Marsh, George Perkins
George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), an American naturalist, organizer, lawyer, diplomat, and businessman whose ecological insights brought awareness to humankind's impacts on the Earth. In 1864, Marsh published Man and Nature, followed by a revised edition in 1874 called The Earth as Modified by Human Action: Man and Nature. These works are widely regarded as the first modern discussion of environmental problems.
In an era of massive industrialization, Marsh introduced a different fashion for measuring progress. While acknowledging the need for human use of the natural environment, Marsh used his writing to challenge Americans to reconsider their misuse and mismanagement of their national bounty. In 1864, Marsh wrote:
"Nature, left undisturbed, so fashions her territory as to give it almost unchanging permanence of form, outline, and proportion, except when shattered by geologic convulsions….In countries untrodden by man, the proportions and relative positions of land and water…are subject to change only from geological influences so slow in their operation that the geographical conditions may be regarded as constant and immutable. Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste…. But she has left it within the power of man irreparably to derange the combinations of inorganic matter and of organic life….man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords….[O]f all organic beings, man alone is to be regarded as essentially a destructive power…."(Marsh, 29-37)
Marsh was remarkably versatile end energetic. He studied linguistics, knew 20 languages, wrote a definitive book on the origin of the English language, and was known as the foremost Scandinavian scholar in North America. He invented tools and designed buildings, including the Washington Monument and the Vermont Capitol. As a congressman in Washington, D.C. (1843-49), Marsh helped found and guide the Smithsonian Institution. In 1849, President Zachary Taylor appointed him minister resident in Turkey; in 1860, President Abraham Lincoln made him his Ambassador to Italy, where he died in 1882.
Marsh's novel contribution to the understanding of Earth and its processes is that he was the first to document systematically how human activity could have a cumulative and destructive effect on ecosystems—and on the ability of those ecosystems to support human culture. Prior to Marsh, humans easily assumed that nature stood outside of culture, unchanged by human acts and works, infinitely capable of providing the resources that human economy extracted from it. Marsh was thus an important precursor of and influence on the nineteenth century Sustained Yield Forestry movement as embodied in the life and work of Gifford Pinchot, which in turn played a central role in the formation of the American conservation movement at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
During his Mediterrean postings Marsh had cause to wonder that areas of the earth that the Bible described as lush, areas in which civilization itself had been cradled by soil fertility, had become dry and stony desert. What had caused these changes? The European experiences gave depth and additional support to an understanding he had been evolving for some time. When he was a boy growing up in Woodstock, Vermont, the stream next to his family's farm rarely flooded its banks; by the time he was an adult practicing law in Woodstock, the hills surrounding the town had been deforested to provide wood for fuel and pasturage for sheep, and the stream flooded regularly. The changes were "too striking," he wrote, "to have escaped the attention of any observing person." By 1847 he was cautioning farmers (at the Agricultural Society meeting in Rutland, September 30, 1847) that too much of the aboriginal forest of Vermont had been cut, leaving rains and melting snows to "flow swiftly over smooth ground...[to] fill every ravine with a torrent, and convert every river into an ocean," transforming "smiling meadows into broad wastes of shingle and gravel and pebbles, deserts in summer, and seas in autumn and spring." The effect on other forms of life was equally clear: in 1857, as a member of the Vermont State Legislature, he prepared a "Report, on the Artificial Propagation of Fish," which argued against the creation of artificial lakes and ponds and diagnosed deforestation (along with pollution and large harvests of spawning fish) as a contributing cause of fisheries collapse. Trees moderated stream flow, sustaining the fisheries; they also harbored insects on which fish larvae feed. To solve the fisheries problem created by deforestation by creating artifical ponds and containments was likely to have undesireable effects: in Europe Marsh had seen extensive tracts of riparian habitat become "barren and pestilential wastes" on this practice.
Marsh's European experiences gave impetus to his desire to codify discoverable knowledge in this field, and he wrote Man and Nature while posted to Rome. The conceptualization and data-gathering was substantially complete by 1860, just as Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published the year before, was attracting attention. (Marsh thought that Darwin did not give sufficient play to human influence on nature as a shaping force of natural processes.) As Marsh studied the dynamic processes of forests, he saw that they perform many functions taken for granted—functions we would now call ecosystem services—including the moderation of local and even regional climates. Thus, his solemn warnings, spoken from 1864, which have undiminished relevance to us today: "Even now...we are breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling, for fuel to warm our bodies and seethe our pottage." Such wanton and heedless use of the planet's forests, he said, meant that earth was "fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant...Another era of equal human crime and human improvidence...would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the [human] species." A proto-ecologist, Marsh also said: "The [exact relations]...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."
Further Reading
- George Perkins Marsh Online Research Center
- Lowenthal, David. George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.
- Lowenthal, David. George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter. (New York, 1958).
- Marsh, G. P. Man and Nature. 1864. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.
- The George Perkins Marsh Institute at Clark University
- U.S. National Park Service. Marsh, Billings, Rockefeller National Historical Park