The First Environmentalist

In his 1864 book, Man and Nature or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action,

George Perkins Marsh challenges the general belief that humans’ impact on the nature

environment is mostly mild or inconsequential and he implies that ancient civilizations are

responsible for bring about their own collapses with their abuse of nature, the environment

and their natural resources. By eroding their soils and deforesting their hillsides, they had

destroyed the natural productivity that sustained their prosperity. Marsh offers the citizens of

the United States a stern warning that the young blossoming American society might repeat the

errors of those failed ancient civilizations if it blunders in ending its own destructive waste of

natural resources. In linking culture with nature, science with history, I believe that George

Marsh’s Man and Nature or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action was the most

influential text of its time.

Nature, of course, is the subject of this book and it seems a subject in which Marsh

excelled. He wrote abundantly about it, on numerous topics, but his masterpiece was Man and

Nature or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. Contrary to the conventional

thinking of the time, he argued that human activity has a profound effect on the natural world

and not all of these effects benign or short-lived. This was the first book to attack the American

myth of the superabundance and the inexhaustibility of the earth. In my opinion, it laid the first

bricks of the foundation of the conservation movement and few books since have had such an

influence on the way men perceive and utilize the natural world around them.

I believe this excerpt from the book personifies Marsh’s ideas and the tone of the book

as a whole.
 “Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone,

not for consumption, still less for profligate waste. Nature has provided against the

absolute destruction of any of her elementary matter, the raw material of her works; the

thunderbolt and the tornado, the most convulsive throes of even the volcano and the

earthquake, being only phenomena of decomposition and recomposition. But she has

left it within the power of man irreparably to derange the combinations of inorganic

matter and of organic life, which through the night of eons she had been proportioning

and balancing, to prepare the earth for his habitation, when, in the fullness of time, his

Creator should call him forth to enter into its possession.”

Reading Marsh's famous Man and Nature or Physical Geography as Modified by Human

Action is a bit like reading a holy text or famous play. It has the feel of being very familiar, even

faded and overused. If you have never read the book, you have still probably heard of it before,

and assumably more than once. Quotes such as “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” or “…one must have known the Levant to be able to conceive how readily

persons intelligent and otherwise respectable will prefer a lie to the truth, when the slightest

advantage is to be gained by the use of a falsehood.” are a great example of the timelessness of

this book. But any disinterest you might feel turns quickly to respect as you realize that this is

where the familiar environmental concepts got there start.

Humans might be unique among animals in their power to affect the natural world, he

noted, but they were also unique in their ability to learn from mistakes. Though we haven’t yet
and as we are seeing in recent events, man is truly being to reap the consequences of our

actions as Marsh warned, but hopefully there is still time for us to change and adept. As it was

to most Americans of that time, it was self-evident and incontestable to Marsh that humans

were the lords of nature, that the world existed for man and not man for the world, a concept

we still struggle with today. He differed from most of his contemporaries in his belief that with

lordship comes responsibility. I believe this controversial thinking and writing is why Man and

Nature or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action was the most influential text of its

time.