Abstract

Recent books promote Alexander Humboldt as an environmental hero, dismissing Humboldt’s partner in exploration, the botanist Aimé Bonpland, in a few inaccurate phrases: left Europe, went native somewhere in South America, did some farming. Bonpland’s writings and his forty years of regional development, botanical research, ethno-pharmacology, and environmental conservation in Argentina and Brazil present a better model for an environmental ethics than Humboldt’s climb to fame in Europe.