Stephen
C. Trombulak, editor. 2001. University Press of New England. Hanover: New Hampshire.
Table
of Contents
Table
of Contents
Address Delivered Before the Agricultural Society of Rutland County (September 30th, 1847)
Lecture delivered before the Smithsonian Institution,
No. 1--The Camel (1855)
Oration before the New Hampshire state agricultural society (October 10th, 1856)
Report, made under authority of the Legislature of Vermont, on the artificial propagation of fish (1857)
The study of nature (1860)
Irrigation: its evils, remedies, and the compensations (1874)
Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as modified by human action (1864)
Chapter I: Introductory
Chapter II: Transfer, Modification, and Extirpation of Vegetable and of Animal Species
Chapter III: The Woods
Chapter IV: The Waters
Chapter V: The Sands
Chapter VI: Projected or Possible Geographical Changes by Man
Suggested Readings
Introduction
The fabric of social discourse today is strongly influenced by our concerns over a host of major environmental issues. It is impossible to read a newspaper or pass through an election year without being confronted with a frightening array of questions about how our societies, both national and international, should best solve problems ranging from air and water pollution to the loss of tropical rainforests, from global warming to the thinning of the ozone layer, and from the depletion of fresh water supplies to soil erosion. From our modern vantage point, it is easy to forget that all debates about environmental policies have as a fundamental tenet an acceptance that it is actually possible for humans to transform their environment in ways that reduce the quality of our lives. The widespread realization that humans can alter their environment in negative ways is one of the most significant intellectual transformations in how we view our relationship with nature.
No one person can take all the credit for affecting this transformation. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, many people argued that the status quo environmental philosophy, a philosophy that assumed our numerical growth and technological development was, at worst, benign, was simply wrong.
But George Perkins Marsh, the 19th century American scholar, author, and statesman, with the publication in 1864 of his book Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as modified by human action, did more than any other single person to make clear to a broad audience society’s widespread environmental impacts and our need to guide social development in light of this knowledge. The historian Lewis Mumford called Man and Nature “the fountain-head of the conservation movement.”
George Perkins Marsh was the quintessential Renaissance man. During the course of his long and productive life he was, at various stages and with different degrees of success, a lawyer, businessman, inventor, scholar of languages (coming to speak at least twenty), art collector, politician, bureaucrat, diplomat, explorer, and architect. But his enduring legacy is based on his writings about the relationship between humans and their environment, writings that have at their core observations and perspectives that he gained as a boy growing up in eastern Vermont and supplemented by a lifetime of scholarly reading and international travel.
Marsh was born in 1801 in Woodstock, Vermont. Woodstock, situated in the Ottauquechee River valley close to its confluence with the Connecticut River, was among the first heavily settled regions in Vermont. By the early 1800s much of the forestland in the area had been cleared for hill and valley-bottom farms. Even as a young boy, Marsh was permanently impressed by the impact that forest clearing had on hillside erosion, frequency of wildfires, and control of surface water flow. He saw first hand the enormous importance of standing forests on a host of related ecological conditions, and hence the role of human action, since humans were the primary cause of large-scale deforestation, on the environment. As a boy, he repeated his observations of the effects of forest clearing numerous times as he traveled widely with his father, Charles, a prominent lawyer and one of Woodstock’s most notable citizens. His father helped encourage Marsh’s interest in the natural world, teaching him the names of trees, the concept of watersheds, and a range of other topics in geography and natural history.
Yet as much as Marsh loved the out-of-doors, his most enduring character trait was his love of books and reading. He had a bright and eager mind, leading him to graduate from Dartmouth College in nearby Hanover, New Hampshire when he was only 19. By this time he was fluent in Greek, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian, being largely self-taught in them all. After a brief stint as an English and language teacher at the Norwich Academy across the Connecticut River from Hanover, he returned to Woodstock, where he studied law with his father. Marsh soon passed the bar exam and moved to Burlington, Vermont, where he entered into a law partnership with the energetic and outgoing B.F. Bailey in 1825. Burlington then, as now, was a center for trade and industry, and their small firm enjoyed great success. Yet with Bailey’s untimely death in 1832, Marsh’s weaknesses as a businessman and his general dislike for the people he had to associate with as a lawyer led to a steady decline in the business until he finally closed the office in 1842.
In 1828, Marsh married Harriet Buell, who sadly died of a heart ailment only five years later. They had two sons, the oldest of which died of scarlet fever only a few days after his mother’s death. The younger boy, George Ozias, was sent to Woodstock to live with Marsh’s mother. Although he would live with Marsh on and off through the succeeding years, he died in his early 30s after years of illness, alcoholism, and bitter relations with his father. Marsh was despondent after Harriet’s death, a state that contributed to the decline of his law practice, and for many years he isolated himself from society and spent his time in the study of Scandinavian languages. Eventually, however, Marsh emerged from his emotional exile and began to mix again with the circle of learned men at the University of Vermont in Burlington. One of his friends at that time was Zadoch Thompson, the author of the first authoritative natural historical account of Vermont, who helped rekindle Marsh’s appreciation for the natural world.
Marsh eventually fell in love again. He remarried in 1939 to Caroline Crane who despite her own poor health was his near-constant companion and source of emotional support for the remaining 43 years of his life. At about this time, Marsh’s venture into wool manufacturing ended disastrously, the first of his many failed business dealings that would result in bankruptcy and his near-constant worries about money and anticipated poverty for the rest of his life.
In part to escape to a better climate and in part because he had few other employment opportunities, Marsh ran for and was elected to one of Vermont’s four congressional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1843, where he served until 1849. His political philosophies were formed while he served a short term in the Vermont Legislature in the mid-1830s. He viewed himself as democratic and, although he had a poor opinion of the common person, egalitarian. He also saw himself as practical, believing passionately in progress, utility, and technology. As a member of the Whig Party in Congress, he campaigned stridently against both slavery and the admission of Texas into the Union, and for high tariffs. At this time, however, the Whigs were the minority party in Congress, and Marsh’s views were in strict opposition to those of the majority Southern Democrats, so he was able to accomplish very little. Perhaps his greatest achievement came from the influential role he played in helping to establish the Smithsonian Institution, which remains today as perhaps the greatest research and museum center in the world.
From the perspective of Marsh’s own life, however, his years in Washington, D.C., had their greatest impact through the professional contacts he developed, contacts that resulted in his spending most of the next 35 years as a foreign diplomat for the U.S. government, first as the U.S. Minister to Turkey and then, after seven years back in Vermont, as the Minister to the new nation of Italy.
For several months during his first year as Minister to Turkey, Marsh and his wife traveled widely through Egypt and Arabia, a journey that formed the basis of Marsh’s observations about the magnitude and type of human modifications of desert environments, a theme he developed at great length more than a decade later in his book Man and Nature. It was during this trip that he also observed the widespread use of camels as domestic and military animals, a development that he later argued the U.S. should adopt for its own military uses in its arid west. His role as minister subsequently took him to Greece, which gave him the easy opportunity to explore the Alps, an area he was to return to, study, and write about for many years after even up to the time of his death.
By 1853 he had been replaced in Turkey and had returned to the U.S., eventually to settle once again in Vermont as the state’s Railroad Commissioner, Statehouse Commissioner, and Fish Commissioner. It was during this time that he actively promoted government control of certain social institutions, most notably transportation and communication, a view developed in large response to his recent financial losses at the hands of unscrupulous private railroad interests. As Fish Commissioner, he also authored an influential and visionary report for the Vermont Legislature on the artificial propagation of fish.
It was also during these years in Vermont that the outline of the themes he would develop in Man and Nature, his greatest and most-lasting work, and one of the most influential environmental books in history, began to take form in his mind. The observations he made as a boy in Vermont and more recently in Arabia and Europe led him to develop a new perspective on human geography. Marsh noted that whether he looked at forests, mountains, waters, or deserts, he saw everywhere irrefutable evidence that humanity had a profound effect on the physical environment of the earth. His extensive reading provided him with abundant examples, drawn from fields ranging from botany to geology to archeology to civil engineering, that supported his central thesis. Man (to use Marsh’s language) was not simply a passive inhabitant of the natural world. He was a potent force of change, for both good and ill.
In 1861, Marsh had once again gained a diplomatic post, being appointed by President Lincoln as the U.S. Minister to Italy, a post retained until his death 21 years later. Marsh completed work on the first edition of Man and Nature in 1864 while living near Turin. For the rest of his life, Marsh traveled widely throughout Italy, revised Man and Nature twice, wrote a report for the U.S. Commission of Agriculture on the social and environmental consequences of irrigation, particularly in the newly opened lands of the American arid west, and developed a fascination for forestry, the subject he was pursuing at the time of his death.
George Perkins Marsh was a complex man, at various times in his life holding views that today would be regarded as jingoistic, racist, mildly sexist, and religiously chauvinistic. Yet time and experience led Marsh to blunt and recant many of his earlier intolerances. He was also capable of espousing dramatically contradictory views. For example, he could, on the one hand, recount the problems associated with the introduction of species outside of their native ranges as well as, on the other hand, promote the introduction of the camel into the U.S. and a host of American plants and animals in Italy. Marsh can perhaps be best understood as a man who believed quite strongly in the capabilities of ordinary people, be they Vermont hill farmers, Egyptian nomads, or Italian vintners. His conservation writings can be seen as testimonies to his belief that human society could progress to greatness, but only if it paid attention to nature and learned the lessons she taught. His works, most notably Man and Nature, forever changed our culture’s perception of our relationship with the natural world. Society’s fundamental assumption could no longer be that the world simply shaped humanity. Based on his vision, the new understanding became that humanity could also shape the world. Our guiding question from that point on became, “What must we do to live within the boundaries established by nature’s harmonies?”
Given his enormous impact on the shape of our environmental consciousness, it is surprising that so few people today have ever heard of George Perkins Marsh, and that even so few people who have a deep understanding of environmental issues are aware of any of the details of Marsh’s thinking. These deficiencies are, perhaps, best explained by aspects of Marsh’s own writings. First, Marsh did not publish often on his thoughts about the environment (or what he called “human geography”), and what he did publish was generally only in outlets that today are not widely available. The notable exception, of course, is Man and Nature, which remains in print in its entirety more than 130 years after it was first published. Yet his other environmental works, written from 1847 to 1874, have to my knowledge never been reprinted and remain largely unread.
Second, Marsh wrote in a style common for men and women of letters in the 19th century, which more modern readers often find dense, even impenetrable. Also, because he was developing a new environmental perspective and marshalling in its support a diverse range of facts and observations, he provided numerous examples for each point, leading to much repetition. As a result, Man and Nature remains one of the most influential but least read books written in the last 200 years.
This volume seeks to correct these problems and to make Marsh’s conservation writings more accessible to the present generation. I have included here all of Marsh’s publications that reflect on his environmental thinking. With the exception of Man and Nature, I present them either in their entirety or edited to highlight just their portions of environmental relevance. I have, on the other hand, edited Man and Nature heavily, including here less than one-fifth of its original text. I edited out almost all of Marsh’s extensive footnotes, as well as many of the examples he provided for his key points. Readers interested in Marsh’s references or the complete argument developed in Man and Nature should read the original text, most recently reprinted by Harvard University Press and skillfully annotated by David Lowenthal, Marsh’s primary biographer. I include a small number of Marsh’s footnotes that contribute to the development of his theme. I have placed each in the main body of the text as parenthetical comments at the location set by Marsh. In a few cases I have inserted into the text in brackets and italics my own comments, either for clarification or for correction. In all of the selections I retained Marsh’s original language and spelling but corrected errors that I felt were introduced by the printers. I preface each selection with my own synopsis of its major themes, especially as they relate to modern conservation thinking. I believe that a comparison between Marsh’s vision and today’s reality amplifies our appreciation of the magnitude of his insights and influence.
This book came to life with the help of many people, most
notably John Elder and Chris McGrory Klyza, my co-editors of the Middlebury
College Bicentennial Series in Environmental Studies, of which this book is a
part. Even separate from our work together on this series, however, I am
indebted to both of them for years of intellectual debate, which helped shape
my ability to understand and appreciate Marsh’s vision. Phil Pachoda and April
Ossmann at the University Press of New England provided constant and invaluable
editing and production advice. Susan Tucker, research librarian at Middlebury
College, helped me track down many of Marsh’s less-readily available writings,
including several that are not included in this volume. Joanna Shipley and Anne
Every painstakingly transcribed Marsh’s original works. Much of my editing and writing for this book
took place while I was on sabbatical leave at the University of Adelaide in
Australia. I am indebted to Hugh Possingham and his cadre of post-doctoral
fellows, graduate students, and honors students, particularly Ian Ball, Steve
Ball, Clare Bradley, Scott Field, Drew Tyre, and Margy Wright, not only for
creating a great intellectual environment but also for tolerating my frequent
outbursts as I struggled through the complexities of Marsh’s writing.
Pg 43, paragraph 2. Change: "Since the Revolution which broke up the great feudal estates, and divided them amongst the peasants, who before had been but serfs upon them, there has been an immense change in the character and condition of the French husbandman. The rural laborers, in spite of the liberal and philanthropic views of Henry IV, …"
To: "Since the Revolution which broke up the great feudal estates, and divided them amongst the peasants, who before had been but serfs upon them, there has been an immense change in the character and condition of the French husbandman. Formerly Paris ruled, and emphatically was France. The rural laborers, in spite of the liberal and philanthropic views of Henry IV, …" [Inserted text in italics; not italicized in the original except where underlined.]
Pg. 60, paragraph 3. Change: "In the colder regions of Europe, you see the elm, the oak, the birch, the pine and the fir, …"
To: "In the colder regions of Europe, you see the elm, the oak, the beach, the birch, the pine and the fir, …" [Inserted text in italics; not italicized in the original. Marsh's orginal spelling retained.]
Pg. 90, paragraph 3. Change: "Artistic genius has been said to consist in the perfection of the senses. Without admitting that this is a just definition of a prerogative which seems of a nobler order, we may allow that highly cultivated organs are essential to excellence in art, is the best of schools for the eye."
To: "Artistic genius has been said to consist in the perfection of the senses. Without admitting that this is a just definition of a prerogative which seems of a nobler order, we may allow that highly cultivated organs are essential to excellence in art. The study of nature, as manifested in genera and species, is the best of schools for the eye." [Inserted text in italics; not italicized in the original.]