HUMBOLDTS COSMOS by Gerard Helferich, Penguin-Gotham ‘04

Recent in depth travelogue & analysis of Alexander von Humboldt´s a brilliant Prussian natural scientist, 6,000 mi odessy thru Latin America 1799 to 1804. That epic voyage thru northern South America, Amazon, Peru, Venezuela, Columbia, Mexico, Cuba & US spawned 42 books he published in Europe after he returned. It appears he was the greatest wilderness science explorerin Latin Americas ever known, after being a great mining scientist in Europe. His hi energy, great courage, awareness, curiosity, ambition & friendliness propelled him thru uncharted Amazon rivers, deep jungles, hi mountain & 1000s of miles of sea voyaging, mostly he paid for, with blessing of King of Spain. But he was German, not Spanish, like Columbus, sponsored by another monarchy, 300 years later. His gentle presence, open mindedness, good heart, instincts & intuition guided him thru terrible wilderness challenges, getting sick & healing en route. He collected 60,000 plants, dozens of animals & 100s of mineral specimens for examining later.

His discoveries seeded some new sciences of plant geography, volcanology, ecology, geomagnetism & more. He invented ways of measuring natural patterns, using devices never known or used in Latin America. Alexander was horrified at how natives & slaves were treated by whites & the Catholic church fathers, who hosting him with pride, helped him on his elite

voyage of scientific exploration, working to create & correct current maps of the new world in Europe. He was very peaceful, aware & determined from youth on to discover new horizons within nature & changed his plans while travelling many times, as paths closed & new visas opened. Humboldt was honored even before he returned to Europe & Cuba, where he's still respected after discovering new geography there. Tho many things are

named from him, he's mostly forgotten in western sciences, becoming ever more specialized since mid 1800s, forgetting & ignoring the ‘unity of Nature' Alexander opened up like Newton, Velikovsky & Rachel Carson & Permaculture now synthesizes natures bioregional cycles for organic homesteading.

He's been praised by Darwin, Charles Lyell, Theo. Roosevelt, S.J. Gould recently called him the ‘the world most famous & (forgotten?= MS) influential intellectual'. Humboldt returned a hero of discovery to Paris & his homeland Germany, then worked 40 years to publish his findings, reprinted in many languages. In 20th cent. I'm reminded of Buckminster Fuller (geodesics & Synergetics)& Immanuel Velikovsky (cataclysmic evolution) in 20th century comprehensively connecting many fields of nature together. But like most pioneer genius, rejected by big $science too specialized to realize their revolutionary findings now, like ecology often does. With his devoted vital partner Bopland &Alexander opened up fields still growing

150 yrs later into Gaia / deep ecology, catastrophism, geomagnetism, organic growing, plant geography, botany, oceanography & trekking nature to discover new dimensions. Humboldt’s books were the best selling science books in 1800s, like Velikovsky’s 3 books on global catastrophe in mid 1950s, but he was & is rejected & ignored by science then, still ignorant of global disasters from cosmic collisions in 750 / 1,500 BC. However earth changes are getting so heavy, common & destructive, catastrophism is growing rapidly since1990s, with bestselling book Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock, revealing evidence of simultaneous disasters around earth, even deeper in his book Underworld showing many cities buried under seas in all oceans, probably known by U$ navy for decades. Exposing the normal split of true history between empirests, local &cosmic evolution of nature causing extinctions of recent cycles.