1.2 Shifting Ideas about Nature

As Zuelow (2016) argues in his book on the History of Modern Tourism, several factors came together over the course of the 17^th and 18^th centuries that shifted human attitudes toward nature in a way that enabled the development of today’s tourist industry. First of all, wealthy visitors to Holland were inspired by the way the Dutch had tamed and controlled the waters of their nation to become an economic superpower surpassing England. The Dutch ability to “conquer” nature conjoined with shifting ideas about science to ease anxiety about what would come to be termed “sublime” landscapes, which inspired travelers, artists, and writers.

Whereas mysterious, awe-inspiring, or frightening landscapes, coastlines, and oceans were once thought of as dangerous entities populated by ferocious beasts and demons, the Irish intellectual Edmund Burke helped transform European thought with the publication of his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) in which he argued that stunning, awe-inspiring, even frightful vistas open the mind and expand human consciousness. So too, Burke believed, do mysterious natural phenomena, such as volcanoes, earthquakes, fires, and avalanches (Sullivan, 2001). Whereas previously nature had been understood in religious terms, Burke helped shift European and, in turn, American attitudes toward a scientific understanding of nature and of humanity.

Burke believed that careful observation and analysis could lead to productive advances in our understanding of the universe and its workings. He argued that traveling through awe-inspiring and fearful settings could prove instructive and enlightening. Burke’s writings would inspire such brilliant minds as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, each of whom wrote about nature’s power to broaden and enrich the human mind. Religious and folk beliefs about nature were slowly replaced by scientific inquiry into the workings of the universe at the same time that explorers such as Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) and William Clark (1770–1838) were mapping the uncharted territories west of the Mississippi in the New Republic, where they were “discovering” new animals such as grizzly bears, coyotes, bighorn sheep, and jackrabbits.

In turn, the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt was crafting a vision of nature and its ecosystems that was centuries ahead of its time. Exploring some of the most extreme places in the world, Humboldt climbed higher than any European ever had before. During his ascent of Chimborazo, a 21,000-foot-tall inactive volcano in the Andes, Humboldt wrote journals and drew sketches charting the change in vegetation and topography, noting that lichen stopped growing at 18,000 feet. As Andrea Wulf (2015) describes in her award-winning biography The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, at the edge of the volcano the naturalist “stood at the top of the world, looking down upon the mountain ranges that folded beneath him [and] began to see the world differently” (p. 2). He saw the earth as one great living organism where everything was connected” (Wulf, 2015, p. 2). Beginning to comprehend the earth as a living entity, Humboldt “became the first scientist to talk about harmful human-induced climate change” after seeing the scarred and ravaged landscape of colonial plantations in Venezuela in 1800 (Wulf, 2015, p. 6). After his journey through the Americas, which ended with a lengthy visit with Thomas Jefferson, Humboldt returned home to Europe in 1804 at the age of 34, bringing back “some 60,000 plant specimens” (Wulf, 2015, p. 129). Of the 6,000 species represented among his collection, 2,000 were new to Europeans.

In part due to Burke and in part due to Humboldt, human understanding of nature was being radically transformed. None other than Charles Darwin cited Humboldt as the inspiration for his career, which involved the scientist’s intellectual pursuit of earth’s geo-history, among many other aims. Darwin attributed his youthful drive to ascend the mountains of Chile to Humboldt’s writings. Darwin’s travel memoir about the trip, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), in turn, inspired generations of naturalists and explorers. In his memoir, Darwin wrote about discovering fossilized shells high in the mountains, which showed that the vertiginous topography he climbed had once been submerged in water. Darwin’s engaging writing style helped fuel the travels of his fellow Victorians, who began exploring ever further afield to see the world’s vast and varied geography and to gain perspective on the natural world as well as rich urban centers.