2000s Illustrated Hardcover Book, Aaron Sachs the Humboldt Current - Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism

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Title: the Humboldt Current - Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism.
Author: Aaron Sachs.
Publisher: Viking Penguin, a … Read more Title: the Humboldt Current - Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism.
Author: Aaron Sachs.
Publisher: Viking Penguin, a member of the Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Publication date: 2006.
Edition/Printing: 1st edition/1st printing.

Description: 496 p. 8vo. Black/red paper over publisher's hardcover, gilt title stamped on spine cover, illustrated text.

About the work and author: "The naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) achieved unparalleled fame in his own time, particularly in the United States. Today, however, he and his enormous legacy to American thought are virtually unknown.

In The Humboldt Current, Aaron Sachs seeks to reverse this undeserved obscurity by tracing Humboldt's pervasive influence on American history, specifically looking at the lives and careers of several nineteenth-century explorers who used Humboldt's notion of "unity in diversity" and his open-hearted spirit of exploration to develop a critique of their increasingly industrialized society. Among the dozens of intellectuals influenced by Humboldt, Sachs suggests, four explored the South Seas from 1829 to 1831 and more than anyone else at that time established the significance of exploration in American culture; Clarence King, the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey; George Wallace Melville, an Arctic explorer and chief engineer of the U.S. Navy for sixteen years, who expressed a deep skepticism about American expansionism and imperialism; and John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, who launched his environmental career as an explorer of Alaska and Siberia.

Sachs explores how these four men embraced different aspects of Humboldt's ethic of environmental justice--grounded in his idea of a "chain of connection: uniting all peoples and all environments in a web of mutual dependence--and how they questioned American progress. As Sachs argues, their examples laid the groundwork for an ecological tradition even more radical than the one that has come down to us today. Sachs's treatment of Humboldt's legacy also includes discussions of the American writers and artists most in the explorer's debt, including Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, Poe, and Frederic Church.

A skillful blend of narrative and interpretation, The Humboldt Current is a colorful, passionate, superbly written, and carefully researched work that offers a fundamental reinterpretation of nineteenth-century American history.

Aaron Sachs is a professor of history at Cornell University and an award-winning environmental journalist." (Dust jacket fly leaf) See less