| The Humboldt Current attempts to revise current thinking about 19th-century exploration. Specifically, it questions the assumption that explorers were primarily agents of empire and resource development and argues instead that many explorers contributed to a tradition of social criticism, that in fact they laid the groundwork for a holistic, ecology-based environmentalism long before the formulation of what we think of as the modern environmental movement. The main reason for the cohesion and power of this tradition, this study argues, was the pervasive influence of Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian explorer of South America, who ought to be considered the founder of ecology.;The bulk of the dissertation traces a Humboldtian tradition through the nineteenth century, as reflected primarily in the writings of four American explorers: J. N. Reynolds, Clarence King, George Wallace Melville, and John Muir. Reynolds explored the South Seas (1829--1831) and, more than anyone else in the first half of the 19th century, established the significance of exploration in American culture. King was the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey. Melville, chastened by his experiences in the Arctic, expressed a deep skepticism about American expansionism and imperialism, writing evocatively about the limits of human endeavor in the face of a much more powerful nature---despite the fact that he was the Chief Engineer of the U.S. Navy for 16 years. Finally, Muir, known as the founder of the Sierra Club, actually launched his environmentalist career as an explorer of Alaska and Siberia. It was during those years of exploration that he did his most important work, focusing on natives and on how people could live in nature rather than merely escape to it every now and then.;All four of these American explorers, inspired by Humboldt, who was a vocal critic of slavery and colonialism as well as an interpreter of nature's mutually dependent forces, provide models of a kind of social ecology, teach us to cultivate a sense of exploration in our daily lives, of connection with seemingly foreign people and places. Embracing the disorientation of various frontiers, they also embraced cosmopolitanism. |
