Book completed

[eve_prime]

The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, by Laura Dassow Wells. Humboldt is certainly one of the most interesting people of the past two centuries. Last year I read a book about him by Andrea Wulf. This book is also about him, of course, but it's much more about his thought and the people he influenced than about Humboldt as a person. Humboldt was hugely celebrated in the mid 1800s - on the 100th anniversary of his birth, cities across the United States had major civic events in his honor - but he's been largely forgotten today. The importance of Humboldt's work as an explorer and scientist was his vision for both the interconnectedness of all of the sciences and for their importance as human practices, because it's not possible to be totally objective, and because it's important to understand how science and the natural world affects us and how we affect each other. In other words, Humboldt was the first ecologist.