On Rediscovering Our Inner Empiricist

By White, Richard

The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism, by Aaron Sachs, Viking Penguin.

THE AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL movement is in crisis at a particularly inopportune moment. The globe is warming and the fisheries are collapsing. We face large-scale extinctions and massive habitat destruction. And although the size of human populations is not a problem everywhere, humans are pressing hard on some fragile environments. Politically, it would seem that an epic environmental crisis would strengthen environmental organizations, but this has not proved to be the case. Instead, watching the environment and the environmental movement decline in tandem is a little like watching a patient sink toward catastrophe while the nurse has a nervous breakdown. Even sympathetic critics of the movement regard it as ineffectual, demoralized, and unfocused. Environmental issues do routinely gain large levels of support in public opinion polls, but opinion polls are not politics. Many politicians are afraid of gun owners and evangelical Christians; few politicians are afraid of environmentalists.

Aaron Sachs delivers a withering attack on American environmentalism in the last chapter of The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism. The movement, he argues, has been stalled since 1974. Many of its recent successes have only deflected ecological damage, usually to a place with poorer people who lack the resources to protect themselves. Despite the attacks of property rights advocates, environmentalism is itself so grounded in modern conceptions of property that it has never had what Sachs calls a “social edge.” For instance, it is willing to go to the wall for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the whales, but pays little attention to a consumer culture that inflicts unsustainable damage on many more places and species. Unless pressed by environmental justice advocates, it ignores both native peoples and urban environments. Arguing that environmentalism is an elitist movement with few egalitarian impulses, Sachs complains that it is more interested in preserving pristine places, even at the price of expelling their human inhabitants, than in trying to find ways in which humans and other species can coexist. Even environmental justice movements often deteriorate into a kind of NIMBYism: the not- in-my-back-yard attitude that desires, for example, the power of a coal-fired electrical plant but wants it sited so that its pollution is someone else s problem.

There is nothing particularly new in Sachs’s critique, but there is much of interest in how he arrives at it. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus made similar criticisms in their widely noted attempt at provocation: “The Death of Environmentalism.” Like Sachs, they aspire to a new environmentalism, a progressive movement that does not seek environmental well-being at the price of social justice, yet remains grounded in intimate human relationships with the planet and its other species. Shellenberger and Nordhaus, however, did not go marching off into the nineteenth century. Sachs does. An environmental journalist who is now a historian, Sachs finds inspiration in a nineteenth-century tradition of explorer- naturalists whose fountainhead was Alexander von Humboldt. Sachs s Humboldt Current is not the cold nutrient-rich ocean current flowing off the west coast of South America but rather a way of thinking that fed American culture until the end of the nineteenth century, when, dammed and diverted, it dwindled.

The promotion of The Humboldt Current wrongly aspires to make it an environmental equivalent to Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. It is not nearly as nuanced, well-written, or thoughtful as Menand’s book, but not all its dissimilarities to The Metaphysical Club are bad. In fact, it is valuable precisely because of the ways it differs from Menand’s book and so many other recent popular histories: Sachs examines and proposes to resurrect a cultural and intellectual tradition that by his own account largely petered out and left no legacy. The blurbs for The Metaphysical Club claimed it told the story of four men who changed the way Americans think, and in that claim Menand’s book was like most other popular histories. Whatever their subject, they are about how it “changed” or “shaped” or “invented” or “founded” something the authors presume to be of value and importance in the modern world. The problem is not that all these claims are cracked or exaggerated, although many of them are, but rather the implicit Whiggishness of the history involved in the claims themselves.

Historians, particularly academic historians, have been denouncing Whig history since Herbert Butterfield coined the phrase as a pejorative in the 1930s to describe how a set of earlier British historians had assumed a progressive, teleological history in which past actors held versions of present beliefs and had worked to create modern British institutions. It has come to mean any kind of progressive, teleological history organized around modern ideas that are made to seem transhistorical.

Whig history is necessarily narcissistic-a celebration of us, no matter who “we” may be-and dismissive of most of what actually happened in the past. In Whig histories the point of the past is to produce the present, and those aspects of the past that do not yield the present are dead and meaningless. Since all presents will someday be pasts, this is a rather odd take on human life. Perform a thought experiment. Imagine that your life matters only as ultimately reflected in the thoughts, experiences, and customs of your greatgreat-great-grandchildren. All that is ultimately of any interest about you is what helps produce people not yet born (whom you can imagine only in the abstract) and the world they live in. What is left of you and your world? Not much.

At his most interesting, Sachs says his Humboldt Current wasn’t ancestral to us. It didn’t produce modern environmentalists. Like the actual Humboldt Current during El Nio years, his metaphorical current was disrupted. The intellectual upwelling that fed it dwindled, and, as a result, the currents intellectual species changed: Humboldtians largely disappeared. By stranding Humboldt and his values in the past with hardly any present legacy, Sachs creates a different relation between past and present that is quite un- Whiggish and quite liberating. Why should we care about a way of thinking that died? Sachs’s answer is that its death was not inevitable. American society was, in his words, “many-sided and intensely contested rather than monolithic and preordained.” And the whole point of history stripped of its Whiggishness is that to die is not to disappear.

We should value the past as a storehouse of human possibilities that contains far more variety than we can find in the present. What we find there may be dead, but it is not useless. And certain arrangements of present circumstances might enable some of it to live again. In historical writing like Sachs’s, the past becomes a kind of Jurassic Park in which the vanished becomes once more visible. We cannot go backward, but parts of the past may join us in the future.

I am expanding somewhat on what Sachs writes, since his examinations of the nature of history are far more implicit than explicit in The Humboldt Current, and he at times contradicts his best ideas. The book is as much a product of Sachs the journalist as Sachs the historian. It has all the qualities of good journalism: often smart, closely observed, lively, and full of sharply etched characters who carry his story. The book also has the flaws of journalism: it is often glib, satisfied with easy connections, unwilling to examine the contradictions and absences in its own argument. The title, a metaphorical mess, is the most visible example of the book’s confusion and unwillingness to maintain its own premise. The subtitle-Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism-indicates that explorers in the Humboldtian mold formed the roots of modern environmentalism. This connection implies that, like the actual Humboldt Current, Sachs’s intellectual stream flows strong and deep into the present. However, the text indicates that the intellectual Humboldt Current largely vanished, yielding only a few intellectuals-Carey McWilliams, Carl Sauer, and Lewis Mumford-to whom Sachs gives cursory attention. By proposing that Humboldt is both neglected and the source of a current movement, Sachs weakens the most interesting argument in his book.

The claim that the past is of interest to us because it is strange, nonancestral, and potentially a critique of our own progress does not mean that the past is unconnected to the present. It must be connected. Whiggish history is presentist history, but not all presentist history is Whiggish. It is hard, for me at least, to imagine what a history that is not presentist would look like. Presentism is the tendency to arrange the past around present concerns and resources, but this sounds worse than it is. Presentism does not mean that we substitute our judgments or values for those of people in the past. If we do, the past has no value. Why not just study ourselves? Instead, it asks us to recognize that our own concerns and intellectual res\ources influence our arrangement of the past. There is no view from nowhere, and the only place that historians write from is the present. Concerns and sources change, and as a result all history is revisionist history. No history we write is unconnected to us.

Presentism is, in and of itself, neither bad nor good; it runs into difficulty only when historians join the necessity of writing in the present moment with the Whiggish mistake of regarding the present as the culmination of history rather than another chronological moment soon to become past. It is perhaps easier for historians critical of the moment in which they write to avoid Whiggishness. Conservatives tend to be less Whiggish, and thus better historians, in progressive moments, and progressives tend to be less Whiggish, and thus better historians, in more conservative times. Conservative and progressive are admittedly slippery terms, but James Malin, an American historian at the University of Kansas during the 1950s and 1960s, was by any standard a political troglodyte, disgusted with the New Deal and postwar liberalism. He wanted nothing to do with conservation programs on the Great Plains that claimed to embody the clear lessons of the Dust Bowl. Malin s politics were reactionary, but his history was often brilliant because he refused to accept a 19505 orthodoxy of natural balance and orderly succession in nature. Instead, he regarded such a view as ideologically motivated. Malin’s natural history, like his human history, was complicated and contingent. He was really the first American historian to take environmental history and ecology seriously, and he deeply influenced even those historians who detested his politics.

Sachs is a progressive historian in a conservative moment who is disillusioned with a progressive icon-environmentalism. Environmentalism is rightly called a progressive movement, which is somewhat strange considering that it is often pessimistic and nostalgic. In its American form, environmentalism seems fixated on a vanishing past. It is a long lament for the fate of nature at the hands of human beings. In part, it is a secular offshoot of Christianity, a declensionist tale of the loss of Eden. But as Thomas Dunlap has recently argued in his neglected book, Faith in Nature, environmentalism intersects with more than one branch of the Judeo-Christian tradition. If it seems obsessed with sin and a lost paradise, it has also borrowed from Christianity the moral dramas that “put everyday lives and everyday actions in the context of the ultimate battle of Good against Evil.” There is a tension in environmentalism between a feeling that, though the future will be worse than the past, we must fight sin and save what we can, and a more millennial idea that what is at stake in the unfolding battle over nature is the ultimate future of the world.

Sachs wants to keep alive the core idea of environmentalism, that our daily practice in the world affects the intertwined fate of humans, the planet, and its other species. He wants a world in which humans are aware of their place in nature, not one where they fail to recognize or care for the nature around them and imagine that they visit real nature only in the wilderness. He wants us to feel, in a nearly religious way, the interconnection of things, and he believes caring for the environment means caring for the weak and poor.

For Sachs, the intellectual Humboldt Current is a holistic combination of social justice, a belief in human progress, a deep involvement and interest in the natural world, and an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things. Humboldt recognized the “general connections that link organic beings” and had a reverence for the “great harmonies of nature,” but what made his thought distinctive was its “social edge.” Those who floated with the Humboldt Current shared “an ecological sensibility” and decried “abuses against comparatively powerless groups like Indians and the collateral devastation of environmental resources like forests and soils.”

Although Sachs s intellectual Humboldt Current never reaches the present, its connections are still largely chronological and linear, flowing forward in time from Humboldt to the American scientistexplorers who followed him. All shared, Sachs claims, a “multifaceted radicalism” that combined a “sweeping political critique. . . scientific justification of human equality. . . [and] a profound understanding of natural resources and their use.” But the particular figures that join Humboldt in this book also have four other attributes. They are Americans; most are comfortable only in the company of men, and some, like Humboldt, are homosexual or bisexual; they are explorers on American frontiers; and, befitting the fate of the intellectual Current, they all end up disappointed and in some sense failures.

The explorers Sachs chooses to discuss were all famous in their time, and they all wrote best-selling books. Sachs has a good eye and these were interesting men. J. N. Reynolds, for example, skirted the Antarctic, traveled the Pacific in 1829-1830, and then yearned, and failed, to lead a major American exploring expedition that was eventually led by Charles Wilkes. Clarence King, inordinately admired by his friends, went West during the Civil War, then became a member of the California Geological Survey and eventually head of the U. S. Geological Survey. He was by all accounts one of the most charming and talented men on the planet and was doomed to disappoint everyone, including himself. George Wallace Melville was an arctic explorer, and eventually a Rear Admiral, but he remained haunted by his role in the tragic and failed voyage of the Jeannette, which had departed for the Arctic in 1879 and was abandoned in the Arctic ice in 1881. John Muir, the only one of Sachs s quartet still widely known today, was the most famous naturalist of the late nineteenth century, a founder of the American environmental movement, and for Sachs only briefly Humboldtian. Muir’s devotion to wilderness, his often harsh disdain for Indian peoples, and his lack of interest in social justice make him, in Sachs’s account, a symbol for the shortcomings of modern environmentalism. Still, Sachs finds a Humboldtian moment in Muir during his trips to Alaska in 1881. He was more nuanced, more appreciative of Indians, more critical of the pieties of his age.

Sachs narrates the lives of these men movingly and well, and he is aware of their contradictions and their struggles, but in the end all that matters is that they displayed the Humboldtian credentials that Sachs hands out like so many merit badges. The Humboldtian influence on King, for example, was his willingness “to go off the beaten track and observe every kind of landscape…to see more than his own reflection when he peered into a pool of water, and to be willing even to stare into the void of a bottomless gulf.” Timothy O’Sullivan, the photographer of the West who sometimes accompanied King, was Humboldtian because his photographs display a concern with “contact, connection, communion, with balance and humility, with real decisions confronted by people laboring in the landscape.” The question is not whether these are admirable traits-I tend to think they are-but rather how they link to form a coherent whole and what kind of practice results from them.

Sachs s attempt to deal with such questions produces a subterranean argument with Mary Louise Pratt, who makes only a footnote appearance as a postcolonialist. At its most basic level, postcolonialism involves examinations of the legacy of colonialist rule, and Pratt s influential Imperial Eyes ( 1992) included a critical but also a nuanced and sympathetic account of Humboldt. Sachs’s response is not to attack postcolonialism, but rather to transform Humboldt into a “founding father” of postcolonialism. Humboldt, Pratt writes, “existed and exists not as a traveler or a travel writer, but as a Man and a Life, in a way that became possible only in the era of the Individual. Humboldt produced himself as such. . .he produced his own journeys and subject matters and spent a lifetime of energy promoting them.” What Pratt “acknowledges and resists,” Sachs embraces. For him, Humboldt produced, in addition to himself, ecology and postcolonialism.

The Humboldt Current is thus a collection of Humboldt and mini- Humboldts, of individuals studying Nature, fighting injustice, criticizing mass industrial society, and seeing the connections between all things. The problem is that by simply embracing what Pratt approached with a combination of skepticism and sympathy, Sachs s arguments often seem flat and one-dimensional. Pratt is a literary critic, but she is much more interested in historical context-the previous and contemporary ideas, people, and traditions that influenced Humboldt-than is Sachs. Where Sachs reads the Humboldtian narratives as unproblematically Humboldt, Pratt, as postcolonial analysts often do, sees them as a complicated collection of voices, a product of what she calls the contact zone. When she contends that Humboldt constructed South America as Nature, she is using a common trope in postcolonial criticism in which Europe stands for Civilization and the colonized world for uncivilized Nature. But she complicates her analysis of Humboldt by saying that this construction arose out of a selective reading of his work by his European and American audiences and a long tradition of presenting the New World as raw Nature. Pratt herself, however, has segregated Humboldt’s more ethnographic and sociological writings and his denunciations of slavery from his writings about nature, which gives Sachs an opening. Since the severing of the natural from the human is one of Sachs’s critiques of modern environmentalism, he cannot let this segregation stand.

The opening is a promising one, but the course Sachs takes is problemat\ic. He brings back the Frontier. “Frontier” is a word that stirred a significant amount of contention among American historians in the igSos and early 19905. Critics, I among them, thought the term imprecise, burdened with an immense amount of cultural baggage, and conceptually unnecessary. We did not seem to need a frontier concept to understand other areas of the world with conditions similar to those found in the American West. Humboldt, for example, traveled in South America and Asia in areas claimed, but often not completely controlled, by states and empires. Europeans regarded these peripheries as quite exotic, but most of these areas had seen considerable contact between natives and newcomers for several centuries. They were quite modern in the sense of being products of European imperial expansion, trade, and new technologies.

Humboldt crossed many frontiers-in the sense of political boundaries between states or peoples-but he did not, like Sachs s American explorers, have the burden of spending his time on the Frontier. The Frontier was a nineteenth-century Anglo-American creation. It was a place of nature that became a transformative testing ground for civilized men. On the Frontier the natural past confronted the civilized present, but this confrontation was always just a phase in an inevitable transformation of the natural into the civilized. Its original inhabitants could resist or merge with their conquerors, who could either despise or pity them. The Frontier allowed Sachs s explorers to express their discontent with industrialism, cheap patriotism, and a generally effete and blas East. And, what is most important for Sachs, the Frontier could momentarily contain both Nature and Indians. It could allow both an environmental consciousness and a concern for human cultures different from one’s own.

It would be easier to accept Sachs’s claim that indigenous peoples did matter to his explorers if these peoples had more of a presence in his own book. The Indians who appear in The Humboldt Current often lack names and particular histories. One exception occurs in an account Sachs gives of a Union Pacific Railroad press tour that included a meeting with the Pawnees. He writes that the chief of the Pawnees, Peter LaCherre, “so far had maintained friendly relations with the white people gradually encroaching upon their territory.” Peter LaCherre was probably a reporters mangled version of Petalesharo, the leading chief of the Tsawi or Chaui Pawnees. At this point in history, the Pawnees did not face white people “gradually encroaching on their territory”; they lived in a much more complicated world, one already transformed by contact with whites and conflicts with other Indians. Fighting with the Lakotas over diminishing buffalo herds, they sought aid from white Americans, with whom they had had a long and tangled relationship. The performance they put on for the newspapermen was one that served their own as well as American purposes. Their purposes deserve more elaboration.

Sachs is so enamored with Humboldt and his coterie that he ultimately sells short the peripatetic German and his American followers by neither fully contextualizing them in their own time nor engaging critically with their ideas. At times he does not take his history seriously enough. Here it is necessary to keep in mind the importance of Sachs’s larger project. He wants to find alternative combinations of ideas that can inspire an environmental movement seeking to halt ecological destruction, improve the conditions of the poor and oppressed, and find a way for humans to live within nature and not just admire it from afar. He is not seeking a set formula for this project in the past, but rather a combination of ideas and attitudes, some of which may still exist in the present, but which taken as a whole no longer cohere. He wants to find a way to make them cohere.

The attitudes of his subject he most often praises-holism, unity in diversity, humility in the face of nature, a devotion to social justice-have contemporary equivalents. Sachs believes that what is important about the intellectual Humboldt Current is not the array of ideas that Humboldt drew from-his deck of cards-but rather the particular hand he held. This is a fruitful way to proceed as long as we historicize the cards. We need to engage them critically (as Pratt does), restoring them to their original context and recognizing that various ideas and tropes change over time, gaining and losing cultural value.

Let’s look at the Ace of Spades in the Humboldtian deck: holism. Sachs repeatedly stresses the holistic thinking of his subjects and treats it as an unambiguously good thing. Sachs can be tough- minded, but he also admits that he is a Romantic, and his Romanticism seems to put holism beyond the bounds of critical inquiry. When I was in college in the 19605, my friends and I invented an imaginary figure: Brother Bernard, the Beautiful Benedictine. Brother Bernard allowed us a critical distance from a counterculture and radical politics that we otherwise enthusiastically embraced. He preached oneness. I still have some of his letters today. “Everything is everything” was how Brother Bernard explained, well, everything, and I sometimes have a feeling that Sachs s Humboldt Current is the same one Brother Bernard floated upon so serenely.

But holism was a much more problematic concept in the early nineteenth century, and Humboldt could find himself on both sides of a fundamental quarrel between Cartesian dualism and Transcendental holism. It would be easy but inaccurate to frame this as a quarrel between Enlightenment rationalism and Romanticism, for Humboldt was not unusual in combining a Romantic sensibility with empirical science. Jessica Riskin has argued for understanding a good part of the French Enlightenment as what she calls sentimental empiricism. Sentimental empiricists were scientists convinced that sentiments originated in physical sensations, that sentimentalism was a form of empiricism, and that sentiments were both a basis for understanding the natural world and for human social life. Humboldt s project, as outlined in his Introduction to Cosmos, was a “rational inquiry into nature… to establish the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force and matter.” He would “submit the results of observation to the test of reason and intellect.” His inquiry would yield not just recognition of the laws of physical nature but a knowledge of the “bond of union, linking together the visible world and the higher spiritual world which escapes the grasp of the senses.”

Humboldt did not create Romantic science, but he embodied it; his equivalents populate not just science but literature. Robert Walton, the explorer to whom Frankenstein tells his story in Mary Shelley’s novel, could have been floating on the Humboldt Current as he set off into the Polar Regions. But in a more tangled way, so was Frankenstein himself. The young Frankenstein was not Gene Wilder, but Ren Descartes. Like Descartes, he was a dualist: mind was spiritual, but the body was natural and material and explicable through physical laws. Frankenstein claims that life is just a chemical reaction, which is why his success with his creature confounds him. The creature has not only life, but mind; he is not only matter, but spirit as well. When the older Frankenstein flees from his creature, he is in a sense fleeing not only from the hubris of Cartesianism but also from an implicit materialism. The creature is more sensitive, intelligent, and discerning than Frankenstein himself. He wins all the arguments, although he is only a collection of spare parts. This seems to lead to the frightening thought that there is seemingly no mind separate from matter.

Descartes and empiricism have been under attack in the academy for so long that it is easy to forget what a complicated and towering figure Descartes was. Humboldt was Cartesian in more than his empiricism. His conviction that science existed as a tool through which mind exerted its dominance over matter to insure human material progress was Cartesian in its instrumentalism. More than that, the very concept of “mind over matter” meant an acceptance at some level of Cartesian dualism, which separated a spiritualized reason from a material world. And on a more experiential plane, Humboldt embraced Descartes’ advice in his Discourse to travel and compare, to “wander around the world, trying to be a spectator rather than an actor in the dramas that unfold there.”

The intellectual ambitions of Descartes and Humboldt were also congruent. In Cosmos, Humboldt mentions that Descartes attempted a similar project in Le Monde, a book Descartes largely destroyed in fear of the Inquisition. Both Descartes and Humboldt wanted to encapsulate and summarize a universal knowledge of the world, but it was knowledge of a very particular kind. Humboldt wrote that his “physical history of the universe. . . does not pretend to rise to the perilous abstractions of a purely rational science of nature, and is simply a physical geography combined with a description of space and the bodies occupying them’.’ Both Humboldt and Descartes fought against design arguments that understood nature in terms of an imputed purpose. They were not interested in final causes, but instead in sufficient causes-physical laws.

Still, there were shades of Romanticism in Cartesian reason and in Humboldt’s claim to find knowledge of a higher spiritual world. Ultimately, Descartes claimed to know fundamental truths because they were printed upon the soul. So did the American Transcendentalists who pop in and out of The Humboldt Current. Sachs describes Humboldt’s “spiritual ecology” and calls him a Transcendentalist. Spiritual ecology is an anachronism: in the early nineteenth-century there was natural history, but the word ecology did not yet exist. Still, spiri\tual ecology works well as a metaphor, for Transcendentalists like Emerson and the early Thoreau pursued a natural history that imparted spiritual lessons. It did so through the doctrine of correspondence. In Emerson’s words, nature was “emblematic. Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.” The Transcendentalists read nature for its moral and spiritual significance. This impulse represents a kind of dualistic thinking into which it was easy enough to assimilate the Humboldtian project of “linking together the visible world and the higher spiritual world which escapes the grasp of the senses.” Taken a step further, however, it could be part of the “perilous abstractions of a purely rational science of nature” that Humboldt sought to avoid.

Among these perilous abstractions were certainly doctrines of design, but such abstractions could also involve a basic belief of the Transcendentalists: their distinction between reason and understanding. What we call reason, Emerson dismissed as mere understanding-the practical and empirical knowledge of the world that carpenters, farmers, or scientists possessed. Reason, for Emerson, is what we think of as intuition or spiritual insight. It was the stuff that poets had. Yet it is hard to imagine the relentlessly empirical Humboldt following the train of thought that sprang from this distinction all the way to the brink that both Emerson and Thoreau found themselves looking over: the possibility that all there was was spirit and that the material world was an illusion. The claim that all material things dissolved into unitary spirit was probably not the unity in diversity Humboldt had in mind.

Holism can be banal; it can carry significant intellectual baggage; it can be mystical; it can also in some cases be dangerous. The embrace of holistic ecologies by fascists in Nazi Germany and England and by the architects of apartheid in South Africa have been unfairly used to tar environmentalists as being closet fascists, but these uses of holism are still worthy of some note. Romantic holistic thinking has led to some nasty practices, but, to be fair to Sachs, he compensates by emphasizing tolerance and humility as Humboldtian virtues. He does not want Humboldt to run with a bad crowd.

Trolling the past for combinations of ideas that no longer exist is an eminently worthwhile historical endeavor, but we need to be historical in doing it. Our catch will always be a complicated one. The lessons should not be easy or comfortable since human history has rarely been either. It is not entirely clear whether Sachs is speaking for himself or Clarence King when he writes, late in the book, that “ultimately, it made more sense to valorize human experience than to trust even the most precise, modern instruments. Besides, once you started pondering the larger problems of the earth’s history and of humanity’s changing relationship to the environment, the significance of particular measurements started to fade, and technical accuracy seemed almost irrelevant.” Whoever is speaking, it is, first of all, unnecessary to oppose human experience and instrumental measures. We can use, and suspect, both. secondly, valorizing human experience raises the immediate question: whose human experience? When empiricism and subjective experience diverge, their divergence demands more thought and investigation, not a default choice of subjectivity and experience.

The ideas and tropes that comprised Sachs’s Humboldt Current did not so much disappear in the twentieth century as separate and drift off in other directions, and their recombination may not produce exactly what Sachs has in mind. It was an ardent Humboldtian, Charles Darwin, who did more than anyone to divert the Humboldt Current when he published The Origin of Species and developed his theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle is a Humboldtian narrative: part travel account, part wacky ethnology, part natural history. The Origin of Species eventually evicted design from the biological sciences, although as Robert Young has emphasized in the wonderful title essay of his Darwin’s Metaphor, Darwin muddied the issue with his own metaphor of natural selection, which seemed to indicate a force or entity doing the selection. In trying to escape the arguments for design, the theory of natural selection was Cartesian and Humboldtian, even as it struck a blow against dualism. The theory was thoroughly materialistic.

Darwin had reshuffled the deck in ways that had implications for modern environmental controversies. Certain cards just dropped out of scientists’ hands. Ideas like spiritual ecology have become oxymorons. After Darwin, biological sciences became more and more materialist. Biologists as biologists neither claimed nor sought spiritual laws or insights. Questions of design ceased to be scientific issues.

The Christian Right’s resurrection of design to attack Darwinian evolution has understandably provoked concern among secular intellectuals. But the furor has obscured Christian design’s intellectual precursors. In his Traces on the Ehodian Shore (1990), Clarence Glacken shows how concepts of design were prominent in Western cultures long before Christianity. Design appeals to a desire for purpose in nature and in human life that is not peculiarly Christian. Many environmentalists believe, in Barry Commoners phrase, that nature knows best. Many believe that nature has a purpose. The continued fascination with nature as a way to access spiritual enlightenment makes the environmental movement available as both a surrogate for religion and an adjunct of it.

Humboldt s holism, so much the center of Sachs’s account, can yield a perverse appreciation of the empiricism that Humboldt relied upon to protect him from the “perilous abstractions of a purely rational science of nature.” It has been the relentless accumulation of things measured rather than human experience that has made the case for global warming. Humboldtian empiricism may in the long run serve environmentalism better than holism, but only with the usual caveats. Knowledge is not necessarily power; as we see too often today, power can determine what knowledge counts. And facts need theories to explain them, even if the relentless accumulation of contrary facts can also undermine theories.

Much of graduate education in the humanities over the last generation has consisted of constant warnings about the dangers of naive empiricism, about the social construction of facts and knowledge, and about the necessity of theory. I endorse all of these warnings, at least up to the point where they indicate that we have no reliable knowledge of the world. We might not be able to say what is true and what is false, but we can usually say what is likely to be true and what is likely to be false. It is hard to imagine such knowledge of the world without empiricism. There was more to Humboldt and the American explorers Sachs describes than empirical science, but it was empirical science that set them on their journeys and guided their work.

Empirical science, however, sometimes yields its own strange fruits. Many modern scientists, after distinguished careers as empirical researchers, spend their later years crafting their own Cosmos. Darwinian science, which in so many ways dissolved the Humboldtian project, becomes in their hands a tool for reconstituting Humboldt s ambitions for a universal science that explains human society, culture, and history, as well as the physical world. There is in much neoevolutionary writing a desire to contain and simplify the disturbingly promiscuous tendencies of cultural and environmental change. These unifying schemes do not impute design, but there is a claim of a unifying logic.

Evolution eliminated reason as some disembodied force that was both within and outside of human beings. Reason has, however, proved resilient. In the new neoevolutionary literature of Steven Pinker and E. O.Wilson, the concept of adaptation seems very much like the old reason. It makes us what we are; it makes the world what it is. What fails to adapt dies and becomes mere matter-or history. Adaptation seems to explain, well, everything. Confronted with the “perilous abstractions” of this new universal science of nature and society, historians rediscover their own inner empiricist. But that is another essay.

RICHARD WHITE is the Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University. He is at work on a book about the transcontinental railroads and the role of failure in shaping the North American West.

Copyright Rutgers University Fall 2006

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