A Collège de France - CNED coproduction
Excerpt
"Just as today, in the last days of March, but in the year 1800, lies the episode that will serve as my introduction. On the 31st of that month, Alexandre de Humboldt was descending the Rio Apure lecture in the llanos of Venezuela, enjoying the spectacle offered by a prodigiously diverse nature that civilization had not yet disturbed. The Christianized Indian maneuvering his pirogue exclaimed, "It's like Paradise!" But the scientist believes neither in the good savage nor in the innocent harmony of an original world; so he notes in his diary, "The golden age has ceased, and, in this paradise of the American forests, as everywhere else, a sad and long experience has taught all beings that gentleness is rarely found united with strength." This is an almost banal observation for a naturalist and ethnographer, attentive by training as well as temperament to the chains of dependence, particularly food dependence, that bind organisms in a tropical ecosystem, and disinclined to see the inhabitants of these lands as idealized relics of an Edenic past. But a new observation in the context of the time... "
