As a former mining inspector, Humboldt had a unique insight into the environmental and economic consequences of the exploitation of nature’s riches. He criticized unjust land distribution, monocultures, violence against tribal groups and indigenous work conditions – all powerfully relevant issues today. He debated nature, ecological issues, imperial power and politics in relation to each other. Everywhere in the world, Humboldt said, water engineers were guilty of such short-sighted follies. On the high plateau of Mexico City, Humboldt had observed how a lake that fed the local irrigation system had shrunk into a shallow puddle, leaving the valleys beneath barren. To make matters worse, they had also felled the trees that had held the riverbanks together like ‘a very tight wall’ with the result that the raging river carried more land away each year. At the Rio Apure, he had seen the devastation caused by the Spanish who had tried to control the annual flooding by building a dam. Again and again, his thoughts returned to nature as a complex web of life but also to man’s place within it. “Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment.
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