Stories rooted in place, history, and hope.

Alexander von Humboldt was one of the greatest minds the world has ever known. Throughout his multi-volume publications, he crystalized the world he explored onto the pages of his writings. He brought the great wild of the jungles, the volcanoes he climbed, the rivers he crossed, plants and animals he encountered, and the indigenous ways of knowing; came to life in the pages of his narratives.

Humboldt was a Prussian multi-discipline scholar. Long before the concept of an ecosystem or climate science, Humboldt was already studying how nature works as one living system. He considered Earth to be a single living organism made up of millions of interconnected parts. He carefully recorded temperatures, air pressure, plants and their dispersal, even the blueness of the sky; giving us some of the earliest scientific data about Earth's atmosphere and climate.

During his lifetime, Humboldt became the most famous scientist in the world. For more than a century after his death, people across many countries honored him for his ideas, discoveries. Even the theory of evolution was initially conceived by Humboldt, outlined in letters exchanged between Darwin and Humboldt. His work influenced science, art, poetry, and philosophy, and helped shape fields like geology, climatology, meteorology, ecology, and land preservation. Few places on Earth are untouched by his ideas, and style of writing.