In Business, Creating Sustainable Enterprises & Communities

COSMOS

In Business, January-February, 2006, Vol. 28, No. 1, p. 31

SUSTAINABLE COMMERCE

Robert F. Young

ONE HUNDRED and fifty years ago, Alexander von Humboldt was immersed in writing his life's work. In this five volume opus, titled Cosmos, von Humboldt sought to compose all that science knew about the universe. Encompassing the spectrum of life, from astronomy to microbiology, Cosmos attempted to display, as if in a great landscape painting, not only the individual expressions, but the unitary wholeness of creation.
Von Humboldt was the man for such a task. Known in his day as the world's greatest scientist and referred to today as the “last universal man”, von Humboldt was versed in all the branches of the emerging experimental sciences. A traveler of great renown, he had explored the planet from the Andes to the Amazon to the steppes of Siberia. His experiments and research established the modern foundations of ecology, geography, meteorology, plate tectonics, planetary magnetism, and accurate cartography. He coined the terms “isothermal lines” and “Jurassic”, among others, and it was in his honor that Humboldt County, California and the Humboldt Current off the coast of Peru, along with a host of other communities and geographic features, received their names.
He was friends and colleagues with every great person of the Enlightenment from Thomas Jefferson (with whom he spent 3 weeks as a guest at Monticello discussing natural history and revolution) to Goethe and inspired a new generation of scientists such as Charles Darwin, to delve further into the delights of science.
His fame was such that it rivaled Napoleon's (they were the same age) and the General made his displeasure of any equal known the one time they met. Yet it is in the juxtaposition of these two imposing figures that the history and future trajectory of a sustainable society can be traced. Each man, in reality and symbolically, represented the possible paths that the modern future did, and still could take.
Napoleon, as is well known, was the master of warfare. Victor in the vast majority of the 60 battles he directed, he established an empire and determined the course of military strategy for a century. Yet this display of power overlay an empty hand when it came to economics. Fueling this juggernaught was the remaining “espirit” of the French Revolution, that had been diverted into the Emperor's wars of expansion, and the looted treasuries and mandated levies of the conquered nations. Like a prairie fire, the imperial economy required fresh territory to exploit to feed its growth while in its wake it left the blackened stubble of war.
Von Humboldt offered a different direction. In his journeys, he came not to conquer new lands but to understand how their particular geography, botany, and economy fit into the world system as a whole. With an eye to the possibilities offered by the unique attributes of each place, Humboldt was able to discern new global economic opportunities in the landscapes of the regions he explored.
In Peru, he calculated that the Incas must have had a powerful fertilizer to support their large urban populations. This insight led to Europe's discovery of guano, bird droppings that are 33 times richer in nutrients than barnyard manure and opened new opportunities for organic soil fertility management. In what was to become Panama, he marked out the path of a transoceanic canal three quarters of a century before it was to be realized in the Panama Canal. With Amie Bonpland in Venezuela and Columbia, he identified over 6,000 new species of plants that had, until then, been unknown to European researchers and offered new possibilities in cross-breeding and crop diversification.
Following the teachings of local natives, he was introduced to natural medicines that provided protection from tropical diseases. Furthermore, he was shown how to make rubber from trees as a sealant and waterproof lining and reflected on the possibilities of what has become known today as agroforestry. Climbing the mountains of Equador, von Humboldt experienced the connection between climate and vegetation through which he was later to establish the field of plant geography and have an immeasurable impact on agriculture.
Each of these discoveries was the result and done in the spirit of an incessant search to comprehend more about the planet of which we are a part. By seeking to understand rather than conquer other cultures and biospheres, intimations of the natural wealth and possibilities of the planet were revealed.
Where Napoleon's failed empire brought on a conservative political backlash, the effects of which are still being felt, Humboldt's efforts laid the foundations for enlightened science and a new conception of the earth. That new concept found its ultimate expression in Cosmos where Alexander von Humboldt laid out the scientific evidence that all the systems of the world, both animate and inanimate, are part of a greater whole, and that the universe was truly that, a unified and creative entirety in which the greatest delight and possibilities could be found.

Robert F. Young is codirector of the Sustainable Business Alliance and runs an organic farm in New York State.