In June 1802, the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt ascended the inactive volcano Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador. As he climbed from tropical rainforest towards the snow-covered peak almost 21,000ft above sea level, he acquired a new vision of nature, interwoven with “a thousand threads”. It was like taking a journey from the equator to the poles: an entire world of diversity collapsed on to this single mountain, a “microcosm on one page”. Here Humboldt began to develop the notion he called Naturgemälde, a scarcely translatable word that implies a unity or wholeness in nature.
Humboldt is often credited with the idea of an ecosystem as a web of interdependent living species, each playing a part in supporting the whole. But as conservation biologist Thor Hanson says in Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid, Chimborazo also opened the intrepid German naturalist’s eyes to another profound realisation: climate, not mere geographical location, “dictated what grew where, and similar vegetation should occur in any place where temperature, humidity and other conditions were the same, regardless of geography”.
