“There will probably come a time when humans will travel to distant planets. When that happens, we will take our deadly mixture of arrogance, greed, and violence with us and destroy this planet just as we have already done with our Earth,”1 Andrea Wulf writes in Alexander von Humboldt and the Invention of Nature. Humboldt recognized the bond between nature and humans and described it in his studies. Are these animal and plant species, which Humboldt discovered and catalogued at the time, affected by the changes in our environment? The Humb catalog addresses this question. 127 of the animal and plant species cataloged by Humboldt have been categorized according to the IUCN Red List for endangered species.
- Wulf, Andrea. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015. ↩