“In The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf’s biography of the famous nineteenth-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, I learned he’d had it too. Von Humboldt wondered aloud why being in the outdoors evoked something existential and true. “Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice that is familiar to his soul,” he wrote; “Everything is interaction and reciprocal,” and therefore nature “gives the impression of the whole.” Humboldt went on to introduce the European intellectual world to the concept of the planet as a living whole, with climatic systems and interlocking biological and geological patterns bound up as a “net-like, intricate fabric.” This was Western science’s earliest glimmer of ecological thinking, where the natural world became a series of biotic communities, each acting upon the others.” (italics added)

Zoë Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth