| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Aaron Sachs. The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism. New York: Viking. 2006. Pp. xii, 496. $25.95.
Aaron Sachs argues that the life and writings of the Prussian explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) demonstrate how exposure to extreme natural settings and immersion in native cultures can engender the kind of humility, egalitarianism, and holism needed to make the environmental movement relevant in a new century marked by rampant ecological destruction and global inequality. Humboldt articulated a "social vision of nature" (p. 346) that emphasized sustainable, democratic use of natural resources, rather than the defensive preservation of disconnected tracts of wilderness. As a result, his work gave rise to what Sachs calls the "Humboldt Current," a powerful intellectual tradition that combines ecological and sociological insights into a "global vision" (p. 87) with a radical political edge.	1
Sachs sets out to challenge the views of postcolonial scholars like Mary Louise Pratt, whose Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992) remains the most influential account of nineteenth-century exploration narratives and their appropriative gaze. Basing his argument on multilingual archival work of the best kind, Sachs reconstructs Humboldt's "radical romanticism" (p. 41), praising his recognition that a "chain of connection" (p. 13) links material phenomena, creating a global "unity in diversity" (p. 52). Sachs maintains that rather than "imposing Western, rationalist, colonialist concepts" on conquered peoples and places, Humboldt's "universal science ... actually revealed the social and ecological damage wrought by colonialism" (p. 13). Humboldt's encyclopedic, self-published monographs, especially Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, 1799–1804 (1814) and Cosmos (1845–1861), examine "humanity's relationship to nature as an explicitly social problem" (p. 45), revealing that the exploitation of humans and nature are two sides of the same coin.	. . .

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