous peoples, placing wildlife and biodiversity in peril. “Forest peoples and their representatives may speak for the forest,” Sanderson has said, “They may speak for their version of the forest; but they do not speak for the forest we want to conserve.” WCS, originally the New York Zoological Society, is a BINGO lesser in size and stature than the likes of TNC and CI, but more insistent than its colleagues that indigenous territorial rights, while a valid social issue, should be of no concern to wildlife conservationists.
Maya, Guatemala
Photograph | AFP / Getty Images
It should be no surprise, then, that tribal peoples regard conservationists as just another colonizer—an extension of the deadening forces of economic and cultural hegemony. Whole societies like the Batwa, the Maasai, the Ashinika of Peru, the Gwi and Gana Bushmen of Botswana, the Karen and Hmong of Southeast Asia, and the Huarani of Ecuador are being transformed from independent and self-sustaining into deeply dependent and poor communities.
WHEN I TRAVELED THROUGHOUT MESOAMERICA and the Andean-Amazon watershed last fall visiting staff members of CI, TNC, WCS, and WWF I was looking for signs that an awakening was on the horizon. The field staff I met were acutely aware that the spirit of exclusion survives in the headquarters of their organizations, alongside a subtle but real prejudice against “unscientific” native wisdom. Dan Campbell, TNC’s director in Belize, conceded, “We have an organization that sometimes tries to employ models that don’t fit the culture of nations where we work.” And Joy Grant, in the same office, said that as a consequence of a protracted disagreement with the indigenous peoples of Belize, local people “are now the key to everything we do.”
“We are arrogant,” was the confession of a CI executive working in South America, who asked me not to identify her. I was heartened by her admission until she went on to suggest that this was merely a minor character flaw. In fact, arrogance was cited by almost all of the nearly one hundred indigenous leaders I met with as a major impediment to constructive communication with big conservation.
If field observations and field workers’ sentiments trickle up to the headquarters of CI and the other BINGOs, there could be a happy ending to this story. There are already positive working models of socially sensitive conservation on every continent, particularly in Australia, Bolivia, Nepal, and Canada, where national laws that protect native land rights leave foreign conservationists no choice but to join hands with indigenous communities and work out creative ways to protect wildlife habitat and sustain biodiversity while allowing indigenous citizens to thrive in their traditional settlements.
In most such cases it is the native people who initiate the creation of a reserve, which is more likely to be called an “indigenous protected area” (IPA) or a “community conservation area” (CCA). IPAs are an invention of Australian aboriginals, many of whom have regained ownership and territorial autonomy under new treaties with the national government, and CCAs are appearing around the world, from Lao fishing villages along the Mekong River to the Mataven Forest in Colombia, where six indigenous tribes live in 152 villages bordering a four-million-acre ecologically intact reserve.
The Kayapo, a nation of Amazonian Indians with whom the Brazilian government and CI have formed a co-operative conservation project, is another such example. Kayapo leaders, renowned for their militancy, openly refused to be treated like just another stakeholder in a two-way deal between a national government and a conservation NGO, as is so often the case with co-operative management plans. Throughout negotiations they insisted upon being an equal player at the table, with equal rights and land sovereignty. As a consequence, the Xingu National Park, the continent’s first Indian-owned park, was created to protect the lifeways of the Kayapo and other indigenous Amazonians who are determined to remain within the park’s boundaries.
In many locations, once a CCA is established and territorial rights are assured, the founding community invites a BINGO to send its ecologists and wildlife biologists to share in the task of protecting biodiversity by combining Western scientific methodology with indigenous ecological knowledge. And on occasion they will ask for help negotiating with reluctant governments. For example, the Guarani Izoceños people in Bolivia invited the Wildlife Conservation Society to mediate a comanagement agreement with their government, which today allows the tribe to manage and own part of the new Kaa-Iya del Gran Chaco National Park.
Nez Perce, Idaho, US
Photograph | Joel Sartore / National Geographic
And there are some respected and influential conservation biologists who still strongly support top-down, centralized “fortress” conservation. Duke University’s John Terborgh, for example, author of the classic Requiem for Nature, believes that co-management projects and CCAs are a huge mistake. “My feeling is that a park should be a park, and it shouldn’t have any resident people in it,” he says. He bases his argument on three decades of research in Peru’s Manu National Park, where native Machiguenga Indians fish and hunt animals with traditional weapons. Terborgh is concerned that they will acquire motorboats, guns, and chainsaws used by their fellow tribesmen outside the park, and that biodiversity will suffer. Then there’s paleontologist Richard Leakey, who at the 2003 World Parks Congress in South Africa set off a firestorm of protest by denying the very existence of indigenous peoples in Kenya, his homeland, and arguing that “the global interest in biodiversity might sometimes trump the rights of local people.”
Yet many conservationists are beginning to realize that most of the areas they have sought to protect are rich in biodiversity precisely because the people who were living there had come to understand the value and mechanisms of biological diversity. Some will even admit that wrecking the lives of 10 million or more poor, powerless people has been an enormous mistake—not only a moral, social, philosophical, and economic mistake, but an ecological one as well. Others have learned from experience that national parks and protected areas surrounded by angry, hungry people who describe themselves as “enemies of conservation” are generally doomed to fail.
More and more conservationists seem to be wondering how, after setting aside a “protected” land mass the size of Africa, global biodiversity continues to decline. Might there be something terribly wrong with this plan—particularly after the Convention on Biological Diversity has documented the astounding fact that in Africa, where so many parks and reserves have been created and where indigenous evictions run highest, 90 percent of biodiversity lies outside of protected areas? If we want to preserve biodiversity in the far reaches of the globe, places that are in many cases still occupied by indigenous people living in ways that are ecologically sustainable, history is showing us that the dumbest thing we can do is kick them out.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Defending the Rivers of the Amazon
Amazon Watch and International Rivers have teamed up to create a state-of-the-art 10-minute Google Earth 3-D tour and video narrated by actress Sigourney Weaver, with technical assistance from Google Earth Outreach. The video is in support of Brazil's Movimento Xingu Vivo Para Sempre (Xingu River Forever Alive Movement). The tour allows viewers to learn about the harmful impacts of, and alternatives to the massive Belo Monte Dam Complex on the Amazon's Xingu River.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Massacres in the Peruvian Rain Forest
Exploitation and the Rubber Trade
Throughout history the wealth of the Forest has attracted adventurers and outcasts in search of the mythical El Dorado. The existence of natives hindered the absolute dominion over the bountiful rubber woods and rivers of gold, and aroused dark hatreds that always meant harm to the Amazonian people. This hatred led to massacres untold.
Orellana, during the Spanish Conquest searched for the hidden city of Gold and was defeated by tropical diseases. However, adventurers were not deterred for ever.
The need for rubber in the early 1900's launched greedy expeditions throughout the world. International corporations settled in Iquitos and from there mastered a vast network of native villages forced under threat of dead to supply rubber on a continuous basis. To trap those who did not comply with their rubber quotas, corporations cunningly utilised the ancestral rivalry among different natives.
Among the known and unknown of massacres, the rubber genocide was well documented in the Putumayo Trial, a summarised version of which follows:
The Putumayo Trial
In the National Library the papers of the Putumayo Trial report that in the year 1907 a trial was opened against "Víctor Macedo, Miguel Loayza, Carlos Miranda, José Inocente Fonseca, Luis Alcorta, Miguel Flores, Armando Normand, Aurelio Rodriguez, Arístides O'Donnell, Alfredo Montt, Abelardo Calderón, Elías Martinengui, Abelardo Agüero, Bartolomé Guevara, Augusto Jiménez, Dagoberto Arriarán and N.Suárez as authors of fraud, theft, burning with fire, rape, poisoning and murder, all of these accompanied by the most cruel tortures such as fire, water, whip and mutilations. The trial report indicates that all these crimes were known and approved by the Arana, Vega y Compañía, and Julio C. Arana y Hnos companies.
"These crimes took place on the tributaries of the Putumayo river, between rivers Igarparaná, Caraparaná, Cahuinarí, Cotuhé Idima, Menage and others."
"In 1903, some 800 Ocaina Indians arrived in "La Chorrera" to deliver the rubber they had harvested, and after having weighed the products the head of section, Fidel Velarde pointed out 25 Indians and accused them of being lazy at work. This was enough for Macedo to have them dressed with a cloth bag, imbibed in kerosene and ignited with fire. The poor Indians ran to the river yelling and crying in despair, and all of them died.
"..............Fonseca has a harem of ten native girls, ranging between 8 and 15 years of age.
"..............Miguel Flores, another of the Putumayo hyenas murdered so many natives that Victor Macedo, afraid of that section's depopulation ordered Flores 'not to kill so many Indians' in his orgies, but only when they did not deliver rubber quotas. Thus, the reformed Flores 'only' killed 40 Indians in the next 2 months but continued to whip and mutilate them. Fingers, arms, ears, legs were cut out and castrations took place every day.
"..............Matanzas is another section of Igara Parana with the greatest number of skeletons, hundreds of Indians have been killed under Normand's orders. This young man, who is barely 22 years old.... has people killed without any mercy and burns them by the hundreds, and whips them by the thousands. The whipped victims receive no cure whatsoever, their wounds get worm-ridden and once they become totally useless for work they are killed with machetes.
"..............Periodically 'correrías' take place in this way: the head of section orders his employees to arm themselves and travel in search of the Indian 'nations' who must collect and deliver rubber every ten days. Those [Indians] who do not comply are whipped 25 times by Barbados Negroes who have arrived in this region to work only as executioners. When the Indians do not attend to the meeting place because they could not harvest rubber, the head of section orders his civilised employees to look for them and to follow them with 10 or 15 savage Indians who are enemies of those they look for. When they are found, their houses are burnt and when they try to escape the employees fire at them. Before the fire is over they get all those who could not leave the hut: elder people, babies, cripples, they all die under the lethal stroke of the Putumayo machete."
Iquitos, August 9th., 1907
In the Putumayo Trial Report Pablo Zumaeta, manager of The Peruvian Amazon Co. Ltd. in Iquitos is quoted in his reply to the accusations "Indians should not be considered witnesses in any trial because they are under transition into civilised life, they have no notion of what Law or Right means. They should be previously educated to have conscience and be able to acknowledge the value and advantages of civilisation ... such purpose existed under the Spanish Viceroy when Indians were reduced in towns where they were taught Spanish and Catholic religion and were provided with adequate laws.
"However, nothing of this sort has taken place in the Putumayo area, where Indians are barely being introduced into civilisation."
Later he blames "the Colombian Rafael Tovar, Eladio Trujillo, Plata and others for the crimes of homicide, theft, rape, women kidnapping, fires, and others. However, after having been imprisoned, they were released upon request of the Colombian consul so as to avoid unpleasant diplomatic problems."
The trial was interrupted without any explanation until 1910 when it had to be resumed upon request of international human right organisations.
The judge, Dr. Paredes went on inspection to the sites together with the English Consul, Sir Roger Cassement.
Dr. Paredes declared: "I could not find any of the main criminals when I arrived in Putumayo. The presence of a Consul caused them fear, the presence of a judge made them flee. They all escaped, some to Brazil, others to Argentina, to Barbados, etc. I could only find new employees and heads of section.
"The real massacres, the hideous crimes peaked in 1906. As of 1907, they decreased a bit, and by the time I arrived in Putumayo, on March 26th., 1911, crimes against the savages were rare and isolated."
Colombia apology for devastation in Amazon rubber boom
Many Colombian indigenous peoples are threatened by conflict between left-wing rebels and the army
Colombia's
president has apologised to indigenous communities in the Amazon for
deaths and destruction caused by the rubber boom around 100 years ago.
Backed by Colombia's government, a Peruvian firm tapped rubber from 1912 to 1929 near La Chorrera in the south. Up 100,000 people were killed and communities devastated, according to indigenous leaders.
President Juan Manuel Santos asked for forgiveness "for all the dead and their orphans".
He apologised "in the name of a company, a government".
Mr Santos said that in pursuit of progress, the government of the day "failed to understand the importance of safeguarding each indigenous person and culture as an essential part of a society we now understand as multi-ethnic and multicultural."
Torture and mutilation Rubber barons in the Amazon carried out horrendous human rights abuses, first documented by British diplomat Roger Casement in 1912.
These included forced labour, slavery, torture and mutilation, says the BBC's Arturo Wallace in Colombia.
The apology was issued on the day Latin Americans mark the beginning of Spanish colonisation.
The Day of the Race, as the date is known in the region, commemorates the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the continent on 12 October 1492.
The president named nine indigenous peoples who were decimated by the rubber-tapping project of Julio Cesar Arana, a controversial Peruvian entrepreneur and politician.
"It is essential to contribute towards healing the wounds inflicted on your lives and in the memory of our nation," he said.
President Santos vowed that such abuses would never happen again.
The Colombian government recognises 87 indigenous groups but the Colombian Indigenous Organisation, OIC says there are 102.
Up to one-third of them face extinction because of the armed conflict and forced displacement.
Monsanto's Biopiracy
By Vandana Shiva
April 27, 2004
Zmag
Wheat the Golden grain, is called "Kanak" in North Western India. It is the staple of a large majority. Wheat diversity has been evolved by Indian farmers over millennia for taste, for nutrition, for ecological adaptation to cold climates and hot climates, dry regions and wet regions.
Barely four years after starting work, in December 1909, the book entitled "wheat in India" was published. By 1924 no fewer than thirty one papers exclusively on wheat had appeared. A survey of work was presented to the Royal Society of Arts in 1920.
In 1916-1920 indigenous Indian varieties won prizes in International Grain Exhibitions. Indian Wheat was so important a crop for the British Empire that an important Resolution of the Government of India no. I - 39-50 of March 17th, 1877 was passed on the wheat question requiring the Governor General to provide all information on Indian wheat including "local names for the varieties of wheat cultivated and three description in English". More than 1000 wheat samples in bags of 2 pounds each were sent to the India office, examined by Forbes Watson, and a detailed report provided to the Secretary of the State.
Sir Albert Howard, the founder of Modern Organic Farming and his wife G.L.C. Howard started to document and systematize India's wheat diversity. They identified 37 separate botanical varieties of wheat belonging to 10 sub-species.
The Ghoni, Kanku, Rodi, Mundli, Retti, Kunjhari, Sindhi, Kalhia, Sambhergehna, Sambhau, Kamla, Laila, Dandi, Gangajali, Pissia, Ujaria, Surlek, Manipuri, Anokhla, Tamra, Mihirta, Munia, Gajia, Mundia, Merdha, Dudhia, Lurkia, Jamali, Lalka, Harahwa, Galphulia¬Ö.
An amazing diversity of indigenous wheat was evolved by farmers through their indigenous innovation and knowledge. In 1906, the Howards began to select and systematize Indian wheat in Pusa (Bihar) and Lyallpur in Punjab (now Pakistan) and made Indian wheat known worldwide. Howard's work on wheat paid full tribute to the genius of Indian peasants. As he wrote in his plan to study and improve Indian wheat.
"The present condition of Indian agriculture is the heritage of experience handed down from time immemorial by a people little affected by the many changes in the government of the country. The present agricultural practices of India are worthy of respect, however strange and primitive they may appear to Western ideas. The attempt to improve Indian agriculture on Western lines appears to be a fundamental mistake. What is wanted is rather the application of Western scientific methods to the local conditions so as to improve Indian agriculture on its own lines."
Millennia of breeding by millions of Indian farmers is however now being hijacked by Monsanto which is claiming to have "invented" the unique low-elasticity, low gluten properties of an indigenous Indian wheat, rice lines derived from such wheat and all flours, batters, biscuits and edible products made from such wheat.
On 21st May, 2003, the European Patent Office in Munich granted a patent to Monsanto with the number EP 445929, with the simple title "plants", even though plants are not patentable in European Law. The patent covers wheat exhibiting a special baking quality, derived from native Indian wheat. With the patent, Monsanto holds a monopoly on the farming, breeding, and processing of a range of wheat varieties with low elasticity. Earlier in a patent (EP 518577) filed in 1998 Unilever and Monsanto have claimed "invention" of an exclusive claims to the use of flour to make traditional kinds of Indian bread such as "chapattis".
And it is not just in Europe that Monsanto has filed and obtained patents based on the biopiracy of Indian wheat. In the U.S on May 3, 1994 patent number 5,308,635 was given for low elasticity wheat flour blends, on June 9, 1998 patent number 5,763,741 was given for wheat which produce dough with low elasticity, and on January 12, 1999, patent number 5,859,315 another patent was granted for wheats which produce dough with low elasticity.
Through these global patents based on biopiracy, Monsanto is literally seeking to control our daily bread. The wheat variety which has been pirated from India, has been recorded as NapHal in the gene banks from which Monsanto got the wheat and in Monsanto's patent claims. The name NapHal is not the name of an Indian variety. Indian varieties were fully documented by Howard in Wheats of India. NapHal means "no seeds", and is not, and cannot be an indigenous seed variety because farmers bred seed to produce seed.
They did not breed "Terminator seeds" for which the Indian name could be "NapHal". This is clearly a distortion that has crept into the gene bank records because the original variety was stolen, not collected. NapHal is the name given by W.Koelz, USDA. However Koelz clearly did not make the collections himself, but was handed over the varieties, since the locations are inaccurate. The altitudes and longitude / latitudes do not match. According to our search, W.Koelz made the following collections :
Date of Collection Locality
a.. 10.4.48 Marcha, Uttar Pradesh, India Elevation - 3050 meters Latitude - 28o mm N Longitude - 80o mm E
a.. 10.7.48 Subu Uttar Pradesh, India Elevation - 3050 meters Latitude - 28o mm N Longitude - 80o mm E
a.. 19.7.48 Nabi, Uttar Pradesh, India Elevation - 2745 meters Latitude - 29.50o mm N Longitude - 79.30o mm E
a.. 21.7.48 Saro, Nepal Elevation - Not given Latitude - 28o mm N Longitude - 84o mm E
The latitude 28o N and longitude 80o E lies in the plains near Shajahanpur. The elevation here is clearly not 3000 meters. This altitude is in the higher Himalayan ranges with different latitude and longitude. In any case Marcha is not the name of the village but a sub tribal category of the Bhotias who are Tibetans speaking Buddhist living in the upper regions of the Himalayas. The terms Bhotia came from Bo which is the native Tibetan word for Tibet.
The discrepancy in the location and in the name indicate that the variety referred to as NapHal was pirated, not collected. Probably the name is a distortion of Nepal, since one sample was from Nepal and indigenous varieties names Nepal are in the NBPGR collection.
We have challenged Monsanto wheat biopiracy both in the Indian Supreme Court and in the European Patent Office in Munich with Greenpeace. As our challenge submitted to the EPO on 17th February, 2004, stated,
"The patent is a blatant example of biopiracy as it is tantamount to the theft of the results of endeavours in cultivation made by Indian farmers. In the countries of the southern hemisphere, it is frequently the small farmers who make a decisive contribution to agricultural diversity and secure sufficient food supplies by freely swapping seeds and breeding regionally modified forms of crops.
Monsanto is now unscrupulously exploiting the fruits of their labour. The company is able to restrict not only the farming and processing of crops, but also trade in them, in the countries for which the patent has been granted. At the same time it can block the free exchange of the seed, thus preventing other growers and farmers from working with the patented seeds.
The wheat exhibiting these special baking qualities is the result of the labours of cultivators and farmers in India who originally grew these plants for their own regional requirements, growing them to bake traditional Indian bread (chapatis). As it is natural for these farmers to freely swap seeds, it comes as no surprise that this wheat seed has been stored in various international gene banks outside India for many years.
Thus, samples of the seed can be found in the collections held by the US agricultural administration as well as in Japan and Europe. The patent owner uses these features to achieve his own business goals in a way which can only be regarded as indecent.
Unilever and Monsanto also have unrestricted access to these seed banks. They took the wheat to their laboratories, where they searched for the genes responsible for the special baking qualities. And, indeed, they were able to find the gene sequences which they had been looking for in the plant. In this connection, they were aided by the research results of various scientists as the corresponding gene regions had been undergoing examination for quite some time. It is this natural combination of genes which has now been patented by Monsanto as an "invention"."
This patent needs to be challenged on the following grounds :
The traits of low elasticity, low gluten which are being patented are not an invention, but derived from an Indian variety. The crossing with a soft milling variety is an obvious step to any breeder. The patent is based on piracy, not on non-obvious novelty, and hence needs to be challenged to stop legal precedence being created on false claims to invention.
The broad scope of the patent covering products made with Indian wheat robs Indian food processes and biscuit manufacturers of their legitimate export market and could in future affect our domestic food sovereignty. The Governments 2020 vision refers to making India a "global food factory".
However if Monsanto has the patent based on piracy of Indian wheat, India's "food factory" will be controlled by Monsanto, not Indian food processors and producers. The governments policy if it has to be successful, must have the Monsanto patent revoked in order to bring market benefits for our unique food products to the country's producers - both farmers and food processors.
With an estimated annual turnover of US$ 1.5 billion, the baking industry in India is one of the largest manufacturing sectors in India, production of which has been increasing steadily in the country. The two major bakery industries, viz. Bread and biscuit account for about 82 percent of the total bakery products. With overall annual growth estimated at 6.9%. According to ASSOCHAM India, a business support services firm, there are almost 85,000 bakeries in the country. Approximately 75,000 of these operate in the unorganised sector, which has a 60% market share. The remaining 1,000 bakeries operate in the organised sector, which has a 40% market share.
Packaged Food in India, a recently released report from Euromonitor, recorded year 2000 volume sales of the organised biscuit sector at 500,000 MT, or approximately US$492 million in value terms. The unorganised sector, which supplies 60% of total production, has an annual turnover of nearly US$718 million. If combined, the two sectors would bring overall biscuit sales to more than US$ 1.2 billion annually, or 1.3 MMT, making India the world's second largest biscuit manufacturer and consumer behind the US.
Further, the patent covers not just biscuits but all edible products and flours with low elasticity. India Chapatis are in effect covered by the patent.
If such biopiracy based patents are not challenged, and crop lines and products based on unique properties evolved through indigenous breeding become the monopoly of MNC's, in future we will be paying royalties for our innovations especially in light of the Patent Cooperation Treat and upward harmonization of patent law.
Monsanto's wheat biopiracy patent should be a wake up call to citizens and governments of the world. It is yet another example of why the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS) of W.T.O needs to be changed, and why traditional knowledge and community rights need to be legally recognized and protected.
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Beyond extraction conference -free
Please share the webpage and
invite people to join the Facebook group of
the
conference. The program is also attached, as well as an email to
forward to your network if we haven't already done so (it went out to
some programs already).
Also, please register for the conference if you plan to join by writing beyondextraction@gmail.com.
On Saturday night, there is also an awesome Cree singer coming, Mama D. Social event starts at 8PM and will be at Avant Garde.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Dirty Old Man
You
can vote ONCE PER DAY from multiple
devices (computers, smart phones, ipads, etc.), and of course, if you
feel inclined to share the link on your facebook pages, we would be
extra, extra grateful! Voting ends on Sunday at midnight. All you have
to do is click on this link and your vote will be
cast automatically!
Thanks everyone!
All the best,
AmeliaMonday, March 4, 2013
Alexander Von Humboldt
By: Jeffrey
Lee
 |
| Self-portrait |
Baron
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was one of the last true generalists in
science. While generally considered a geographer, he contributed to most
of the sciences of the natural environment found today. Born in Berlin,
von Humboldt’s father was Chamberlain to the King, a royal advisor, who died
when Alexander was nine years old. As a child, he received a private education
and was a slow learner and sickly much of the time. On his own, though,
he loved collecting local plants and animals and reading books on foreign
travel and adventure. He also loved to draw, mostly landscapes.
Typical of the time, science was not part of his schooling; Humboldt was
generally self taught in that area. At sixteen, he attended some lectures
on physics and philosophy by a local doctor and then he decided to pursue a
career in science.
Humboldt attended several universities, but never for very long. His mother wanted him to get a job with the Prussian Civil Service and to appease her he ended up at the Hamburg School of Commerce. There he studied intensely for his courses and with equal intensity his other interests in geology, botany and languages. He developed a liberal approach to politics and a visit to Paris in 1790, while the ideals of the French Revolution were still apparent, confirmed his convictions.
In 1791 he got a position with the Prussian Academy of Industry and Mines, where he was given a thorough education in geology at the Freiberg Mining Academy. A. G. Werner, one of the leading geologists of the day, was one of his instructors. His job with the Bureau of Mines gave him ample opportunity to travel and do scientific investigations. Some of his studies were mining related but his wide interests led him to do research on many topics in his spare time. (Throughout his life, he typically slept only three or four hours per night.) He published an exhaustive study on electrical effects on nerves and muscles, though his conclusions were quickly shown to be incorrect by the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, namesake of the unit ‘volt’. His botanical work, however, brought him lasting acclaim in the scientific world. He became good friends with Goethe, the leading intellectual of Germany. While best known for his poetry and plays, Goethe was also a statesman and scientist. The two learned much from each other.
Humboldt’s mother died in 1796 and he was left a respectable fortune. He resigned his mining job and set out to go exploring. He was to join a British expedition to the Nile, but Napoleon invaded Egypt. Then he was set to join a French voyage around the world, but war with Austria broke out and the government withdrew the funds. While preparing for this voyage, though, he met Aimé Bonpland, a French botanist. The two became good friends and decided to set out on their own expedition at Humboldt’s expense. They convinced the King and Queen of Spain to allow them to visit the Spanish American Colonies, where few foreigners were welcome. The two sailed to the New World with a collection of the best scientific instruments Humboldt could buy. As he said in a letter, “I shall try to find out how the forces of nature interact upon one another and how the geographic environment influences plant and animal life. In other words, I must find out about the unity of nature.”
Humboldt and Bonpland spent five years in the New World. In 1799 they arrived in Venezuela. They explored the Orinoco and Rio Negro Rivers in that colony, mapping and collecting natural history specimens in the rainforest. Next they traveled in the Andes Mountains in Columbia, Ecuador and Peru. They spent several months in the city of Quito, mostly exploring the local volcanoes. Humboldt and Bonpland climbed Chimborazo, then thought to be the highest mountain in the world at 6300 meters. Humboldt and Bonpland only reached 5900 meters, but that was far higher than any known human had ever been. This feat brought international attention to Humboldt as an adventurer. (Bonpland never received the accolades that Humboldt did, presumably because Humboldt was the leader of the expedition.) Humboldt’s observations in the volcanic region led him to argue forcefully that volcanic activity is a major force in mountain building, a concept not commonly understood at the time. He also made the observation that altitude and latitude play similar roles in controlling plant types: at the base of the Andes is tropical rainforest, while at the top is tundra-type vegetation. They then spent a year in Mexico, traveling and studying the geography, economics and politics of that colony. While sailing from Peru to Mexico, Humboldt took careful measurements of the ocean current there, now known as the Humboldt Current.
Humboldt attended several universities, but never for very long. His mother wanted him to get a job with the Prussian Civil Service and to appease her he ended up at the Hamburg School of Commerce. There he studied intensely for his courses and with equal intensity his other interests in geology, botany and languages. He developed a liberal approach to politics and a visit to Paris in 1790, while the ideals of the French Revolution were still apparent, confirmed his convictions.
In 1791 he got a position with the Prussian Academy of Industry and Mines, where he was given a thorough education in geology at the Freiberg Mining Academy. A. G. Werner, one of the leading geologists of the day, was one of his instructors. His job with the Bureau of Mines gave him ample opportunity to travel and do scientific investigations. Some of his studies were mining related but his wide interests led him to do research on many topics in his spare time. (Throughout his life, he typically slept only three or four hours per night.) He published an exhaustive study on electrical effects on nerves and muscles, though his conclusions were quickly shown to be incorrect by the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, namesake of the unit ‘volt’. His botanical work, however, brought him lasting acclaim in the scientific world. He became good friends with Goethe, the leading intellectual of Germany. While best known for his poetry and plays, Goethe was also a statesman and scientist. The two learned much from each other.
Humboldt’s mother died in 1796 and he was left a respectable fortune. He resigned his mining job and set out to go exploring. He was to join a British expedition to the Nile, but Napoleon invaded Egypt. Then he was set to join a French voyage around the world, but war with Austria broke out and the government withdrew the funds. While preparing for this voyage, though, he met Aimé Bonpland, a French botanist. The two became good friends and decided to set out on their own expedition at Humboldt’s expense. They convinced the King and Queen of Spain to allow them to visit the Spanish American Colonies, where few foreigners were welcome. The two sailed to the New World with a collection of the best scientific instruments Humboldt could buy. As he said in a letter, “I shall try to find out how the forces of nature interact upon one another and how the geographic environment influences plant and animal life. In other words, I must find out about the unity of nature.”
Humboldt and Bonpland spent five years in the New World. In 1799 they arrived in Venezuela. They explored the Orinoco and Rio Negro Rivers in that colony, mapping and collecting natural history specimens in the rainforest. Next they traveled in the Andes Mountains in Columbia, Ecuador and Peru. They spent several months in the city of Quito, mostly exploring the local volcanoes. Humboldt and Bonpland climbed Chimborazo, then thought to be the highest mountain in the world at 6300 meters. Humboldt and Bonpland only reached 5900 meters, but that was far higher than any known human had ever been. This feat brought international attention to Humboldt as an adventurer. (Bonpland never received the accolades that Humboldt did, presumably because Humboldt was the leader of the expedition.) Humboldt’s observations in the volcanic region led him to argue forcefully that volcanic activity is a major force in mountain building, a concept not commonly understood at the time. He also made the observation that altitude and latitude play similar roles in controlling plant types: at the base of the Andes is tropical rainforest, while at the top is tundra-type vegetation. They then spent a year in Mexico, traveling and studying the geography, economics and politics of that colony. While sailing from Peru to Mexico, Humboldt took careful measurements of the ocean current there, now known as the Humboldt Current.
Before returning to Europe in 1804, they visited the young United States. In Philadelphia they were treated warmly by the American Philosophical Society, the leading scientific organization in the country. They also stayed with President Thomas Jefferson in Washington D.C., a small town still under construction. Humboldt and Jefferson shared a love of science and had similar political philosophies. Dolly Madison, wife of then Secretary of State James Madison, said of Humboldt: “We have lately had a great treat in the company of a charming Prussian Baron von Humboldt. All the ladies say they are in love with him…. He is the most polite, modest, well-informed and interesting traveler we have ever met, and is much pleased with America.”
In their five year journey, Humboldt and Bonpland traveled 10000 kilometers through difficult terrain. They returned with over 60000 plant specimens, along with geological, ethnographic and zoological collections. In addition, they had a wealth of astronomical, oceanographic, meteorological and magnetic observations and they corrected the latitude and longitude positions of many geographic features.
Humboldt returned as a grand celebrity in Europe, especially Paris where he lived. He worked on publications and socialized much, and he wrote between one and two thousand letters each year. Napoleon never trusted the Prussian Humboldt and the secret police watched him and broke into his home often to copy his papers (with quill pen and ink!). In spite of this, Paris was the intellectual center Humboldt required and he lived there for twenty-five years after his return from the Americas. Humboldt never married and it is generally assumed that he was homosexual. This is based on some love letters he wrote as a young man and the many close relationships he had with men throughout his life.
The publications resulting from the American expedition took thirty years to complete. The thirty volumes of [[Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland ]]are a mix of scientific results, geographic and economic studies, and travel/adventure books. He often worked with experts in various fields on the scientific volumes. Humboldt wrote on climatology, geology, ecology, biogeography, economic geography, oceanography, ethnography, and history. Bringing the books to fruition broke Humboldt financially; he had to pay for the artists who illustrated them along with the engravings and general printing costs. Sales of the necessarily pricey books never made up for the expenses.
Bonpland participated in some of the botanical work, but while he was a superb field scientist, he was generally incompetent at desk work. He became superintendent of gardens for Empress Josephine, had a short marriage, and in 1816 he returned to South America. He worked as a professor in Argentina and while on an expedition to an area disputed by Argentina and Paraguay, the Paraguayans took him prisoner. They held him for nine years, despite Humboldt’s diplomatic efforts to get his friend released. Later, Bonpland settled in Uruguay and seems to have led a happy life living in a mud hut, doing botanical work, and raising children until he died at age 85. After Humboldt and Bonpland returned to France in 1804, the French government awarded Bonpland a 3000 franc pension as thanks for his achievements; each year Humboldt made sure that it was sent to his friend in South America.
In 1827 Humboldt left Paris for Berlin, serving as Chamberlain to the King of Prussia, Frederick William III. One of his duties was to report on cultural and scientific matters. Though he got along well with the King, the liberal Humboldt was never truly welcomed at the mostly reactionary Royal Court. In Berlin, he gave a six month series of university lectures on physical geography. These proved so popular that he gave another series to the public at a local concert hall. His main purpose was to show that science was a better way to learn about nature. The Romantic Movement in Germany led to ‘natural philosophers’ who felt that intuition was the best route to understanding, not cold empiricism. Humboldt showed that science was the more effective approach to knowledge on empirical matters.
Humboldt tried for years to make another scientific expedition, preferably to Asia. In 1829 he was granted permission to travel in Russia for six months. Tsar Nicholas I paid for the trip, hoping that Humboldt’s assessment of mining in the Ural Mountains would prove valuable. Zoologist C. G. E. Ehrenberg and Gustav Rose, a chemist and minerologist, joined the sixty year old Humboldt on the trip. They spent a month in the Urals, then moved on to Siberia. After reaching the Chinese border, they returned to Moscow via the Caspian Sea. In the six months they traveled over 15000 kilometers within Russia, some by river but most by carriage. The scholarly work produced by the Siberian Expedition was far less extensive than Humboldt’s American work and he left the writing to Ehrenberg and Rose. They produced a three volume geography of Central Asia.
Humboldt and his friend, mathematician Karl Gauss, set out to organize a global network of magnetic and meteorological monitoring stations. He used his new contacts in Russia to set up stations across that country and Gauss convinced European governments to do the same. Humboldt convinced the British to set up stations throughout their Empire and the United States already had a similar network in operation. This was the first large scale international scientific collaboration and it resulted in many advances in knowledge of magnetic and meteorological phenomena.
Humboldt’s lectures on physical geography in 1828 inspired him to write a monumental work on nature. Cosmos, Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe took twenty five years to write. (Using Humboldt’s notes, the fifth and final volume was finished after he died.) He used all of the sciences to explain everything from the Milky Way Galaxy to microscopic organisms. Much of it he could illustrate with his own studies. More than an encyclopedia, Cosmos showed nature as a whole, not a series of unconnected parts. It also showed science to be intellectually exciting. The work was well received throughout Europe and the USA.
In 1859, a few months shy of his ninetieth birthday, Humboldt died. He was given an elaborate state funeral.
Alexander von Humboldt is sometimes criticized for being too general, not focusing on one discipline. But few scientists can match his contributions to knowledge in any one of the dozens of phenomena he studied. Among his pioneering contributions are:
- Anthropology: Insightful observations on Native American ethnography and Inca history. He was the first to suggest an Asiatic origin of Native Americans.
- Astronomy: He helped show the periodicity of meteor showers.
- Botany: Bonpland and Humboldt identified 3500 new species of American plants.
- Climatology: He was the first to extensively map temperatures across continents.
- History: He made a detailed history of the early exploration of the Americas and discovered how ‘America’ became the name of the two continents.
- Human Geography: He showed the connections between the natural environment and the course of nations.
- Geology: Humboldt showed that volcanic activity is an important factor in mountain building and he suggested that volcanoes can be associated with subterranean fault systems.
- Geophysics: Alone and with mathematician Karl Gauss, he studied variations in Earth’s magnetism across the globe.
- Meteorology: With chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, he measured the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
- Oceanography: Humboldt studied the physical properties of ocean waters.
- Physiology: He studied electrical effects on nerves and muscles and the effects of altitude on humans.
- Plant Geography and Ecology: He pioneered the concepts of environmental influences on plants.
Perhaps more important than his individual contributions, Humboldt showed, especially in Cosmos, the unity of nature. Few before or since could view the natural world on such a grand scale.
(Note: this biography was originally published in Focus on Geography, v. 46, no. 3 (2001), p. 29-30 and is reprinted here with permission of the American Geographical Society.)
Von Humboldt, Alexander
This article has been reviewed by the following Topic Editor: Peter Saundry
![Self portrait of Alexander von Humboldt, 1814. (Source: <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/article/File:AvHumboldt.jpg' class='external free' title='http://en.wikipedia.org/article/File:AvHumboldt.jpg' rel='nofollow'>http://en.wikipedia.org/article/File:AvHumboldt.jpg</a>])](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tJJHEPHa1HOucE0zghu9Aru5foz2V3CiqC-DOnJQ-bpTiCBdH4quOS_h-R-aI40Y9v58GBg0pabqYps6AYeY-wQxqjUfJm0QgJUQqaRiJZA4IcZmRYrkBFTMhTq_zWkMLqY2FqSXdNxg=s0-d)
Self portrait of Alexander von Humboldt, 1814. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/article/File:AvHumboldt.jpg])
Humboldt attended several universities, but never for very long. His mother wanted him to get a job with the Prussian Civil Service and to appease her he ended up at the Hamburg School of Commerce. There he studied intensely for his courses and with equal intensity his other interests in geology, botany and languages. He developed a liberal approach to politics and a visit to Paris in 1790, while the ideals of the French Revolution were still apparent, confirmed his convictions.
In 1791 he got a position with the Prussian Academy of Industry and Mines, where he was given a thorough education in geology at the Freiberg Mining Academy. A. G. Werner, one of the leading geologists of the day, was one of his instructors. His job with the Bureau of Mines gave him ample opportunity to travel and do scientific investigations. Some of his studies were mining related but his wide interests led him to do research on many topics in his spare time. (Throughout his life, he typically slept only three or four hours per night.) He published an exhaustive study on electrical effects on nerves and muscles, though his conclusions were quickly shown to be incorrect by the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, namesake of the unit ‘volt’. His botanical work, however, brought him lasting acclaim in the scientific world. He became good friends with Goethe, the leading intellectual of Germany. While best known for his poetry and plays, Goethe was also a statesman and scientist. The two learned much from each other.
Humboldt’s mother died in 1796 and he was left a respectable fortune. He resigned his mining job and set out to go exploring. He was to join a British expedition to the Nile, but Napoleon invaded Egypt. Then he was set to join a French voyage around the world, but war with Austria broke out and the government withdrew the funds. While preparing for this voyage, though, he met Aimé Bonpland, a French botanist. The two became good friends and decided to set out on their own expedition at Humboldt’s expense. They convinced the King and Queen of Spain to allow them to visit the Spanish American Colonies, where few foreigners were welcome. The two sailed to the New World with a collection of the best scientific instruments Humboldt could buy. As he said in a letter, “I shall try to find out how the forces of nature interact upon one another and how the geographic environment influences plant and animal life. In other words, I must find out about the unity of nature.”
Humboldt and Bonpland spent five years in the New World. In 1799 they arrived in Venezuela. They explored the Orinoco and Rio Negro Rivers in that colony, mapping and collecting natural history specimens in the rainforest. Next they traveled in the Andes Mountains in Columbia, Ecuador and Peru. They spent several months in the city of Quito, mostly exploring the local volcanoes. Humboldt and Bonpland climbed Chimborazo, then thought to be the highest mountain in the world at 6300 meters. Humboldt and Bonpland only reached 5900 meters, but that was far higher than any known human had ever been. This feat brought international attention to Humboldt as an adventurer. (Bonpland never received the accolades that Humboldt did, presumably because Humboldt was the leader of the expedition.) Humboldt’s observations in the volcanic region led him to argue forcefully that volcanic activity is a major force in mountain building, a concept not commonly understood at the time. He also made the observation that altitude and latitude play similar roles in controlling plant types: at the base of the Andes is tropical rainforest, while at the top is tundra-type vegetation. They then spent a year in Mexico, traveling and studying the geography, economics and politics of that colony. While sailing from Peru to Mexico, Humboldt took careful measurements of the ocean current there, now known as the Humboldt Current.
Before returning to Europe in 1804, they visited the young United States. In Philadelphia they were treated warmly by the American Philosophical Society, the leading scientific organization in the country. They also stayed with President Thomas Jefferson in Washington D.C., a small town still under construction. Humboldt and Jefferson shared a love of science and had similar political philosophies. Dolly Madison, wife of then Secretary of State James Madison, said of Humboldt: “We have lately had a great treat in the company of a charming Prussian Baron von Humboldt. All the ladies say they are in love with him…. He is the most polite, modest, well-informed and interesting traveler we have ever met, and is much pleased with America.”
In their five year journey, Humboldt and Bonpland traveled 10000 kilometers through difficult terrain. They returned with over 60000 plant specimens, along with geological, ethnographic and zoological collections. In addition, they had a wealth of astronomical, oceanographic, meteorological and magnetic observations and they corrected the latitude and longitude positions of many geographic features.
Humboldt returned as a grand celebrity in Europe, especially Paris where he lived. He worked on publications and socialized much, and he wrote between one and two thousand letters each year. Napoleon never trusted the Prussian Humboldt and the secret police watched him and broke into his home often to copy his papers (with quill pen and ink!). In spite of this, Paris was the intellectual center Humboldt required and he lived there for twenty-five years after his return from the Americas. Humboldt never married and it is generally assumed that he was homosexual. This is based on some love letters he wrote as a young man and the many close relationships he had with men throughout his life.
The publications resulting from the American expedition took thirty years to complete. The thirty volumes of [[Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland ]]are a mix of scientific results, geographic and economic studies, and travel/adventure books. He often worked with experts in various fields on the scientific volumes. Humboldt wrote on climatology, geology, ecology, biogeography, economic geography, oceanography, ethnography, and history. Bringing the books to fruition broke Humboldt financially; he had to pay for the artists who illustrated them along with the engravings and general printing costs. Sales of the necessarily pricey books never made up for the expenses.
Bonpland participated in some of the botanical work, but while he was a superb field scientist, he was generally incompetent at desk work. He became superintendent of gardens for Empress Josephine, had a short marriage, and in 1816 he returned to South America. He worked as a professor in Argentina and while on an expedition to an area disputed by Argentina and Paraguay, the Paraguayans took him prisoner. They held him for nine years, despite Humboldt’s diplomatic efforts to get his friend released. Later, Bonpland settled in Uruguay and seems to have led a happy life living in a mud hut, doing botanical work, and raising children until he died at age 85. After Humboldt and Bonpland returned to France in 1804, the French government awarded Bonpland a 3000 franc pension as thanks for his achievements; each year Humboldt made sure that it was sent to his friend in South America.
In 1827 Humboldt left Paris for Berlin, serving as Chamberlain to the King of Prussia, Frederick William III. One of his duties was to report on cultural and scientific matters. Though he got along well with the King, the liberal Humboldt was never truly welcomed at the mostly reactionary Royal Court. In Berlin, he gave a six month series of university lectures on physical geography. These proved so popular that he gave another series to the public at a local concert hall. His main purpose was to show that science was a better way to learn about nature. The Romantic Movement in Germany led to ‘natural philosophers’ who felt that intuition was the best route to understanding, not cold empiricism. Humboldt showed that science was the more effective approach to knowledge on empirical matters.
Humboldt tried for years to make another scientific expedition, preferably to Asia. In 1829 he was granted permission to travel in Russia for six months. Tsar Nicholas I paid for the trip, hoping that Humboldt’s assessment of mining in the Ural Mountains would prove valuable. Zoologist C. G. E. Ehrenberg and Gustav Rose, a chemist and minerologist, joined the sixty year old Humboldt on the trip. They spent a month in the Urals, then moved on to Siberia. After reaching the Chinese border, they returned to Moscow via the Caspian Sea. In the six months they traveled over 15000 kilometers within Russia, some by river but most by carriage. The scholarly work produced by the Siberian Expedition was far less extensive than Humboldt’s American work and he left the writing to Ehrenberg and Rose. They produced a three volume geography of Central Asia.
Humboldt and his friend, mathematician Karl Gauss, set out to organize a global network of magnetic and meteorological monitoring stations. He used his new contacts in Russia to set up stations across that country and Gauss convinced European governments to do the same. Humboldt convinced the British to set up stations throughout their Empire and the United States already had a similar network in operation. This was the first large scale international scientific collaboration and it resulted in many advances in knowledge of magnetic and meteorological phenomena.
Humboldt’s lectures on physical geography in 1828 inspired him to write a monumental work on nature. Cosmos, Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe took twenty five years to write. (Using Humboldt’s notes, the fifth and final volume was finished after he died.) He used all of the sciences to explain everything from the Milky Way Galaxy to microscopic organisms. Much of it he could illustrate with his own studies. More than an encyclopedia, Cosmos showed nature as a whole, not a series of unconnected parts. It also showed science to be intellectually exciting. The work was well received throughout Europe and the USA.
In 1859, a few months shy of his ninetieth birthday, Humboldt died. He was given an elaborate state funeral.
Alexander von Humboldt is sometimes criticized for being too general, not focusing on one discipline. But few scientists can match his contributions to knowledge in any one of the dozens of phenomena he studied. Among his pioneering contributions are:
- Anthropology: Insightful observations on Native American ethnography and Inca history. He was the first to suggest an Asiatic origin of Native Americans.
- Astronomy: He helped show the periodicity of meteor showers.
- Botany: Bonpland and Humboldt identified 3500 new species of American plants.
- Climatology: He was the first to extensively map temperatures across continents.
- History: He made a detailed history of the early exploration of the Americas and discovered how ‘America’ became the name of the two continents.
- Human Geography: He showed the connections between the natural environment and the course of nations.
- Geology: Humboldt showed that volcanic activity is an important factor in mountain building and he suggested that volcanoes can be associated with subterranean fault systems.
- Geophysics: Alone and with mathematician Karl Gauss, he studied variations in Earth’s magnetism across the globe.
- Meteorology: With chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, he measured the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
- Oceanography: Humboldt studied the physical properties of ocean waters.
- Physiology: He studied electrical effects on nerves and muscles and the effects of altitude on humans.
- Plant Geography and Ecology: He pioneered the concepts of environmental influences on plants.
Perhaps more important than his individual contributions, Humboldt showed, especially in Cosmos, the unity of nature. Few before or since could view the natural world on such a grand scale.
(Note: this biography was originally published in Focus on Geography, v. 46, no. 3 (2001), p. 29-30 and is reprinted here with permission of the American Geographical Society.)
Von Humboldt, Alexander
This article has been reviewed by the following Topic Editor: Peter Saundry
Self portrait of Alexander von Humboldt, 1814. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/article/File:AvHumboldt.jpg])
Humboldt attended several universities, but never for very long. His mother wanted him to get a job with the Prussian Civil Service and to appease her he ended up at the Hamburg School of Commerce. There he studied intensely for his courses and with equal intensity his other interests in geology, botany and languages. He developed a liberal approach to politics and a visit to Paris in 1790, while the ideals of the French Revolution were still apparent, confirmed his convictions.
In 1791 he got a position with the Prussian Academy of Industry and Mines, where he was given a thorough education in geology at the Freiberg Mining Academy. A. G. Werner, one of the leading geologists of the day, was one of his instructors. His job with the Bureau of Mines gave him ample opportunity to travel and do scientific investigations. Some of his studies were mining related but his wide interests led him to do research on many topics in his spare time. (Throughout his life, he typically slept only three or four hours per night.) He published an exhaustive study on electrical effects on nerves and muscles, though his conclusions were quickly shown to be incorrect by the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, namesake of the unit ‘volt’. His botanical work, however, brought him lasting acclaim in the scientific world. He became good friends with Goethe, the leading intellectual of Germany. While best known for his poetry and plays, Goethe was also a statesman and scientist. The two learned much from each other.
Humboldt’s mother died in 1796 and he was left a respectable fortune. He resigned his mining job and set out to go exploring. He was to join a British expedition to the Nile, but Napoleon invaded Egypt. Then he was set to join a French voyage around the world, but war with Austria broke out and the government withdrew the funds. While preparing for this voyage, though, he met Aimé Bonpland, a French botanist. The two became good friends and decided to set out on their own expedition at Humboldt’s expense. They convinced the King and Queen of Spain to allow them to visit the Spanish American Colonies, where few foreigners were welcome. The two sailed to the New World with a collection of the best scientific instruments Humboldt could buy. As he said in a letter, “I shall try to find out how the forces of nature interact upon one another and how the geographic environment influences plant and animal life. In other words, I must find out about the unity of nature.”
Humboldt and Bonpland spent five years in the New World. In 1799 they arrived in Venezuela. They explored the Orinoco and Rio Negro Rivers in that colony, mapping and collecting natural history specimens in the rainforest. Next they traveled in the Andes Mountains in Columbia, Ecuador and Peru. They spent several months in the city of Quito, mostly exploring the local volcanoes. Humboldt and Bonpland climbed Chimborazo, then thought to be the highest mountain in the world at 6300 meters. Humboldt and Bonpland only reached 5900 meters, but that was far higher than any known human had ever been. This feat brought international attention to Humboldt as an adventurer. (Bonpland never received the accolades that Humboldt did, presumably because Humboldt was the leader of the expedition.) Humboldt’s observations in the volcanic region led him to argue forcefully that volcanic activity is a major force in mountain building, a concept not commonly understood at the time. He also made the observation that altitude and latitude play similar roles in controlling plant types: at the base of the Andes is tropical rainforest, while at the top is tundra-type vegetation. They then spent a year in Mexico, traveling and studying the geography, economics and politics of that colony. While sailing from Peru to Mexico, Humboldt took careful measurements of the ocean current there, now known as the Humboldt Current.
Before returning to Europe in 1804, they visited the young United States. In Philadelphia they were treated warmly by the American Philosophical Society, the leading scientific organization in the country. They also stayed with President Thomas Jefferson in Washington D.C., a small town still under construction. Humboldt and Jefferson shared a love of science and had similar political philosophies. Dolly Madison, wife of then Secretary of State James Madison, said of Humboldt: “We have lately had a great treat in the company of a charming Prussian Baron von Humboldt. All the ladies say they are in love with him…. He is the most polite, modest, well-informed and interesting traveler we have ever met, and is much pleased with America.”
In their five year journey, Humboldt and Bonpland traveled 10000 kilometers through difficult terrain. They returned with over 60000 plant specimens, along with geological, ethnographic and zoological collections. In addition, they had a wealth of astronomical, oceanographic, meteorological and magnetic observations and they corrected the latitude and longitude positions of many geographic features.
Humboldt returned as a grand celebrity in Europe, especially Paris where he lived. He worked on publications and socialized much, and he wrote between one and two thousand letters each year. Napoleon never trusted the Prussian Humboldt and the secret police watched him and broke into his home often to copy his papers (with quill pen and ink!). In spite of this, Paris was the intellectual center Humboldt required and he lived there for twenty-five years after his return from the Americas. Humboldt never married and it is generally assumed that he was homosexual. This is based on some love letters he wrote as a young man and the many close relationships he had with men throughout his life.
The publications resulting from the American expedition took thirty years to complete. The thirty volumes of [[Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland ]]are a mix of scientific results, geographic and economic studies, and travel/adventure books. He often worked with experts in various fields on the scientific volumes. Humboldt wrote on climatology, geology, ecology, biogeography, economic geography, oceanography, ethnography, and history. Bringing the books to fruition broke Humboldt financially; he had to pay for the artists who illustrated them along with the engravings and general printing costs. Sales of the necessarily pricey books never made up for the expenses.
Bonpland participated in some of the botanical work, but while he was a superb field scientist, he was generally incompetent at desk work. He became superintendent of gardens for Empress Josephine, had a short marriage, and in 1816 he returned to South America. He worked as a professor in Argentina and while on an expedition to an area disputed by Argentina and Paraguay, the Paraguayans took him prisoner. They held him for nine years, despite Humboldt’s diplomatic efforts to get his friend released. Later, Bonpland settled in Uruguay and seems to have led a happy life living in a mud hut, doing botanical work, and raising children until he died at age 85. After Humboldt and Bonpland returned to France in 1804, the French government awarded Bonpland a 3000 franc pension as thanks for his achievements; each year Humboldt made sure that it was sent to his friend in South America.
In 1827 Humboldt left Paris for Berlin, serving as Chamberlain to the King of Prussia, Frederick William III. One of his duties was to report on cultural and scientific matters. Though he got along well with the King, the liberal Humboldt was never truly welcomed at the mostly reactionary Royal Court. In Berlin, he gave a six month series of university lectures on physical geography. These proved so popular that he gave another series to the public at a local concert hall. His main purpose was to show that science was a better way to learn about nature. The Romantic Movement in Germany led to ‘natural philosophers’ who felt that intuition was the best route to understanding, not cold empiricism. Humboldt showed that science was the more effective approach to knowledge on empirical matters.
Humboldt tried for years to make another scientific expedition, preferably to Asia. In 1829 he was granted permission to travel in Russia for six months. Tsar Nicholas I paid for the trip, hoping that Humboldt’s assessment of mining in the Ural Mountains would prove valuable. Zoologist C. G. E. Ehrenberg and Gustav Rose, a chemist and minerologist, joined the sixty year old Humboldt on the trip. They spent a month in the Urals, then moved on to Siberia. After reaching the Chinese border, they returned to Moscow via the Caspian Sea. In the six months they traveled over 15000 kilometers within Russia, some by river but most by carriage. The scholarly work produced by the Siberian Expedition was far less extensive than Humboldt’s American work and he left the writing to Ehrenberg and Rose. They produced a three volume geography of Central Asia.
Humboldt and his friend, mathematician Karl Gauss, set out to organize a global network of magnetic and meteorological monitoring stations. He used his new contacts in Russia to set up stations across that country and Gauss convinced European governments to do the same. Humboldt convinced the British to set up stations throughout their Empire and the United States already had a similar network in operation. This was the first large scale international scientific collaboration and it resulted in many advances in knowledge of magnetic and meteorological phenomena.
Humboldt’s lectures on physical geography in 1828 inspired him to write a monumental work on nature. Cosmos, Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe took twenty five years to write. (Using Humboldt’s notes, the fifth and final volume was finished after he died.) He used all of the sciences to explain everything from the Milky Way Galaxy to microscopic organisms. Much of it he could illustrate with his own studies. More than an encyclopedia, Cosmos showed nature as a whole, not a series of unconnected parts. It also showed science to be intellectually exciting. The work was well received throughout Europe and the USA.
In 1859, a few months shy of his ninetieth birthday, Humboldt died. He was given an elaborate state funeral.
Alexander von Humboldt is sometimes criticized for being too general, not focusing on one discipline. But few scientists can match his contributions to knowledge in any one of the dozens of phenomena he studied. Among his pioneering contributions are:
- Anthropology: Insightful observations on Native American ethnography and Inca history. He was the first to suggest an Asiatic origin of Native Americans.
- Astronomy: He helped show the periodicity of meteor showers.
- Botany: Bonpland and Humboldt identified 3500 new species of American plants.
- Climatology: He was the first to extensively map temperatures across continents.
- History: He made a detailed history of the early exploration of the Americas and discovered how ‘America’ became the name of the two continents.
- Human Geography: He showed the connections between the natural environment and the course of nations.
- Geology: Humboldt showed that volcanic activity is an important factor in mountain building and he suggested that volcanoes can be associated with subterranean fault systems.
- Geophysics: Alone and with mathematician Karl Gauss, he studied variations in Earth’s magnetism across the globe.
- Meteorology: With chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, he measured the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
- Oceanography: Humboldt studied the physical properties of ocean waters.
- Physiology: He studied electrical effects on nerves and muscles and the effects of altitude on humans.
- Plant Geography and Ecology: He pioneered the concepts of environmental influences on plants.
Perhaps more important than his individual contributions, Humboldt showed, especially in Cosmos, the unity of nature. Few before or since could view the natural world on such a grand scale.
(Note: this biography was originally published in Focus on Geography, v. 46, no. 3 (2001), p. 29-30 and is reprinted here with permission of the American Geographical Society.)
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