HUMBOLDT'S NEW WORLD

摘要

Two hundred years ago, a young scientist set off on a voyage of scientific discovery that would inspire the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Charles Darwin—and sketch a road map for the future of conservation. The Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt was midway through a five-year, 6,000-mile voyage of scientific discovery through Latin America that would revolutionize thinking in fields from astronomy to zoology Charles Darwin himself called Humboldt "the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived," and when Darwin set off on his own journey aboard the Beagle three decades later, he took a copy of Humboldt's seven-volume travel narrative. Two hundred years later, it's no coincidence that Humboldt's route leads through many placesthe Conservancy is working to protect. His quest to collect enough information to assemble a unified theory of the natural world led him to some of the most biologically distinct regions in the Americas: over icy peaks, through wild grasslands, up jungle rivers and across rich ocean currents. Today, many of the landscapes that inspired one of the world's greatest thinkers are under threat, and together they form an atlas of much of the Conservancy's work in the northern parts of South America.