00:00Un saludo a toda la audiencia del espectador que nos acompaña en esta entrevista.
00:04Hoy estamos con Andrea Wolff, una reconocida escritora, historiadora, divulgadora, científica.
00:10Andrea, thank you very much for joining us in this interview.
00:14Thank you for having me.
00:16Andrea, evidently because of the invasion of nature
00:22and to understand Alexander von Humboldt's great journey in this territory,
00:27you had a relationship with Latin America.
00:31What is your relationship with this side of the planet now and with Colombia?
00:38So I had never been to Latin America before I wrote the invention of nature.
00:43And the great thing when you write a book about an explorer is that you have to follow his footsteps.
00:48So I started with Venezuela and Ecuador and then Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Chile.
00:56Although he never went to Chile, so I only just went to Chile.
00:59So for me, it was one of the greatest surprises doing this, doing this book,
01:05because I completely and utterly fell in love with Latin America.
01:08I still don't speak Spanish, which is really, really embarrassing.
01:11But I just love this place.
01:14And I love Colombia.
01:16I mean, so I love nature.
01:19This is the reason why I wrote this book.
01:20And this is just so spectacular here.
01:23I mean, you have such amazing biodiversity here in Colombia.
01:27So the last 10, no, more than 10 years now,
01:32I have been here, except for the pandemic, all the time, whenever I can.
01:38Super.
01:40In recent weeks, you have been in Siberia, American Latin countries.
01:46Do you usually take advantage of these trips to gather information for your work?
01:52Yes.
01:53So, but as I'm not writing about Humboldt anymore,
01:57I don't have to do research anymore.
01:59So now I can just enjoy it, which is really, really nice.
02:02So I've just spent, so this is the reason why I've just been in Chile.
02:06And I kind of went all over the place, just enjoying it.
02:09And I mean, I do, I do talks.
02:11I do talk about Humboldt.
02:12I give lectures on Humboldt.
02:13But I can, I now travel as a tourist to Latin America, not so much research anymore.
02:20But the first few years was always research, always following his footsteps,
02:25trying to experience a little bit what he felt.
02:29Because I don't know how other authors do this, but I need to see the landscapes
02:34that my protagonists see.
02:36And I had, for example, never been in the rainforest before.
02:40So that was incredibly important.
02:42And then suddenly you realize why Humboldt is constantly writing about mosquitoes,
02:46because, you know, you are just attacked by mosquitoes the whole time.
02:49And it was very important for me to climb in the Andes,
02:54to kind of get a sense of what he experienced.
02:57Okay. And by the way, what are you working now?
03:02And if you can give us a preview.
03:05I'm working on another explorer, but he did not come to South America.
03:10Okay.
03:10So it's, it's going to be the, it's going to be the South Pacific now.
03:13In some of your lectures, you have said that Alexander von Humboldt is the forgotten father
03:20of the environmentalism. Why?
03:24Well, he traveled to Latin America in 1799, and he spent four years here.
03:31And it was a journey that really shaped his life and his thinking,
03:34and that made him famous across the world.
03:36And it was here in Latin America that he realized that nature is an interconnected whole,
03:43kind of living organism where everything's connected from the smallest insect to the tallest trees.
03:49But he also realized here that humankind is destroying nature.
03:55So as he was traveling through South America, he saw, for example,
03:59how plantation owners had completely destroyed the forests to make way for cash crops.
04:05And seeing that, he was the first to understand the fundamental functions of the forest for the ecosystem.
04:11And he talked about the tree's ability to protect the soil, to enrich the atmosphere with moisture.
04:19So he, because he, because he connects everything, he understood what was happening.
04:25He sees how ruthless pearl fishing kind of destroyed the oyster stock.
04:30So wherever he traveled through South America, he saw this.
04:33And then he eventually began to write about it.
04:37And in his diary, for example, I found a diary entry where he says,
04:41in Mexico, he says, they are raping nature.
04:45So he's, he's very clear in his criticism.
04:48So he talks about harmful human induced climate change in 18, in 1800.
04:54So more than 200 years ago.
04:56So that's why he's the forgotten father of environmentalism.
04:59A couple months ago, a climate change summit ended and left some lessons, but several disappointments.
05:07And today you are in Colombia in a particular time.
05:11We have very high temperatures.
05:13We have fires and possibly there will be drought.
05:19Are there any of that kind of Humboldt's ideas that you think are worth risking to help us reflect on
05:28these complex times?
05:30Well, I think he doesn't have a solution because he couldn't know back then how bad it's going to be.
05:38But he's an inspiration, I think, because he's a scientist who, who also, on the one hand, measured everything in
05:49nature.
05:49So he's kind of, you know, he's an empirical scientist.
05:52But at the same time, he always said that he was driven by a sense of wonder.
05:56He said that we only can truly understand nature if we use our emotions and our imagination.
06:02And I think that is something that's really missing in today's climate change debates.
06:07That we are talking about numbers, statistics, figures, projections, which I think is incredibly important.
06:14I love the scientists, so it's not me talking against the scientists here at all.
06:18But I think we also need artists, filmmakers, poets, writers who will tell this story slightly differently to engage more
06:31people in that something has to change.
06:34Because we will only, you know, we only protect what we love.
06:39So we need poets, filmmakers, artists to kind of bring back this love for nature, to tell a slightly different
06:46story, to communicate the threat in another way.
06:49And I think for me, that is really where I draw a lot of inspiration from Humboldt from, because he
06:57is the bridge between the arts and the sciences, between poetry and the sciences.
07:01Okay, let's talk about a bit about the Gena group, the magnificent rebels.
07:10I'm struck by how much influence some of the women, such as Caroline Schlegel, had on that group, and how
07:18much they contributed to the idea of romanticism.
07:22Had they been somewhat overshadowed by history?
07:25And how difficult was it to reconstruct their lives compared to other much more recognized characters?
07:35So these people are very famous in Germany.
07:40So, and because they're, so these are the young romantics who came together in the last decade of the 18th
07:45century, this tiny little town in Germany called Jena, which is about 250 kilometers southwest of Berlin.
07:52And some of the names there in Germany are like the literary superstars.
07:57So they kept all their letters.
08:00They were incredible letter writers.
08:02So there are thousands and thousands and thousands of their letters.
08:05It was a university town.
08:07There were lots of students who wrote letters home, describing their professors and these famous people.
08:12So it was, that was not so difficult to find the sources.
08:16What was difficult is kind of to put them all together and to bring them alive.
08:19Because for me, they are, so Humboldt is also part of this group.
08:24That's how I started writing about this.
08:27But they, they talked a lot about bringing the arts and the sciences together.
08:31They really tried to kind of work against the increasingly materialistic world.
08:36They, but they also talked about the self.
08:41So the importance of a free self, of a self-determined self.
08:45And we today are such a selfish society because we've taken it a little bit too far.
08:51So for them, it was this thrilling power of self-determination, which now has become selfishness.
08:59So I wanted to find out what went wrong and where this all comes from.
09:03Okay, okay.
09:06Your books are intersected by the figure of another absolutely fascinating character,
09:12who influenced the lives of all the protagonists.
09:17It's Goethe.
09:18Having read his letters and studied his life, what are your thoughts on Goethe today?
09:26And what do we owe to Goethe?
09:29So Goethe was Germany's most famous poet, still is Germany's most famous poet.
09:35He was a, he was a little bit older than the rest of the group.
09:38So he was a, he was like a stern godfather to this group.
09:43And he was incredibly influential on Alexander von Humboldt, for example.
09:49So when Humboldt arrived in Jena in 1794, he was very much a child of the Enlightenment.
09:55He believed in rational thought, observations, experiments.
09:58And he met Goethe, who was a poet, but also scientist.
10:02And Goethe, as Humboldt said himself, Goethe gave Humboldt new organs through which to see the world.
10:10Organs that were much more subjective.
10:13So it is with these new organs that Humboldt travels to South America.
10:19So it is with, with almost with Goethe's eyes, with the eyes of a poet that he sees nature,
10:26not just the eyes of a scientist.
10:29Is there any character that you have discovered in your research that you have yet to write about,
10:37or would like to write more about? Maybe that the new one.
10:43The new one kind of popped up in the research. So I'm, I, it, so far always someone popped up
10:50from the research, but I, I'm terrible at finding new book ideas. So it, it always takes me a long,
10:56long time.
10:57Okay. Okay.
10:59We could say that today you are also a science communicator.
11:05And, obviously you are in the midst of the, this strange context of misinformation,
11:14anti-vaccination and climate change denialist. What is the value of doing this work?
11:22Okay. Well, I think we historians are finders of truth. I think that's what we try to do. We try
11:32to
11:32find some truth in the past in order to shed some light on today. So I think it is, for
11:41me,
11:41it is very important because I don't think that history is a pile of dusty old ideas. I think history
11:46is
11:47something that really opens a window into the present. So I, I hope that what we historians
11:55are doing is also important because it is, it is the stories that sometimes give us some inspiration.
12:04So I've, you know, I, I, after my talks, I talk a lot to, um, young environmentalists who feel very
12:10inspired when they hear the story of Alexander from Humboldt, someone who's been dead for 200 years,
12:16almost, but someone who really believed in the same things they are believing and someone who talked
12:22about harmful human-induced climate change, someone who warned about the devastating effects of
12:28monoculture, deforestation and irrigation. So all subjects that they are dealing with today. So it is
12:35sometimes, I think, important to bring alive these forgotten figures from the past to give some
12:43inspiration for, for today or for the future. Okay. And the last one, the history of science has been
12:52constructed mainly from a European and Anglo-Saxon point of view. How can we remedy this excess of a
13:02European centred view? Well, I think, um, you're very, you're absolutely right. And it's quite interesting
13:09to see how Humboldt, for example, he went, he did a big detour from Catarina when he was going down
13:16to
13:16Lima. I mean, he could have just taken a boat to come to Bogota to meet Mutis, uh, because Mutis
13:22was the expert on South American flora. So Humboldt was very aware that he needed him. Humboldt was also
13:32very aware of the importance of indigenous knowledge. So he, um, as he traveled through
13:38South America, he talked to indigenous people. He said that they are the best observers of nature,
13:43the best geographers of nature. So I think there is a, there's a whole other history
13:48to be written to kind of try to find it, you know, from their perspective, because I think
13:53Humboldt's idea that nature was a living organism is partly influenced from his time in Jena,
13:59because they were talking about this, but also from indigenous knowledge, which obviously believes
14:05that there's a mother earth and that earth is alive. Obviously. And the last one, this,
14:10what is Andrea Woolf reading now? What am I reading now? I am reading so many novels. I can't believe
14:18how many novels, because I've judged in, um, I was just a judge of the Bailey Gifford nonfiction prize
14:23in England, which is the most important nonfiction prize. And, um, we had to read about a hundred
14:30nonfiction books, which were brilliant, but at the moment I'm reading lots of novels. I've just read,
14:35um, Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait, it's called, and I've just finished Henan Diaz's,
14:44um, Trust. So I am, I'm reading novels at the moment. Andrea, thank you very much for your time.
14:50Thank you for having me.
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