There is a name carved into the geography of South America so many times that it borders on mythology. A current in the Pacific. A mountain. A county. A river. A species of penguin. A species of squid. A vast stretch of Andean cold-water upwelling that feeds one of the richest marine ecosystems on the planet.
The name is Humboldt, and the man behind it was arguably the most important scientist, explorer, and naturalist the world has ever produced.
And yet, outside of scientific circles and the corridors of places like the Alexander von Humboldt Institute in Bogota, his name has faded into something most people vaguely recall from a geography class and quickly forget.
That is a profound cultural loss. Because understanding Humboldt, his journeys, his mind, and his warnings, may be one of the most useful things a person can do right now, in an era when the natural world he spent his life documenting is coming undone at the seams.
Table of Contents
The Last Great Adventurer
Born in Berlin in 1769 into Prussian nobility, Alexander von Humboldt had every reason to live a safe and comfortable life. He had money, connections, and the ear of the European intellectual elite. Instead, he chose the jungle.
In 1799, he sailed from Spain with the French botanist Aimé Bonpland and landed on the coast of what is now Venezuela. What followed over the next five years was one of the most extraordinary feats of scientific exploration in human history.
Humboldt and Bonpland paddled dugout canoes deep into the Orinoco basin, hacking through jungle so dense the sky disappeared. They climbed Chimborazo in Ecuador, then believed to be the world’s highest peak, reaching an altitude of around 19,000 feet without supplemental oxygen and nearly dying in the attempt. They trekked across the Andes, traversed the llanos of Venezuela, and journeyed through what is now Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Cuba, and Mexico.
At every step, Humboldt was measuring, sketching, recording. He carried instruments the way soldiers carry weapons: barometers, chronometers, sextants, compasses, magnetometers. He measured the temperature of rivers and the temperature of air at altitude. He collected thousands of plant specimens, catalogued hundreds of animals, and mapped coastlines and mountain passes and the course of rivers that no European had ever seen.
Think Indiana Jones, if Indiana Jones had been genuinely interested in understanding the world rather than extracting artifacts from it. Humboldt did not take. He observed, absorbed, and synthesized. He nearly drowned, was attacked by electric eels that he deliberately provoked for scientific purposes, survived tropical fevers, and ate things that would make a modern adventurer blanch.
He did it all in service of a single overwhelming obsession: understanding nature as a living, interconnected whole.
The Landscape of a Legacy
To understand how thoroughly Humboldt embedded himself into the identity of South America, you only have to look at a map.
The Humboldt Current runs along the western coast of South America, a cold upwelling from the deep Pacific that moderates the climate of Chile and Peru, drives the fog banks that feed the coastal deserts, and sustains the anchovy fisheries that feed millions.
The Humboldt penguin nests on the rocky shores of that current’s coastline. There are mountain peaks, rivers, lakes, and glaciers across Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru that bear his name. A Humboldt County in California was named during the rush of explorers who followed in his intellectual wake.
The geographer John Leighly calculated that more places on the planet are named after Humboldt than after any other person in history. In South America especially, the density of that naming tells a story about how deeply he entered the consciousness of the continent, not as a conqueror, but as a witness.
Simón Bolívar called him the greatest man since the Flood. That is not a modest compliment. Bolívar liberated a continent. He considered Humboldt the greater figure.
Colombia and the Living Laboratory
Of all the places Humboldt explored, Colombia holds a particular significance. He traveled through what was then known as New Granada in 1801 and 1802, ascending the Andes, tracing the Magdalena River, and spending time in Bogota. He was astonished by what he found. The Colombian highlands, with their extraordinary range of elevation from sea level to nearly 18,000 feet in a matter of miles, compressed an entire world’s worth of ecosystems into a single vertical transect.
Humboldt described this phenomenon in what would become one of his most famous visualisations, the Naturgemälde, or painting of nature. It was a cross-section of Chimborazo showing the distribution of plant species at each altitude, from tropical palms at the base to barren rock and ice at the summit.
It was arguably the first ecological diagram ever made. The idea it expressed, that altitude mimics latitude, that climbing a mountain is like traveling from the equator to the poles, was Humboldt’s insight, and it remains a foundational concept in biogeography today.
His presence in Colombia did not end with his departure. The Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Research on Biological Resources, headquartered in Bogota with facilities in Villa de Leyva, is one of Latin America’s premier scientific institutions. Founded in 1993, it operates as Colombia’s national institute for biodiversity research and serves as the scientific backbone for conservation policy across the country.
The institute carries out research that Humboldt himself would have recognized immediately: documenting species, mapping ecosystems, tracking the health of rivers and forests, connecting biological data to policy decisions. Its scientists work in the páramos, those extraordinary high-altitude wetlands unique to the northern Andes that Humboldt was among the first to describe in scientific terms. They monitor the Chocó, one of the most biodiverse rainforests on Earth. They study the llanos, the great plains that Humboldt crossed by canoe.
In a country that contains over ten percent of all the plant species on Earth despite making up less than one percent of the planet’s land surface, the Humboldt Institute is doing the work of trying to understand what Colombia has before it loses it. That urgency, that race to document and protect, is Humboldt’s direct inheritance.
The Prophet Nobody Listened To
Here is the part of Humboldt’s story that becomes almost unbearable to contemplate in hindsight.
In 1800, in the Venezuelan llanos, Humboldt observed that the vast treeless plains showed signs of degradation. The colonists who had settled the region had cleared forests, diverted rivers for irrigation, and grazed cattle across land that could not sustain that kind of pressure. The springs were drying up. The soil was cracking. He wrote about it with alarm, noting that human action was fundamentally altering the water cycle, the vegetation, and the climate of the region.
In 1825, writing about the deforestation he had seen across his South American journey and in the colonial plantations of Cuba and Mexico, Humboldt warned that the clearing of forests, the expansion of agriculture, and the extraction of resources were triggering a cascade of consequences that would affect rainfall, temperature, and the stability of ecosystems on a continental scale. He connected the local destruction of trees to changes in rivers, to drought, to soil erosion, and ultimately to changes in the climate itself.
He was writing about climate change in the early nineteenth century. Not as a vague fear, but as an observed consequence of things he had watched happening in front of his eyes, across six countries, over five years of fieldwork.
Nobody listened. The industrial revolution was accelerating. The great colonial extraction of Latin American resources was intensifying. Humboldt kept writing, kept warning, kept publishing the connections he saw between human activity and natural collapse. His five-volume masterwork, Cosmos, attempted to synthesize the entire physical world into a unified description of nature as an interconnected system. It was a bestseller in its day. It influenced Darwin, Thoreau, Muir, and generations of scientists and writers who followed.
But the warning embedded in all that beauty was not heeded. The forests kept falling. The rivers kept being drained. The temperatures kept rising.
The Invention of Nature
Andrea Wulf’s book The Invention of Nature, published in 2015, is the work that brought Humboldt back to the consciousness of a general reading public and, for many people, changed the way they thought about the natural world entirely.
Wulf spent years trying to understand why Humboldt, once one of the most famous people alive, had been so thoroughly erased from popular memory, especially in the English-speaking world. Her answer was subtle and damning: he had been forgotten precisely because his ideas had been absorbed so completely into the culture that the source became invisible.
The way we talk about ecology, about biodiversity, about the interconnectedness of natural systems, about the relationship between humans and the environment, all of it flows directly from Humboldt. But because his influence spread through Darwin, Thoreau, Muir, and dozens of others who never quite gave him full credit, his name detached from his legacy.
Reading the book is a particular kind of experience. You find yourself making mental lists of things you thought you already understood and realizing you only understood the surface. The idea that a forest regulates rainfall. That deforestation causes drought. That species exist in relationship to one another and to their physical environment, not as isolated units. That the altitude of a mountain and the latitude of a location produce the same biological effects. These ideas feel self-evident now. They were not self-evident before Humboldt.
He built the conceptual architecture that all of modern ecology and environmentalism stands inside, and he built it by doing something almost recklessly simple: he went to South America and paid attention.
For anyone who reads the book and feels its particular pull, the impulse it generates is not just intellectual. It is physical. It makes you want to go to the places Humboldt went. To stand on the flank of Chimborazo. To walk through a Colombian cloud forest and understand that the world is not a collection of separate things but a single breathing system, and that paying attention to it is not just a scientific act but a moral one.
What We Learn From Him Now
The thing about Humboldt that feels most urgent right now is not the breadth of his knowledge or the audacity of his journeys. It is his method.
He believed that understanding the natural world required direct experience. That you could not grasp the interconnections of a landscape from a desk or a laboratory. You had to go there, observe, measure, and above all feel the complexity of what you were looking at. He brought rigour to wonder and wonder to rigour, and he refused to separate them.
In an era of climate crisis, that combination matters enormously. We have data. We have models. We have satellite imagery and atmospheric measurements and ocean buoys sending readings back in real time. What we often lack is the visceral, embodied understanding of what we are losing. The sense of a living place, its smell and texture and the particular quality of its light, that makes its destruction feel real rather than abstract.
Humboldt understood that the páramos of the Andes, those high-altitude sponge-like grasslands that capture water from clouds and release it slowly into rivers across Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, were not just interesting. They were essential. They were the plumbing of a continent. He could see that not because he had modelled it, but because he had walked through them, touched the sphagnum moss, watched the mist move across the frailejones, and followed the water with his eyes from the mountains down into the valleys below.
Today, those same páramos are under pressure from climate change, from potato farming that creeps upslope as temperatures rise, from illegal mining that tears through the peat and releases stored carbon and destroys the water-holding capacity of ecosystems that took thousands of years to form. The Humboldt Institute is documenting all of this. But documentation is only the beginning.
What Humboldt modelled, and what feels most necessary to carry forward, is the connection between knowledge and commitment. He did not observe nature as a neutral spectator. He wrote about the destruction he saw with something close to grief. He made the argument, publicly and repeatedly, that human beings were not separate from the natural systems they were altering. That what they did to the forest, they did to themselves.
That argument is two hundred years old. It is also the only argument that might save us.
Rewilding the Imagination
There is a particular kind of traveller that Humboldt’s story tends to produce. Not a tourist. Not even exactly an ecotourist, though that is closer. Something more like a witness. Someone who goes to the cloud forests of the Chocó or the páramos of Boyacá or the savannas of the Orinoco not to consume a landscape but to understand it, to carry something of it back, and to feel the weight of what is at stake.
The impulse to connect people to these places, to the places Humboldt walked, is not sentimental. It is strategic. The natural world will not be protected by people who have never seen it. The páramo will not be defended by someone for whom it is only a data point. The Magdalena River, one of the most biodiverse river systems on Earth and one of the most threatened, will not be restored by someone who has never stood on its bank and watched the water move.
Rewilding, in the ecological sense, means restoring the processes and species that allow a landscape to regulate itself, to recover its own complexity and resilience. In the human sense, it might mean something similar: restoring the connections between people and the natural world that industrial civilisation has severed. Humboldt never used the word. But his entire life was an argument for it.
He spent five years in South America making himself permeable to it, letting the forests and rivers and mountains change the way he thought, dissolving the separation between observer and observed that European science had insisted upon. He came back transformed, and he spent the rest of his long life, he died at 89, trying to transmit that transformation to others through his writing.
The invitation in his work, across two centuries, is still open.
The Places That Still Wait
Chimborazo still rises above the Ecuadorian highland, its glaciers smaller now than when Humboldt climbed it, the shrinkage a direct measure of the warming he predicted. The Orinoco still moves through the Venezuelan llanos, though the wetlands around it are under pressure from agriculture and development. The Colombian páramos still catch water from clouds that no longer arrive as reliably as they once did.
The Humboldt Institute still occupies its place in Bogota, its scientists still counting, measuring, and mapping. In the courtyard of the Villa de Leyva facility, you can stand in a landscape that Humboldt himself passed through in 1801, looking toward the same mountains he sketched in his notebooks, and feel the strange temporal vertigo of standing at the intersection of his world and ours.
He would recognize what was beautiful. He would be devastated by what was gone. And he would almost certainly begin asking questions, pulling out an instrument, reaching for his notebook.
That reflex, curiosity as a form of care, is the most important thing he left behind.
Further Reading
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf (2015) Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America by Alexander von Humboldt (1814–1825) Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe by Alexander von Humboldt (1845–1862) Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Research on Biological Resources: humboldt.org.co
Header image: Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland by the River Casiquiare in the Amazon (oil painting by Eduard Ender, circa 1850). Wikimedia commons, CC BY
I also a run a cultural ecotourism organization called Sacred Treks that helps people travel with a purpose on mindful trekking pilgrimages and connects them with the world's most knowledgable certified hiking guides.
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