MB Civic

The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism
by Aaron Sachs

Thinking Globally

Review by CANDICE MILLARD
In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte met Alexander von Humboldt, a German naturalist and then the world’s most celebrated explorer, in the gardens of the Tuileries palace. The conversation did not last long. “So, monsieur,” Napoleon asked, “you collect plants?” Humboldt smiled in modest agreement. Before walking away, Napoleon replied curtly, “So does my wife.”

It’s a safe assumption that Napoleon’s derision was born less out of comfortable superiority than of bitter jealousy. Napoleon ruled France, but Humboldt, the central figure in Aaron Sachs’s ambitious first book, “The Humboldt Current,” was the toast of all of Europe, as well as a subject of great admiration in the fledgling country across the sea. Crowds flocked to his lectures. Charles Darwin sent manuscripts and data for his review and later attributed his own success in large part to avidly reading and rereading Humboldt’s “Personal Narrative.” Thomas Jefferson sat down with Humboldt in Washington to discuss Indian languages and compare their collections of mammoth teeth.

For all his fame at home in Europe, Humboldt felt a deep connection to the United States, where he helped to shape the scientific culture of the new nation, as it had shaped him. He spent five years, from 1799 until 1804, traveling through the country, and 30 years writing about it. Nearly half a century after his trip to America, he insisted that he was still “so devoted to America in heart and mind as to think of it as a second homeland.” The feeling was mutual. Humboldt became, in Sachs’s words, an “unofficial American hero.” Although there are Humboldt Mountains in Antarctica and a Humboldt glacier in Greenland — and, of course, the Humboldt current off the coast of Peru, from which Sachs takes his metaphoric title — no nation has named more places in Humboldt’s honor than the United States.

Sachs, who teaches history and American studies at Cornell University, argues that Humboldt left an indelible mark not just on American science but also on American history. “Almost all American scientists in the mid-to-late 19th century, no matter what subfields they waded into, considered themselves disciples of Humboldt,” Sachs writes. With a largely unmapped nation before them, American scientists became the country’s earliest explorers — following Humboldt’s example and admonition to travel widely, study the natural world, make connections and view the “globe as a great whole.” Sachs’s subject is less Humboldt himself than his influence, and he examines Humboldt’s legacy through the lives of four American explorers and environmentalists: Clarence King, J.N. Reynolds, George Wallace Melville and John Muir.

In the early 19th century, America was still largely a mystery to most Americans. Lewis and Clark did not set out for the Pacific Northwest until 1804 — the final year of Humboldt’s five-year American expedition. When Clarence King joined the California Geological Survey in 1863, there was still much to be learned about the young country. King’s early career glittered with Humboldtian idealism and ambition. He was the first to climb some of the tallest mountains in the Sierra Nevadas. He led the Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel when he was just 25, and he was named the first director of the United States Geological Survey. By surveying large swaths of the United States, King was able to define in sweeping geological terms a country that Humboldt had loved in scientific detail.

Early in the century, American scientists began to follow Humboldt’s lead and look at the world as a whole — every ocean, mountain and iceberg in it worth careful study. The American government, however, remained reluctant to venture past its own borders. Senator Robert Hayne of South Carolina complained that a large-scale exploring expedition would force the country to make “unnecessary connections abroad.” Unfortunately for Hayne, this was the century of Humboldtian science, the century of discovery. Young American scientists would not be denied the opportunity to explore the planet’s farthest reaches — and, to the degree possible, protect what they found.

According to Sachs, J.N. Reynolds, “more than any other person … was responsible for spurring America’s embrace of exploration for exploration’s sake in the 19th century.” Although not a classically trained scientist, Reynolds had Humboldt’s passion for exploration and, more important, a rare ability to thrill and inspire an audience. In 1828, after listening to a particularly stirring address by Reynolds, Congress finally passed a resolution recommending the country’s first official expedition to Antarctica. Through a series of missed opportunities and cruel twists, the command of the expedition — the United States Exploring Expedition, popularly known as the U.S. Ex. Ex. — was given to Reynolds’s bitter rival, Charles Wilkes. However, the Ex. Ex. was undeniably the result of Reynolds’s dreams and determination, and it became one of America’s greatest triumphs of exploration. Not only did it answer the burning geographical question “Does Antarctica exist?” but it also brought home thousands of species new to science, a collection large enough and extraordinary enough to form the foundation of the Smithsonian Institution.

Half a century later, the United States had wholeheartedly joined the race to discover new land and lay claim to new territory. According to Sachs, when George Wallace Melville set sail for the North Pole in 1879, he and the expedition’s commander, George Washington De Long, boarded their ship with “some fairly typical Rooseveltian attitudes regarding their superiority as Euro-American white men, and with dreams of conquering nature.” However, Melville, who had been engineer in chief of the Navy for 16 years, came home a changed man. His ship, the Jeannette, was stuck in the polar ice for nearly two years, and when it finally sank, the members of the expedition were divided into three boats. One boat never reached land. The other two were separated in a gale. Melville, with help from a group of Inuit, eventually led his men to safety, but the second group became lost, and all but two of its men perished. After Melville returned, he bore the guilt of a survivor, but the expedition affected him in more fundamental ways. He returned with a deep respect for nature, with an understanding of humankind’s uneasy place in the world, and, most important, with humility. “He developed a distinctly Humboldtian attitude,” Sachs writes, “not so much about nature’s connectedness but about its power over humanity.”

With respect for nature came a desire to protect it — a desire that would give birth to the modern environmental movement. Sachs argues that Humboldt may have been the first true ecologist, at least the first to think “ecologically.” If so, John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, was undoubtedly the most effective advocate of his ideas in the 20th century. “How intensely,” Muir wrote, “I desire to be a Humboldt!” Muir is, as Sachs puts it, “the patron saint of American environmentalism.” By the time Muir was 30, he had committed his life to the study and appreciation of the natural world. His final years were devoted to saving it. He wrote eloquently and irresistibly of his nearly religious devotion to nature, and he used this intensity of feeling to win over new converts. “Through all the permutations of environmental thought in the 20th century,” Sachs writes of Muir, “the one consistently resonant voice has been his.”

“The Humboldt Current” is not lacking in resonant voices. Sachs’s subjects are strong, and he describes them in extensive detail. The difficulty is that there are perhaps too many subjects and too much detail — digressing at length from Humboldt. As interesting as his followers were, their stories beg for a fuller portrait of the extraordinary figure who inspired them. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of him, he was “one of those wonders of the world … who appear from time to time, as if to show us the possibilities of the human mind.”

Candice Millard is the author of “The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey.”

—-

The Shia Revivial: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future
by Vali Nasr

Muslim Against Muslim

Review by IRSHAD MANJI
In February, a group of Sunni Muslims bombed the Golden Mosque in Samarra, Iraq, one of Shiite Islam’s holiest sites. Meanwhile, Muslims continued rioting over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Prompted by the week’s violence, HBO’s Bill Maher pulled a Rodney King and asked, “Can’t we all just get Allah?”

As a guest on his show that night, I howled offstage. But the joke fell flatter than my hair under a head scarf. Most of Maher’s studio audience didn’t get it.

Americans may be paying more attention to Muslim conflicts now. They had better. In “The Shia Revival,” a fast-moving, engaging and ultimately unnerving book, Vali Nasr writes that wars within Islam “will shape the future.” A professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and an occasional adviser to the American government, Nasr argues that Operation Iraqi Freedom has tilled the soil for a “new” Middle East — one fueled less by the ideal of democracy than by an age-old animosity between Islam’s two major sects, the majority Sunnis and minority Shiites.

Their split has a violent history, initiated in A.D. 632 by a feud over who should succeed the prophet Muhammad. Some Muslims supported the prophet’s cousin Ali. More Muslims endorsed the prophet’s elder companion, Abu Bakr, and they won. Grudges died hard, however, and the disgruntled murdered three of the first four successors to the prophet. These assassinations spawned a hunger for stability, even at the price of tyranny.

The trade-off precipitated Islam’s most stubborn schism. The Sunnis (followers of the “sunnah” or traditions) backed a fifth successor, whose iron fist ensured order at all costs. To preserve power, his son slaughtered the prophet’s own grandchild Hussein. At this, the horrified dissidents could no longer stay silent. Insisting that only blood relatives of the prophet had Allah’s blessing to lead Muslims, they maintained that Ali should have been the first successor all along. The Shiites (“partisans of Ali”) broke away.

In the wake of that rupture, Nasr explains, Shiites and Sunnis developed different values and visions. Sunnis historically considered worldly success as a sign of Allah’s favor; political engagement and empire-building have been religious callings for them. Shiites tended to emphasize moral victories rather than political ones, taking as their central narrative Hussein’s valiant but failed fight against a dictator — the Saddam Hussein of yore. Through this and related stories, Shiites have found meaning in physical hardship, material loss, social exclusion and personal martyrdom. Suffering has helped them cultivate faith that their messiah (another of the prophet’s descendants) will usher in the End of Days and bring justice to people everywhere. But what Shiites treat as essential Islamic virtues, Sunnis regard as post-prophet corruptions. That’s why, Nasr observes, “Saudi textbooks, criticized for their anti-Semitism, are equally hostile to Shiism, characterizing the faith as a form of heresy.”

“The Shia Revival” is at its most provocative when exposing how the Sunni-Shiite power imbalance seeps out of classrooms and infects Muslim life on the ground. Nasr reports that in Lebanon, Shiites were “forced to fight for the Palestinian cause, and even to sacrifice their own and their children’s lives and property for it.” In Dubai, a senior government official fears speaking Persian — the language of Shiite Iran — unless assured “absolute privacy.” In Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fantasy of avenging Sunni arrogance drove him to anoint countless village boys as martyrs in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980’s. (Paradoxically, Khomeini helped Sunnify Shiism by assuming the role of autocrat and empire-seeker, while helping Sunnis to Shiify their creed by glorifying martyrdom — a tactic since adopted by the Sunni brain trust of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.)

Above all, Nasr reveals, the growing influence of Khomeini’s Shiite soldiers throughout the Middle East led Saudi Arabia to forge an “axis” with Pakistan, a country where Shiites are commonly labeled “mosquitoes.” The aim of this axis? To “underwrite the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan” and exploit it “as a training ground for various ‘holy warrior’ outfits.” Now for Nasr’s kicker: “It was in worrying about that axis — and the threat from Baathist Iraq — that Iran first became interested in a nuclear arsenal.” With or without Washington’s meddling, it appears that Muslims find ways to conspire against one another. Take heart, America. It’s not all your fault.

Still, George W. Bush has been naïve in underestimating the Sunni-Shiite chasm, especially in Iraq. Despite adopting the slogans of a secular nationalist, Saddam Hussein, like most Arab leaders, was actually a Sunni chauvinist. (Nasr reports that he approached the shah of Iran for permission to kill the ultra-Shiite Khomeini, then an exile living in Paris. The shah declined Hussein’s offer.)

The problem is that liberating Iraq’s Shiites has stoked their hopes for domination — not just representation — in the new Middle East. Witness the upstart militancy of Hezbollah, in alliance with Iran. Nasr says a showdown could be coming between Iran, the Shiite heavyweight, and Saudi Arabia, the Sunni behemoth. “Ultimately,” he predicts, “the character of the region will be decided in the crucible of Shia revival and the Sunni response to it.”

Amid such an ancient rivalry, how can American Mideast policy effectively advocate rule of law, transparency and human rights — the cornerstones of any democracy? That’s a question Vali Nasr doesn’t address, a revealing omission in an otherwise riveting analysis. One suspects that far from being a superpower, the United States is about to become a superpawn. Whatever the final chapter of this drama, Washington won’t write it. Muslims will.

Irshad Manji, a fellow at Yale University, is the author of “The Trouble With Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith.”

—-

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
by Thomas E. Ricks

Eyes Wide Shut

Review by JACOB HEILBRUNN
IN early July 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, met in a former presidential palace with a defense consultant and retired Marine colonel named Gary Anderson, who had written an op-ed in The Washington Post warning that the United States might be facing a guerrilla insurgency. After Bremer indicated he wasn’t that interested in the issue, Anderson made one last attempt: “Mr. Ambassador,” he said, “here are some programs that worked in Vietnam,” referring to local village militias that had functioned successfully. Bremer was enraged: “Vietnam! I don’t want to talk about Vietnam. This is not Vietnam. This is Iraq!”

Thomas E. Ricks’s “Fiasco,” which is filled with such telling vignettes, offers a comprehensive and illuminating portrait of the willful blindness of the Bush administration to Iraqi realities. A veteran Pentagon correspondent for The Washington Post, Ricks has done his homework: he has interviewed numerous Bush administration officials, traveled extensively in Iraq and consulted thousands of pages of military documents. At some points, the amount of detail will overwhelm all but the most hardened policy wonk, but Ricks makes a powerful case that, far from being inevitable, the insurgency was the direct product of American bungling.

As Ricks notes, the modern American Army was a response to the Vietnam debacle. A new officer corps, epitomized by a young Colin Powell, was determined to avoid a rerun, and it sought to turn the military into a lethal force that could deploy overwhelming power. But according to Ricks, the wholesale revamping of Army doctrine also meant that “after it came home from Vietnam, the Army threw away virtually everything it had learned there, slowly and painfully, about how to wage a counterinsurgency campaign.” What’s more, it became addicted to new technologies, even substituting PowerPoint presentations for formal written orders — a sign of intellectual slovenliness that Ricks singles out as symptomatic of the lackadaisical planning for the aftermath of war.

Ricks’s fury at the Pentagon higher-ups is palpable. He indicts not only administration hawks like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, but also the military brass for initially pretending that the insurgents didn’t exist. He recounts a meeting at Baghdad’s Al-Rasheed Hotel in midsummer 2003, where Wolfowitz appeared with Gen. John Abizaid to assure a group of handpicked journalists, including administration cheerleaders like Vanity Fair’s Christopher Hitchens and Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal, that progress was “pretty amazing.” Ricks writes: “Looking over the white tablecloth set with candelabras to the buffet of lamb, rice and vegetables at the end of the room, swaddled in the tight security of the Green Zone, it was almost possible for a moment to believe they were correct.”

But the United States was inadvertently becoming the biggest recruiting agent for the budding insurgency. For one thing, had Bremer not insisted on recklessly disbanding the Iraqi Army in May 2003, it might have been deployed to cordon off huge caches of ammunition. And worse was to come. On Aug. 14, 2003, Capt. William Ponce, an officer in the Orwellian sounding Human Intelligence Effects Coordination Cell, sent an e-mail message to subordinate commands stating: “The gloves are coming off regarding these detainees” at Abu Ghraib.

Ricks meticulously reconstructs the slide into excessive force and torture, showing that the horrors of Abu Ghraib were not an aberration, but the logical outcome for a military that was “moving in the direction of institutionalized abuse.” He rightly notes that Rumsfeld and Pentagon officials shirked responsibility, claiming that abuses were simply individual cases. But again and again, apart from a few exceptions like David Petraeus and H.R. McMaster who tried to work with local leaders, the military ended up humiliating and antagonizing Iraqis.

For all his depictions of the Americans’ shortcomings, however, Ricks never explains why so many mistakes occurred. Why, for instance, was the military leadership, after vowing not to replicate the experience of Vietnam, so easily rolled by Rumsfeld and company? And how could an administration that started what was, at bottom, a war of the intellectuals, be so bereft of insights and ideas about Iraq? Part of the answer is surely to be found as much in hubris as in the incompetence portrayed by Ricks. In this regard, it’s worth recalling that the scholar Fouad Ajami, who helped influence Vice President Dick Cheney in pushing for a makeover of Arab regimes, published a book in 1998 called “The Dream Palace of the Arabs.” The longer the war drags on, the clearer it becomes that Bush and his paladins have been living in their own dream palace.

Jacob Heilbrunn, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is writing a book on neoconservatism.