Alexander von Humboldt was the most famous scientist in the world in his lifetime and is now mostly a list of place names. Wulf brings him back: Five years in South America, climbing Chimborazo higher than anyone had gone, and coming down with the idea that the natural world is a single interconnected web — which is where ecology starts. He predicted human-caused climate change in 1800 after seeing what colonial plantations did to a Venezuelan lake. Then the second half traces what he set off in Darwin, Thoreau, Muir, Haeckel, and Marsh. She writes it as an adventure story, which it was.
The Invention of Nature