2024-10-26 11:30:00
On April 7, 1800, Alexander von Humboldt wrote in his diary: “Nothing can show people more vividly how vast and powerful is the realm of organic life. Myriads of insects crawl on the ground or surround plants burned by the heat of the sun. A confused sound comes from every bush, from the rotten trunks, from the crevices of the rocks, from the ground in which lizards, millipedes and caecilians dig their burrows. There are just as many voices that tell us that everything in nature breathes, that life reigns in a thousand different forms in the dusty and fissured soil, as well as in the depths of the waters and in the air that surrounds us.
The Prussian explorer has been traveling on the Orinoco River for a week. He is amazed by the biodiversity, but also notes that no one has to go to the equator to realize that the earth is alive. Not far from the Humboldt camp fire, where he writes and draws his thoughtswhat he sees, from the black-faced ukari to the macaw, which the natives call Cahuei, the United Nations Conference on Endangered Species (COP16) takes place 224 years later. Delegates meet in Cali to avert the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history. This time it’s not a meteor’s fault, but humans.
As if Humboldt already suspected what might happen to the Colombian rainforest as a result of colonization, he records everything in his diaries. In an inventory of flora and fauna: manatees and river dolphins, guinea pigs and sloths, peccaries and tapirs, jaguars and above all birds, fish and reptiles, biting flies and mosquitoes: “Everything here recalls the original state of the world . The Golden Age is over in this paradise of American forests.”
Humboldt turns his boat into an ark. “We already had in our dugout seven parrots, two rock hens, a motmot, two guan, two manaviri and eight monkeys, namely two atelen, two titis, a viudita, two doroucoulis or night monkeys and the short-tailed cacajao”, he observed on May 10, 1800 on the Orinoco.
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