Man and Nature: Or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action
(Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Hum...)
Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, first published in 1864, was written by American scholar, George Perkins Marsh. Marsh intended it to show that “whereas others think the earth made man, man in fact made the earth”. As a result, he warned that man could destroy himself and the Earth if we don’t restore and sustain global resources and raise awareness about our actions. It is one of the first works to document the effects of human action on the environment and it helped to launch the modern conservation movement. Marsh argued that ancient Mediterranean civilizations collapsed through environmental degradation. Deforestation led to eroded soils that led to decreased soil productivity. Additionally, the same trends could be found occurring in the United States.
So Great a Vision: The Conservation Writings of George Perkins Marsh (Middlebury Bicentennial Series in Environmental Studies)
(Diplomat, linguist, politician, and naturalist, Vermonter...)
Diplomat, linguist, politician, and naturalist, Vermonter George Perkins Marsh was a 19th-century polymath who is now widely considered the father of the modern conservation movement. Marsh was the first man to recognize the extent and destructiveness of the human impact on the environment, and his 1864 book, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, has been described by the Washington Post as "the wellspring of the environmental movement."
While Man and Nature continues to be cited and read, Marsh's earlier, groundbreaking writings on environmental topics have been unavailable (even though they may be more accessible to modern readers than his sometimes obtuse magnum opus). In an invaluable service to those interested in the development of environmental thought, Stephen C. Trombulak has gathered into a single volume Marsh's most significant conservation writings -- including key passages from Man and Nature -- and has annotated them in the light of contemporary conservation thinking. These speeches, letters, and reports not only document the development of Marsh's own ideas, they also offer insight into the state of conservation thinking in the early 19th century.
George Perkins Marsh was an American lawyer, diplomat, and scholar.
Background
George Perkins Marsh was a first cousin of James Marsh, and was born on March 15, 1801 at Woodstock, Vt. His father, Charles Marsh, an eminent lawyer, was a descendant of John Marsh who settled at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1636, and the son of Joseph Marsh, a former lieutenant-governor of Vermont; his mother, Susan (née Perkins), at the time of her marriage to his father was the widow of Josias Lyndon Arnold. His ancestors on both sides belonged to the intellectual aristocracy of New England. Brought up in a family of Puritan restraint, George was a frail and serious child who played by preference with girls and almost ruined his eyesight when he was seven by too assiduous reading.
Education
Unable for long periods to use his eyes, he learned by listening to others read and entered Dartmouth College in 1816 having had only a few months of formal schooling. There he was recognized as the most brilliant scholar in his class. Studious almost to excess, he learned French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German in his spare time, yet a dry humor made him not unpopular with classmates. In 1820 he graduated with highest honors and immediately tried teaching, but finding it distasteful, studied law in his father's office. Admitted to the bar in 1825, he practised in Burlington, Vt. , where he not only became prominent in his profession but also found time to familiarize himself with the Scandinavian languages.
Career
His ability as a lawyer, business man, and scholar had been recognized, and in 1835 he was appointed by the governor to the supreme executive council of the state. In 1834 he was elected to Congress as a Whig, and during two successive terms proved himself a cogent if dry speaker in support of high tariff and in opposition to slavery and the Mexican War. In 1849 President Taylor appointed him minister to Turkey, and at Constantinople his encyclopedic knowledge of languages was most useful. He cooperated with Sir Stratford Canning in aiding many refugees from the central European revolutions of 1848 and arranged for the departure of Kossuth and fifty compatriots on an American frigate. In the summer of 1852 he was sent to Athens, where the United States had no regular diplomatic representative, to investigate the case of Jonas King, an American missionary imprisoned by the local authorities. After careful study of the copious evidence in modern Greek, Marsh found him the victim of unscrupulous and bigoted persecution and returned the next spring to demand redress. While the Greek government procrastinated, the minister was recalled to Constantinople by an acrimonious dispute over Martin Koszta, a Hungarian revolutionist half-naturalized in the United States and illegally seized in Smyrna by an Austrian naval commander. Instructed by John Porter Brown, the American chargé at Constantinople, Capt. Duncan N. Ingraham of the American sloop of war St. Louis had demanded the prisoner and cleared his ship for action to enforce compliance before the Austrian discreetly delivered him to the French consul. Marsh and the Austrian ambassador pointed out with equal correctness that both naval officers had flagrantly disregarded the sovereignty of Turkey, but the Porte did nothing, and excitement soon died down. Recalled by a new administration in 1854, Marsh labored to mend his bankrupt fortunes, acted as railroad commissioner for the state of Vermont, and delivered at Columbia University and the Lowell Institute lectures on English philology and etymology which established his reputation as an outstanding authority in those fields. Having joined the Republican party in 1856, he was sent by President Lincoln as the first United States minister to the new kingdom of Italy in 1860. This post he held for the remaining twenty-one years of his life, gaining great prestige with the Italian government through his obvious honesty and sympathy with their aims, and building up a greater reputation as a scholar by his numerous reviews and encyclopedia articles. He died at Vallombrosa, near Florence, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome.
Achievements
In 1843, Marsh was elected a congressman from Vermont until 1849 when he was appointed the United States ambassador to Turkey. In 1861, Marsh was appointed to be the first ambassador to the new kingdom of Italy, a post he would hold until his death in Vallombrosa, Italy in 1882. In 1864, he published a book titled "Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, " in which he warned of ecological disaster if the environment continued to be effected. His book, however, would not receive any real attention until long after his death.
(Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Hum...)
Views
Quotations:
"All Nature is linked together by invisible bonds and every organic creature, however low, however feeble, however dependent, is necessary to the well-being of some other among the myriad forms of life. "
"Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste. "
"Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords. "
"The improvement of forest trees is the work of centuries. So much more the reason for beginning now. "
"The great question, whether man is of nature or above her. "
"We have now felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise means for maintaining the permanence of its relations to the fields, the meadows and the pastures, to the rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with which it waters down the earth. "
"Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and the inorganic world are . .. bound together by such mutual relations and adaptations s secure, if not the absolute permanence and equilibrium of both . .. at least a very slow and gradual succession of changes in those conditions. But man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords. "
"The equation of animal and vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human intelligence to solve, and we can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic life. "
"When not protected by law, by popular favor or superstition, or by other special circumstances, [birds] yield very readily to the influences of civilization, and, though the first operations of the settler are favorable to the increase of many species, the great extension of rural and of mechanical industry is, in a variety of ways, destructive even to tribes not directly warred upon by man. "
"Wherever modern Science has exploded a superstitious fable or even a picturesque error, she has replaced it with a grander and even more poetical truth. "
Membership
Member of the U. S. House of Representatives from Vermont's 3rd district
Personality
A man of great personal dignity and reserve, Marsh was master of a punning humor and could turn a compliment prettily. With interests which ranged from comparative grammar to physiography and from the gathering of reptiles for the Smithsonian Institution to the collection of engravings, which were ultimately acquired by the Smithsonian, he was a sort of universal genius, a conscientious and erudite scholar in many fields. His early interest in Scandinavia resulted in the publication of A Compendious Grammar of the Old-Northern or Icelandic Language (1838), largely a compilation from the work of R. K. Rask; while another aspect of the same study showed itself in his preaching a gospel of old Teutonic simplicity and virtue, to which he attributed everything good in the English tradition. His travels in the Near East inspired The Camel, His Organization, Habits, and Uses, Considered with Reference to His Introduction into the United States (1856). He was one of the early workers associated with the Oxford Dictionary. His Lectures on the English Language (1860) and The Origin and History of the English Language (1862) were excellent philological and etymological works for their day but have since become antiquated. His Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, embodying the fruit of many years' acute observation during his extensive travels, has been called "the fountainhead of the conservation movement". It was a pioneer effort "to suggest the possibility and the importance of the restoration of disturbed harmonies and the material improvement of waste and exhausted regions", and had a significant influence both at home and abroad.
Connections
On April 10, 1828, he married Harriet, daughter of Ozias Buell of Burlington, and her death in 1833, within a few days of that of the older of their two sons, was a crushing blow. Six years later he married Caroline, daughter of Benjamin Crane of Berkley, Massachussets.
