Alexander von Humboldt

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt was born 14 September 1769, younger brother to the Prussian minister and linguist Wilhelm. Between 1799 and 1804 he and French explorer Aimé Bonpland traversed thousands of miles through some of the least-known terrain on Earth, identifying the source of the Orinoco and scaling Ecuador's highest peak. His quantitative work on botanical geography founded the field of biogeography; his push for long-term geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring. The journey became several volumes published over 21 years. In Kosmos, his multivolume treatise, he resurrected the ancient Greek word and used it to unify diverse branches of knowledge, introducing a holistic view of the universe that seeded the concepts of ecology and environmentalism. In 1800 and again in 1831 he described, from his own observations, human-induced climate change. He died 6 May 1859, called the father of both ecology and environmentalism.