Humboldt Fever

Yesterday I was in my garden.  It was an extraordinarily perfect day.  Blue skies, a breeze, overstory and understory in alignment, deliriously happy.  Me, birds, squirrels, chipmunks and bunnies; I imagine even  rats and mice and worms stretching their limbs and reveling in nature’s glory.  Also trees, bushes, flowers waving like flags at a memorial day celebration.

My relationship to nature is romantic and sensual.  I feel it in my being.  This is a well worn tradition:  consider all the romantic poets and novelists and song writers. My approach has been neither empirical, scientific  or commercial.  I just love to be outside digging or walking or hiking or swimming or anything actually so that I can engage in this wonderful world.  I just need to be of it.  We are all of it, aren’t we?

I am reading a book called The Invention of Nature  Alexander Humboldt’s New World.  I’d never heard of him but sort of remember when this book about him came out in 2015.  Alexander Humboldt lived from 1769 to 1859 or round about.  His contemporaries and friends were Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Jefferson and Simon Bolivar. He influenced Darwin, Thoreau and Muir.

This book has got me revved up.  The folks Humbodlt hung with were or became scientists, naturalists, romantics and adventurers.  They measured mountains, studied gravity, looked at plants and animals with a wondering eye, photographed, cataloged and wrote long papers which they shared with others who were interested.  They were engaged in the world.

Then there are the folks that look upon nature as a a giant supermarket for them to loot. This latter category I find particularly loathsome. It’s not about balance, or husbandry.  Nature is not engaged with curiosity or with wisdom.  It’s not about seeking to understand and study nature.  It’s about rape.  Rape and pillage and grab.  Trump and his cohorts, like robber barons of old, grab mother nature by the pussy.  She’s theirs to use and abuse.

Dancing in the beautiful breezes feeds my soul, but romance needs to be married to politics.  Activist politics.  We need to care for mother earth.  She is our home.