Mental Health as a Vision of Ecological Safety | Part 4
- John P. Flynt, PhD
- Oct 31, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Nov 10, 2023
Safety in Rituals of Mental Health
Chimborazo
A decade after her narration of the efforts of Fairchild and other key figures in the history of gardening (or more generally horticulture), Wulf began work on Alexander von Humboldt’s life. The theme concerned how Humboldt created the concept we know as “nature.” Wulf argues that this took place when Humboldt attempted climb of Chimborazo, a prominent, isolated, extinct volcano in Ecuador.
This occurred on June 23, 1802. Under heavy cloud cover, Humboldt made it nearly to the top of Chimborazo, but the ascent was halted when the climbing team encountered an impassable crevasse. Humbolt reported that they were stopped at an elevation of 19,914 feet. The summit was 20,584 feet.
What might have been felt as defeat for others, Wulf says, was not so for Humboldt. Instead, the event enabled him to extend even farther his love of exploration and the natural world that characterized every step and paddle stroke he took during his years in South America. Although climbing in a thick fog, facing harsh cold, and suffering terribly from the effects of altitude, Humboldt and his companion Aimé Bonpland carefully recorded precise measurements of temperature, the boiling point of water, humidity, altitude, and other features of the environment, laying down as they did so, not only a store of data, but also the foundation for decades of future work as scientists and writers.
True, they were stopped by the crevasse a few hundred feet from the summit. But then Humboldt at that point had climbed higher than any other scientific explorer in history. While this alone was a feat meriting a historical narrative, the moment brought an even greater event, one with endless experiential, scientific, and historical dimensions.
Just where he had been stopped, hundreds of feet from the cloud-enshrouded summit, the fog suddenly vanished, opening up a panoramic view of the surrounding country. As he looked out over the earth from where he stood, Humboldt had a realization that made him a founding figure in ecology and climate awareness. From where he stood, Humboldt saw a vast expanse of undulating hills, meandering rivers, sharp ridges, lush valleys, dense forests, and open plains, and the extensive store of data he had accumulated of geophysical and biological details over the preceding decade of exploration and research rushed back to him. His attention was flooded by a burst of knowledge that his widely admired ability to endlessly recall facts made possible.
A glowing vision of nature burst into Humboldt’s imagination, one that enabled him to describe nature in a new way. Today this approach to visualizing knowledge underlies the standard practices of representing data and concepts in all areas of science. For Humboldt, at that moment he discovered how he wanted to visually represent his vast store of knowledge about nature. Wulf observes, “Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force.” She continues,
For Humboldt, the days they had spent travelling from Quinto and then climbing up Chimborazo had been like a botanical journey that moved from the Equator towards the poles – with the whole plant world seemingly layered on top of each other as the vegetation zones ascended the mountain…. Towards the end of his life, Humboldt often talked about understanding nature from ‘a higher point of view’ from which those connections could be seen; the moment when he had realized this was here, on Chimborazo. With ‘a single glance’, he saw the whole of nature laid out before him. (Wulf, IN, p. 101)
At that point, the full manifestation of his discovery was years away, requiring the work of dozens of artisans and printers and the expenditure of his substantial fortune to cover the labor and materials. The specific creation was what Humboldt referred to as Naturgemälde (paintings of nature). In its most rudimentary form, such a painting shows the types of plants that are to be found at various altitudes. Colors provide a visual aid, as do the layered or juxtaposed positions of the names of flora.
But the Naturgemälde also provides an intricately detailed, vividly portrayed, and factually supplemented symbolic representation of nature based on information about biological, atmospheric, and geological exploration. And above all, it provides a path to understanding nature as a system of life, an understanding that is dynamically iconic instead statically descriptive.
As Wulf emphasizes, Humboldt’s visualization enables its viewer to experience the unity of nature and ecology in an intuitive burst of awareness. Including such data as altitude, temperature, air pressure, precipitation, and geological layering, it unifies knowledge from different scientific domains, including biology, geology, geography, potamology, limnology, atmospheric physics, climatology, and oceanography, and from this it reaches an epistemological scope that is essential for advancing understanding into the areas of ecology and systems theory, where we are able to become aware of ourselves as integrated into, not an exception to, the natural world.
2023 © John P Flynt, PhD | Your Horizon Counseling
