The negotiators in Paris should have asked themselves: What would Alexander von Humboldt do?

The negotiators in Paris should have asked themselves: What would Alexander von Humboldt do? https://t.co/AyPkZetWwT pic.twitter.com/PaB3HBY6Sl

— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) December 18, 2015

Humboldt wasn’t just a prescient proto-environmentalist whose work happened to inspire emotion; he was a thinker who believed nature and imagination are inseparable. At a time when other scientists were searching for universal laws to understand nature, Humboldt insisted that “nature must be experienced through feeling.” Those who wanted to understand the world only through reason, Humboldt wrote in 1810 to Germany’s most celebrated poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “will never get close to it.” Humboldt wanted to excite a “love of nature.” Nature, he explained, had to be described with scientific accuracy but without being “deprived thereby of the vivifying breath of imagination.”