The Invention of Nature

21

Man and Nature

George Perkins Marsh and Humboldt

JUST AS NEWS of Humboldt’s death arrived in the United States, George Perkins Marsh was leaving New York to return to his home in Burlington, Vermont. The fifty-eight-year-old Marsh missed the eulogies that were delivered in Humboldt’s honour two weeks later, on 2 June 1859, at the American Geographical and Statistical Society in Manhattan where he was a member. Buried in his work in Burlington, Marsh had become the ‘dullest owl in Christendom’, as he wrote to a friend. He was also completely broke. In a bid to replenish his funds, Marsh was working on several projects at the same time. He was writing up a lecture series on the English language that he had given in the previous months at Columbia College in New York, compiling a report on railway companies in Vermont and composing a couple of poems for publication in an anthology, as well as writing several articles for a newspaper.

He had returned to Burlington from New York, he said, ‘like an escaped convict to his cell’. Hunched over piles of papers, books and manuscripts, he hardly left his study and rarely spoke to anybody. He was writing and writing, he told a friend, ‘with all my might’, and with only his books as company. His library contained 5,000 volumes from all over the world with one entire section dedicated to Humboldt. The Germans, Marsh believed, had ‘done more to extend the bounds of modern knowledge than the united labors of the rest of the Christian world’. German books were of ‘infinite superiority to any other’, Marsh said, with Humboldt’s publications as the crowning glory. So great was Marsh’s enthusiasm for Humboldt that he was delighted when his sister-in-law married a German, a doctor and botanist called Frederick Wislizenus. The reason for Marsh’s approval was because Wislizenus had been mentioned in the latest edition of Humboldt’s Views of Nature – his qualities as a husband were seemingly of minor significance.

George Perkins Marsh (Illustration Credit 21.1)

Marsh could read and speak twenty languages including German, Spanish and Icelandic. He picked up languages as others picked up a book. ‘Dutch,’ he claimed, ‘can be learned by a Danish & German scholar in a month.’ German was his favourite and he often peppered his letters with German words, using ‘Blätter’ instead of ‘newspapers’, for example, or ‘Klapperschlangen’ instead of ‘rattlesnakes’. When a friend struggled to observe a solar eclipse in Peru because of the clouds there, Marsh referred ‘to what Humboldt says of the unastronomischer Himmel Perus’ – Peru’s unastronomical sky.

Humboldt was the ‘greatest of the priesthood of nature’, Marsh said, because he had understood the world as an interplay between man and nature – a connection that would underpin Marsh’s own work because he was collecting material for a book that would explain how humankind was destroying the environment.

Marsh was an autodidact with an insatiable thirst for knowledge. Born in 1801 in Woodstock, Vermont, the son of a Calvinist lawyer, Marsh had been a precocious boy who by the age of five was learning his father’s dictionaries by heart. He read so rapidly, and so many books simultaneously, that friends and family were always surprised at how he could grasp the content of a page with one glance. All his life people would remark on Marsh’s extraordinary memory. He was, as one friend said, a ‘walking encyclopaedia’. But Marsh was not only learning from books, he also loved the outdoors. He was ‘forest-born’, he said, and ‘the bubbling brook, the trees, the flowers, the wild animals were to me persons, not things.’ As a young boy, he had enjoyed long walks with his father who had always pointed out the names of the different trees. ‘I spent my early life almost literally in the woods,’ Marsh told a friend, and this deep appreciation of nature stayed with him for the rest of his life.

For all this ferocious appetite for knowledge, Marsh was surprisingly unsure about his career. He had studied law but was a useless lawyer because he found his clients rough and uncouth. He was a great scholar, but disliked teaching. He was an entrepreneur with an unfailing knack for disastrous business decisions and he sometimes spent more time in court dealing with his own affairs than with those of his clients. When he tried his hand as a sheep farmer, he lost everything when the price of wool dropped. He was the owner of a woollen mill that first burned down and then was ruined by drift ice. He speculated in land, sold lumber and quarried marble – always losing money.

Marsh was certainly more scholarly than entrepreneurial. In the 1840s he had helped to establish the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC – the United States’ first national museum. He had published a dictionary of Nordic languages and was an expert on English etymology. He had also been a congressman for Vermont in Washington, but even his loyal wife admitted that her husband was not the most inspiring politician. He was, Caroline Marsh said, ‘entirely without oratorical charm’. Marsh tried his hand at so many different professions that one friend quipped, ‘If you live much longer you will be obliged to invent trades.’

There was one thing Marsh was certain about: he wanted to travel and see the world. The only problem was that he never had enough money. The solution, he had decided in spring 1849, was to seek a diplomatic post. His dream posting would have been Humboldt’s hometown of Berlin, but Marsh’s hopes were dashed when a senator from Indiana, who also had his eyes set on Berlin, sent several cases of champagne to Washington with which to bribe the politicians who would decide on the candidate. Within hours the men were in such ‘a state of fearful intoxication’, Marsh heard from friends, that they were dancing and singing. By the end of the night the drunken politicians announced that the senator from Indiana would be going to Berlin.

Marsh was determined to live abroad. Having been a congressman for several years, he was certain that with his contacts in DC he would be able to find a position. If not Berlin, then he would go elsewhere. He was lucky, because a few weeks later, at the end of May 1849, he was made the American Minister to Turkey in Constantinople with instructions to expand trade between the countries. Though it was not Berlin, the lure of the Ottoman Empire at the crossroads between Europe, Africa and Asia was exciting enough. The administrative tasks were supposed to be ‘very light’, Marsh told a friend. ‘I shall be at liberty to be absent from Constantinople a considerable part of the year.’

And so he was. Over the next four years Marsh and his wife Caroline travelled a great deal through Europe and parts of the Middle East. They were a happy couple. Intellectually, Caroline was very much her husband’s equal – she read almost as voraciously as he did, published her own collection of poems and edited every article, essay or book that her husband ever wrote. She was vocal about womens’ rights – as was Marsh, who supported female suffrage and education. Caroline was sociable, lively and a ‘brilliant talker’. She often teased Marsh, who was prone to gloom, for being an ‘old owl’ and ‘a croaker’.

Much of her adult life, though, Caroline struggled with ill health – an excruciating back pain that often left her unable to walk for more than a few steps. Over the years, doctors prescribed a wide assortment of remedies from sea bathing to sedatives and iron supplements, but nothing had helped and just before they left for Turkey, a doctor in New York pronounced her mysterious illness ‘incurable’. Marsh nursed her devotedly and often carried her in his arms. Amazingly, Caroline still managed to join her husband on most of his travels. Sometimes she was carried by local guides, and at others she had to lie on a contraption that was strapped on a mule or even a camel, but she was always in good spirits and determined to accompany Marsh.

When they first travelled from the United States to Constantinople, they made a detour of several months to Italy, but their first real expedition was to Egypt. In January 1851, a year after their arrival in Constantinople, they went to Cairo and then sailed down the Nile. From the deck of their boat they saw an exotic world unfold. Date palms lined the river and crocodiles basked in the sun on sandbanks. Pelicans and flocks of cormorants accompanied them and Marsh admired the herons that were gazing at their own reflections in the water. They acquired a young ostrich ‘fresh from the Desert’, who often rested his head on Caroline’s knees. They saw a patchwork of fields hugging the river, planted with rice, cotton, beans, wheat and sugarcane. From early dawn to late at night they heard the creaking wheels of the irrigations systems – long chains of jars and buckets pulled by oxen that delivered the Nile’s water to the surrounding fields. Along their way, they stopped at the remains of the ancient city of Thebes where Marsh carried Caroline through the great temples, and further south they visited the pyramids of Nubia.

Fields and terraces along the Nile at Nubia

This was a world that exuded history. The monuments told a story of past riches and long-gone kingdoms, while the landscapes showed the traces of ploughshares and spades. Barren terraces shaped the countryside into a geometrical patchwork and every sod turned or tree felled had left indelible records on the ground. Marsh saw a world shaped by humankind and marked by thousands of years of agricultural activity. The ‘very earth’, he said, the naked rocks and the shaven hills, bore testimony to the toil of man. Marsh saw the legacy of ancient civilizations not only in the pyramids and temples but carved into the soil.

How old and worn this part of the world seemed but also how youthful his own country was compared to this landscape. ‘I should like to know,’ he wrote to an English friend, ‘whether the newness of everything in America strikes a European as powerfully as the antiquity of the Eastern continent does us.’ Marsh realized that the appearance of nature was tightly interwoven with the actions of humankind. As they sailed along the Nile, Marsh could see how the vast irrigation systems turned the desert into lush fields but he also noticed the complete lack of wild plants because nature had been ‘subdued by long cultivation’.

Everything that Marsh had read in Humboldt’s books suddenly made sense. Humboldt had written that the ‘restless activity of large communities of men gradually despoil the face of the earth’ – exactly what Marsh was seeing now. Humboldt had said that the natural world was linked to the ‘political and moral history of humanity’, from imperial ambitions that exploited colonial crops to the migration of plants along the paths of ancient civilizations. He had described how sugar plantations in Cuba and the smelting of silver in Mexico had caused dramatic deforestation. Greed shaped societies and nature. Man left trails of destruction, Humboldt had said, ‘wherever he stepped’.

As Marsh travelled through Egypt, he became increasingly fascinated by flora and fauna. ‘How I envy your knowledge of the many tongues in which Nature speaketh,’ he now wrote to a friend. Though not a trained scientist, Marsh began to measure and record. He had become ‘a student of nature’, he proudly announced, as he collected plants for botanical friends, insects for an entomologist in Pennsylvania, and hundreds of specimens for the newly established Smithsonian Institute in Washington. ‘Scorpions are not yet in season,’ he wrote to the curator there, his friend Spencer Fullerton Baird, but he already had snails and twenty different species of small fish pickled in alcohol. Baird was asking for the skulls of camels, jackals and hyenas, as well as fish, reptiles and insects ‘and all else’, and later also dispatched fifteen gallons of alcohol when Marsh ran out of spirit in which to preserve the specimens.

Marsh was a meticulous note-taker, writing wherever he went – holding the paper on his knees, catching it when the wind scattered the pages and scribbling through sandstorms. ‘Trust nothing to the memory,’ wrote the man who was famed for his ability to recollect everything he read.

For eight months Marsh and Caroline travelled through Egypt and then across the Sinai Desert on camels to Jerusalem and all the way to Beirut. At Petra, they saw the magnificent buildings cut into the marbled pinkish rocks, although Marsh found that he had to close his eyes when he saw how the camel that carried Caroline manoeuvred through narrow passages and along deep precipices. Between Hebron and Jerusalem he noted how the old terraced hills, which had been in cultivation for thousands of years, now looked ‘for the most part barren and desolate’. Towards the end of the expedition, Marsh had come to believe that the ‘assiduous husbandry of hundreds of generations’ had transformed this part of the earth into an ‘effete and worn out planet’. It was a turning point in his life.

By the time Marsh was recalled from Constantinople, in late 1853, he had travelled through Turkey, Egypt, Asia Minor and parts of the Middle East as well as Greece, Italy and Austria. Back home in Vermont, he saw the countryside that he had known all his life through the prism of his observations in the Old World and realized that America was marching towards the same environmental destruction. He now applied the lessons of the Old World to the New World. So radically had Vermont’s landscape, for example, changed since the first white settlers had arrived, that what was left was ‘nature in the shorn and crippled condition to which human progress has reduced her’, Marsh said.

America’s environment had begun to suffer. Industrial waste polluted the rivers and entire forests disappeared as timber was used for fuel, manufacturing and railways. ‘Man is everywhere a disturbing agent,’ Marsh said and, as a one-time mill owner and sheep farmer, knew that he had himself contributed to the damage. Vermont had already lost three-quarters of its trees but with the steady move of settlers across the continent, the Midwest was also changing. Chicago had become one of the greatest lumber and grain depots of the United States. It was shocking to see how parts of Lake Michigan’s waters were covered with logs and timber rafts from ‘all the forests in the States’, Marsh said.

Meanwhile the efficiency of America’s agricultural machinery overtook that of Europe for the first time. In 1855 visitors to the World Fair in Paris were amazed to see that an American reaping machine could cut an acre of oats in twenty-one minutes – a third of the time comparable European models took. American farmers were also the first to power their machines with steam, and as US agricultural methods became industrialized, the price of grains fell. At the same time manufacturing output was steadily rising and in 1860 the US became the fourth largest manufacturing country in the world. That same year, in spring 1860, Marsh pulled out his notebooks and began to write Man and Nature, a book in which he would take Humboldt’s early warning about deforestation to its full conclusion. Man and Nature told a story of destruction and avarice, of extinction and exploitation, as well as of depleted soil and torrential floods.

For most people it seemed that humankind was in control of nature. Nothing showed that more clearly than the raising of Chicago out of the mud. Built on the same level as Lake Michigan, Chicago was a city hampered by sodden grounds and epidemics. The city planners’ audacious solution was to raise entire blocks and multi-storey buildings by several feet in order to build new drainage systems beneath. As Marsh composed Man and Nature, Chicago’s engineers defied gravity by lifting up houses, shops and hotels with hundreds of hydraulic jackscrews while people continued to live and work in the very buildings.

There seemed to be no limit to the ability nor to the greed of humankind. Lakes, ponds and rivers that had once abounded with fish had become eerily lifeless. Marsh was the first to explain why. Overfishing was partly to blame, but so too was pollution from industry and manufacturing. Chemicals poisoned the fish, Marsh warned, while the mill-dams stopped their migration upriver and sawdust clogged their gills. A stickler for details, Marsh underpinned his arguments with facts. He didn’t just state that fish disappeared or that railways were eating up forests, he also added detailed statistics of fish exports from across the world and exact calculations of how much timber was needed for each mile of rail track.

Like Humboldt, Marsh blamed the reliance on cash crops such as tobacco and cotton for some of the damage. But there were other reasons too. As the income of ordinary Americans rose, meat consumption, for example, increased – which in turn had a big impact on nature. The ground required to feed the animals, Marsh calculated, was much greater than the size of the fields needed for the equivalent nutritional value in grains and vegetables. Marsh concluded that a vegetarian’s diet was environmentally more responsible than that of a meat eater.

In tandem with wealth and consumption came destruction, Marsh claimed. For the time being, though, his concern for the environment was drowned in the cacophony of progress – the cranking noise of mill wheels, the hissing of steam engines, the rhythmic sounds of saws in the forests and the whistle of locomotives.

Meanwhile Marsh’s financial situation had grown precarious. His salary in Turkey had not been sufficient, his mill had gone bust, his business partner had cheated him, and his other investments had all been disastrous. On the verge of bankruptcy, he was now looking for a job with ‘small duties & large pay’. Relief came in March 1861 when the newly elected President, Abraham Lincoln, appointed him as the ambassador of the United States to the recently established Kingdom of Italy.

Like Germany, Italy had previously been composed of many independent states. After years of fighting, the Italian states had finally united, with the exception of Rome which was still under papal control and of Venetia in the north which was ruled by Austria. Since his first visit to Italy a decade previously, Marsh had been excited about Italy’s move towards unification. ‘I wish I was 30 years younger, and kugelfest’ – ‘bulletproof’ – he wrote to a friend because then he would have joined the fight. To become America’s envoy to this new nation was a thrilling prospect, as was the regular income. ‘I could not survive two more years,’ Marsh said, like ‘the past years’. The plan was to move to Turin, the temporary capital in northern Italy, where the first Italian parliament had assembled that spring. There was not much time to prepare but plenty to do. Within three weeks Marsh rented out his house in Burlington, packed up furniture, books and clothes, as well as his notes and draft sections for Man and Nature.

With America about to descend into civil war, it was a good time to leave. Even before Lincoln was inaugurated on 4 March 1861, seven southern states had seceded and formed a new alliance: the Confederacy.¹ On 12 April, less than a month after Lincoln appointed Marsh, the first shots were fired by Confederates as they attacked the Union forces stationed at Fort Sumter in Charleston’s harbour. After more than thirty hours of constant shelling, the Union surrendered the fort. It was the beginning of a war that would eventually kill over 600,000 American soldiers. Six days later Marsh bade his goodbye to a thousand of his fellow townspeople with an impassioned speech at Burlington town hall. It was their duty, he said, to provide money and men to the Union in their fight against the Confederates and slavery. This war was more important than the revolution of 1776, Marsh told them, because it concerned the equality and liberty of all Americans. Half an hour after his speech, sixty-year-old Marsh and Caroline boarded a train to New York from where they sailed to Italy.

Marsh left a country that was tearing itself apart to move to one that was in the process of uniting. With America deeply divided by war, Marsh wanted to help as much as he could from a distance. In Turin he tried to convince the celebrated Italian military leader Giuseppe Garibaldi to help and join the Union in the American Civil War. He also wrote diplomatic dispatches and bought weapons for the Union forces. All the while his mind was also on his manuscript, Man and Nature, for which he was still collecting more material. When he met the Italian Prime Minister, Baron Bettino Riscasoli, a man who was known for the innovative management of his family estate, Marsh questioned him about agricultural subjects – in particular about the drainage of the Maremma, a region in Tuscany. Riscasoli promised a full report.

This new diplomatic position, however, was a great deal more demanding than Marsh had hoped. Social etiquette in Turin required a constant round of visits and he also found himself having to deal with American tourists who treated him almost like a private secretary abroad: he had to find their lost luggage, organize passports and even advise them on the best sightseeing. There were incessant interruptions. ‘I have been entirely disappointed as to the rest and relaxation I looked for,’ Marsh wrote to friends back home. The idea of a job that demanded little but paid a lot quickly evaporated.

There was the occasional hour or two when he could visit the library or the botanical garden in Turin. Situated in the Po Valley, Turin was hugged by the majestic snow-capped Alps. Whenever they found a moment, Marsh and Caroline made short excursions and drives into the surrounding countryside. Marsh adored mountains and glaciers, and soon began calling himself ‘ice-mad’. He still had stamina and ‘considering my age and inches (circumferentially),’ Marsh boasted, ‘I am not a bad climber.’ If he continued like this, Marsh joked, he would be climbing the Himalaya at the age of one hundred.

As winter turned to spring, the countryside around Turin tempted them ever more. The Po Valley became a carpet of flowers. ‘We stole an hour,’ Caroline wrote in her diary in March 1862, to see thousands of violets competing with yellow primroses. The almond trees were in blossom and dangling willow branches were flushed green with their fresh leaves. Caroline enjoyed picking wildflowers but her husband thought it was ‘a crime’ against nature.

Marsh snatched moments to work on his projects in the early morning hours. He returned to Man and Nature briefly in spring 1862, and then again during the winter when they lived for a few weeks on the Riviera near Genoa. Then, in the spring of 1863, the couple moved to the little village of Piòbesi, twelve miles south-west of Turin, with the half-completed manuscript of Man and Nature in Marsh’s trunks. Here in an old dilapidated manor house with a tenth-century tower overlooking the Alps, Marsh finally found the time he needed to finish his book.

His study opened on to a broad sun-lit terrace next to the tower and he could see thousands of swallows nesting in the old walls. The room was filled with boxes and so many manuscripts, letters and books that he sometimes felt overwhelmed. He had been collecting data for years. There was so much to include, so many connections to make and so many examples to consider. As Marsh wrote, Caroline read and edited, also confessing to feeling ‘rather knocked out’ by it all. Marsh grew so desperate that Caroline feared he would commit a ‘libricide’. He wrote urgently, even rushed, because he felt that humankind needed to change fast if the earth was to be protected from the ravages of plough and axe. ‘I do this,’ Marsh wrote to the editor of the North American Review, ‘to get out of my brain phantoms which have long been spooking in it.’

As spring turned to summer, the heat became unbearable and flies were everywhere – on Marsh’s eyelids and the point of his pen. In early July 1863 he finished his last revisions and sent the manuscript to his publisher in America. He wanted to call the book ‘Man the Disturber of Nature’s Harmonies’ – a title he was dissuaded from by his publisher who felt it would damage sales. They agreed on Man and Nature, and the book was published a year later, in July 1864.

Man and Nature was the synthesis of what Marsh had read and observed over the past decades. ‘I shall steal, pretty much,’ he had joked to his friend Baird when he started, ‘but I do know some things myself.’ Marsh had raided libraries for manuscripts and publications from dozens of countries to collect information and examples. He had read classical texts to find early descriptions of landscapes and agriculture in ancient Greece and Rome. To this he added his own observations from Turkey, Egypt, the Middle East, Italy and the rest of Europe. Marsh included reports from German foresters, quotes from contemporary newspapers, as well as data from engineers, excerpts from French essays and his own childhood anecdotes – and of course information from Humboldt’s books.

Humboldt had taught Marsh about the connections between humankind and the environment. And in Man and Nature Marsh reeled off one example after another of how humans interfered with nature’s rhythms: when a Parisian milliner invented silk hats, for instance, fur hats became unfashionable – and that then had a knock-on effect on the decimated beaver populations in Canada which began to recover. Likewise farmers, who had killed birds in large numbers to protect their harvests, then had to battle with swarms of insects that had previously been the birds’ prey. During the Napoleonic Wars, Marsh wrote, wolves had reappeared in some parts of Europe because their usual hunters were occupied on the battlefields. Even minuscule organisms in water, Marsh said, were essential in nature’s balance: over-scrupulous cleaning of the Boston aqueduct had eliminated them and turned the water turbid. ‘All nature is linked together by invisible bonds,’ he wrote.

Man had long forgotten that the earth was not given to him for ‘consumption’. The produce of the earth was squandered, Marsh argued, with wild cattle killed for their hides, ostriches for their feathers, elephants for their tusks and whales for their oil. Humans were responsible for the extinction of animals and plants, Marsh wrote in Man and Nature, while the unrestrained use of water was just another example of ruthless greed.² Irrigation diminished great rivers, he said, and turned soils saline and infertile.

Marsh’s vision of the future was bleak. If nothing changed, he believed, the planet would be reduced to a condition of ‘shattered surface, of climatic excess … perhaps even extinction of the [human] species’. He saw the American landscape magnified through what he had observed during his travels – from the overgrazed hills along the Bosporus near Constantinople to the barren mountain slopes in Greece. Great rivers, untamed woods and fertile meadows had disappeared. Europe’s land had been farmed into ‘a desolation almost as complete as that of the moon’. The Roman Empire had fallen, Marsh concluded, because the Romans had destroyed their forests and thereby the very soil that fed them.

The Old World had to be the New World’s cautionary tale. At a time when the 1862 Homestead Act³ gave those who headed out to the American West 160 acres of land each for not much more than a filing fee, millions of acres of public lands were placed in private hands, waiting to be ‘improved’ by axe and plough. ‘Let us be wise,’ Marsh urged, and learn from the mistakes of ‘our older brethren!’ The consequences of man’s action were unforeseeable. ‘We can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble in the ocean of organic life,’ Marsh wrote. What he did know was that the moment ‘homo sapiens Europae’ had arrived in America, the damage had migrated from east to west.

Others had come to similar conclusions. In the United States, James Madison had been the first to take up some of Humboldt’s ideas. Madison had met Humboldt in 1804, in Washington, DC, and later read many of his books. He had applied Humboldt’s observations from South America to the United States. In a widely circulated speech to the Agricultural Society in Albemarle, Virginia, in May 1818, a year after his retirement from the presidency, Madison had repeated Humboldt’s warnings about deforestation and highlighted the catastrophic effects of large-scale tobacco cultivation on Virginia’s once fertile soil. This speech carried the nucleus of American environmentalism. Nature, Madison had said, was not subservient to the use of man. Madison had called upon his fellow citizens to protect the environment but his warnings had been largely ignored.

It was Simón Bolívar who had first enshrined Humboldt’s ideas into law when he had issued a visionary decree in 1825, requiring the government in Bolivia to plant 1 million trees. In the midst of battles and war, Bolívar had understood the devastating consequences of arid land for the future of the nation. Bolívar’s new law was designed to protect waterways and to create forests across the new republic. Four years later he had ordered ‘Measures for the Protection and Wise Use of the National Forests’ for Colombia, with a particular focus on controlling the quinine harvest from the bark of the wild-growing cinchona tree – a damaging method that stripped the trees of their protective bark and one that Humboldt had already noted during his expedition.⁴

In North America Henry David Thoreau had called for the preservation of forests in 1851. ‘In Wildness is the preservation of the World,’ Thoreau had said, and then later concluded in October 1859, a few months after Humboldt’s death, that every town should have a forest of several hundred acres ‘inalienable forever’. Whereas Madison and Bolívar had seen the protection of trees as an economic necessity, Thoreau insisted that ‘national preserves’ should be set aside for recreation. What Marsh now did with Man and Nature was to bring it all together and dedicate an entire book to the subject, presenting the evidence that humankind was destroying the earth.

‘Humboldt was the great apostle,’ Marsh had declared when he began Man and Nature. Throughout the book he referred to Humboldt but expanded his ideas. Where Humboldt’s warnings had been dispersed across his books – little nuggets of insight here and there but often lost in the broader context – Marsh now wove it all into one forceful argument. Page after page, Marsh talked about the evils of deforestation. He explained how forests protected the soil and natural springs. Once the forest was gone, the soil lay bare against winds, sun and rain. The earth would no longer be a sponge but a dust heap. As the soil was washed off, all goodness disappeared and ‘thus the earth is rendered no longer fit for the habitation of man’, Marsh concluded. It made for gloomy reading. The damage caused by just two or three generations was as disastrous, he said, as the eruption of a volcano or an earthquake. ‘We are,’ he warned prophetically, ‘breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling.’

Marsh was telling Americans that they had to act now, before it was too late. ‘Prompt measures’ had to be taken because ‘the most serious fears are entertained’. Forests needed to be set aside and replanted. Some should be preserved as places of recreation, inspiration and habitat for flora and fauna – as an ‘inalienable property’ for all citizens. Other areas needed to be replanted and managed for a sustainable use of timber. ‘We have now felled forest enough,’ Marsh wrote.

Marsh was not just talking about a parched spot in the south of France, an arid region in Egypt or an overfished lake in Vermont. This was an argument about the whole earth. Man and Nature’s power stemmed from its global dimension because Marsh compared and understood the world as a unified whole. Instead of looking at local occurrences, Marsh lifted environmental concerns to a new and terrifying level. The whole planet was in danger. ‘Earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant,’ Marsh wrote.

Man and Nature was the first work of natural history fundamentally to influence American politics. It was, as the American writer and environmentalist Wallace Stegner later said, the ‘rudest kick in the face’ to America’s optimism. At a time when the country was racing towards industrialization – fiercely exploiting its natural resources and razing its forests – Marsh wanted to make his compatriots pause and think. To his great disappointment, the initial sales of Man and Nature were low. Then over the next few months, sales improved and over 1,000 copies were sold and his publisher began to reprint.⁵

Man and Nature’s full impact was not felt for several decades but the book influenced a great number of people in the United States who would become key figures in the preservation and conservation movements. John Muir, the ‘father of the National Parks’, would read it, as would Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the United States Forestry Service, who would call it ‘epoch-making’. Marsh’s observations on deforestation in Man and Nature led to the passage of the 1873 Timber Culture Act which encouraged settlers on the Great Plains to plant trees. It also prepared the ground for the protection of America’s forests, leading to the 1891 Forest Reserves Act which took much of its wording from the pages of Marsh’s book and from Humboldt’s earlier ideas.

Man and Nature resonated internationally too. It was intensely discussed in Australia and inspired French foresters as well as legislators in New Zealand. It encouraged conservationists in South Africa and Japan to fight for the protection of trees. Italian forest laws cited Marsh, and conservationists in India even carried the book ‘along the slope of the Northern Himalaya, and into Kashmir and Tibet’. Man and Nature shaped a new generation of activists and would in the first half of the twentieth century be celebrated as ‘the fountainhead of the conservation movement’.

Marsh believed that the lessons were buried in the scars that the human species had left on the landscape for thousands of years. ‘The future,’ he said, ‘is more uncertain than the past.’ By looking back, Marsh was looking forward.

¹ The seven slave states that first seceded were: South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana and Alabama. By May 1861 four more had followed: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina.

² Humboldt had already seen these dangers and warned that the scheme to irrigate the Llanos in Venezuela by canal from Lake Valencia would be irresponsible. In the short term it would create fertile fields in the Llanos, but the long-term effect could only be an ‘arid desert’. It would leave the Aragua Valley as barren as the deforested surrounding mountains.

³ Everyone who was twenty-one and older and who had not fought against the United States could apply. The requirement was to live on the land for at least five years and to ‘improve’ it.

⁴ Bolívar made the removal of any tree or timber from state-owned forests a punishable offence. He also worried about the possible extinction of the wild herds of vicuñas.

⁵ Marsh donated the copyright of Man and Nature to a charity that helped wounded Civil War soldiers. Luckily for Marsh, his brother and nephew quickly bought the copyright back before the sales picked up.