The biogeographical concept of tropical verticality has been associated with Chimborazo thanks to the worldwide circulation of images of the volcano produced by Alexander von Humboldt and Aim\u00e9 Bonpland. Contrary to common belief however, the concept was not invented or discovered by Humboldt. The notion that ecological diversity or plenitude depended upon altitude rather than latitude was first articulated by early modern Hispanic natural historians in the Andes. Intrepid Jesuit naturalists such as Jos\u00e9 de Acosta discovered that climate was as much a function of elevation and microclimate as it was of latitude. The first author to make an explicit connection between slope and tropical diversity was probably the Peruvian Creole Antonio de Le\u00f3n Pinelo (1590\u2013 1660), who argued that of all places in the world, only the Andes could have reached the middle region of the sphere of air, where corruption and the transformation of the elements were considerably retarded, thus allowing the eternal conditions of Paradise to persist. Later, Carolus Linnaeus (1707\u20131778) deployed the ancient image of Paradise as an equatorial mountain to explain biodistribution and secure support for state-building projects in Europe. In this cameralist or statist vein, Humboldt\u2019s field research practice connected underground (mining) and over-ground (botanical) mapping of natural resources, producing a penetrating vision of entire countries as mines and agricultural zones that could be exploited by foreign interests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The biogeographical concept of tropical verticality has been associated with Chimborazo thanks to the worldwide circulation of images of the volcano produced by Alexander von Humboldt and Aim\u00e9 Bonpland. Contrary to common belief however, the concept was not invented or discovered by Humboldt. The notion that ecological diversity or plenitude depended upon altitude rather than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-naturalia"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flacso.edu.ec\/laglobal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flacso.edu.ec\/laglobal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flacso.edu.ec\/laglobal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flacso.edu.ec\/laglobal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flacso.edu.ec\/laglobal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2569"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/flacso.edu.ec\/laglobal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3937,"href":"https:\/\/flacso.edu.ec\/laglobal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2569\/revisions\/3937"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flacso.edu.ec\/laglobal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flacso.edu.ec\/laglobal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flacso.edu.ec\/laglobal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flacso.edu.ec\/laglobal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}