Marsh's "Man and Nature" is a trip.
It's fun when they're planting sunflowers to protect Washington, DC from malaria.
Oops! This is a more academic tone because it was for a class and I hate that things for class wither somewhere on a server forever and don’t do anything so I’m just sending it out here.
Marsh, George Perkins. Man and Nature, Or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action by George P. Marsh. A Kindness of Ravens LLC, 1864.
Perhaps the answer to why a book written in 1864 should be relevant to interdisciplinary comparative work today can be found in Charles Scribner’s review from the same year:
We are deeply interested in the subject discussed in this book, and generally with the author’s manner of treating it. [But] it appears that we live in an age too early to admit of a book being written on this subject, which should give full satisfaction in every respect. (emphasis added)
The subject of Man and Nature is the ecological unsustainability of civilized Western society and economy from the Roman Empire through the nineteenth-century United States. Reading Marsh today is an important reminder of the timelessness of today’s environmental crisis. It is a reminder that today’s crisis is not a function of industrialization, for if it were the entire Roman Empire from “Northern Africa, the greater Arabian peninsula, Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia and many other provinces of Asia Minor,” today would not be a desert.
The main argument of Man and Nature is that environmental degradation is a function of state bureaucratization. Marsh writes that “it is…the result of man’s ignorant disregard of the laws of nature…an incidental consequence of war…of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny and misrule,” of Roman colonial taxation which “the sale of the entire harvest would scarcely discharge,” of “military conscription” that severed people from landed labor, and of “absurd restrictions and unwise regulations” on local economies. Marsh framed Man and Nature as a call for the improvement of corporate and national bureaucratic treatment, and it no doubt worked. Domestically, it inspired Gifford Pinchot to found the US Forest Service and it had cited policy impacts across the globe, from Japan to New Zealand.
We should understand Man and Nature both within its historical context and for its importance for contemporary research. Historically, Man and Nature should be thought of in relation to two trends at the time of writing. First, with nineteenth-century innovations in transportation researchers could for the first time travel globally to collect observations. Humboldt’s masterpiece Cosmos was the first true global empirical naturalistic study and, as historian Andrea Wulf has shown, this work influenced the spatial and temporal imagination of Marsh enormously. And yet, we should understand that whereas Humboldt was focused on imagining a global ecology, Marsh’s work was focused on the globalization of a particular relationship between ecology and economy.
Second, we should also understand Man and Nature as historically situated within and against the then-emerging field of physical geography; within in the sense that it dealt with the relationship between man and landscape; against in the sense that whereas contemporaries like Ritter and Guyot were focused on the “geographical deterministic” directionality of that relationship—how environment affects society—Marsh was focused on the reverse causality—how society affects the environment.
The structure of the book follows six major sections: a) an introductory section laying out they possibility that civilized societies destroy their environment, b) empirical sections on plant and animal translocation and extinction, c) “The Woods”, d) “The Waters, e) “The Sands”, and f) on the potential environmental effects of future projects including the Suez and Panama Canals.
The comparative range of this book in space, time, and content is enormous. For instance, a single section on the “Influence of the Forest on the Flow of Springs” includes naturalistic observations from Pliny the Elder (Roman, 23-79 AD), chemical measurements by Jean-Baptiste Boussingault (French, 1801-1887), and journalism from William C. Bryant (American, 1794-1878). The work flows interdisciplinarily, with policy sections on “Royal Forests and Game Laws” situated next to naturalistic sections on “Small Forest Plants” next to sections connecting the two: “Special Causes of the Destruction of European Woods.”
From a contemporary disciplinary perspective, Man and Nature functions as a bibliographic time capsule for multiple academic interests. For forest scientists, “The Woods” features innumerable accounts and observations of timbering throughout the West. For hydrologists, “The Waters” features countless historical case studies of state river and lake manipulation. For instance, there is an entire section devoted to the economic and technological means of the draining of Lake Haarlem in the Netherlands from 1840-58, and the subsequent “climatic” and environmental effects (187).
Another section covers France’s 1860 tree planting program (1,000,000 Franc per year) aimed at slowing groundwater profusion and thus river inundation rates (214). Comparative historians will feel at home here, in that France’s bureaucratic interventions to prevent river “inundations” are compared to similar interventions in Egypt, Italy, Brazil, India, New York, and Germany, as are their climatic effects. In a sense, Man and Nature functions as a cure for the historical environmental amnesia that allows us to forget that the land between Amsterdam and The Hague was recently a lake, that Toledo, Ohio was recently a 1,500 square mile malaria-infested swamp, and that not long ago we reversed the direction of flow in the Chicago River.
Though useful for today’s science, Man and Nature at times feels dated. For instance, the section on “Trees as a Protection against Malaria” predates the discovery of malaria as an insect-borne illness and operates by assuming it was caused by “bad air” (81).
The extensive section on “The Sands” appears on its surface dated, however is in truth a section primarily about the interface of land and sea and historical policies that have mediated between the two. A case from Pointe de Grave in 1846 France shows the deconstruction of a town and lighthouse threatened by the sea and reconstruction further inland (269). Another case in 1610 Koegras shows the implementation and environmental effects of artificial dune projects (272). Another case from 1539 Denmark shows the criminalization of the destruction of dune plants necessary for stabilization (273). “The Sands” thus provides historical context as we look forward toward a period of sea-level rise.
Though naturalists and policy analysts will find the details of Man and Nature useful, the work is most important for global historians, sociologists, and philosophers because of what its broader emergent claim implies. Namely, that in the context of Western society ecological management and ecological abuse are synonymous; that technological and political efforts to curtail these abuses have been abundant throughout history but have largely failed; and finally that unsustainability is not a function of industrialization, but of a constitutively extractive cultural that links Ancient Sumeria and Chicago.
This review opened with a quote implying that Man and Nature would not have an audience in the 1800s, but that it must at some point. Another New York Times review from the same year explained why:
[The problem addressed in Man and Nature] is one that appeals to no passion dominant in the present hurry of events; there is nothing in it that any political party can make capital of, and scarcely anything that can be turned into private advantage.
Today we live in an age of climate anxiety, of the Green New Deal, and of Tesla—an age in which at long last this quote has lost validity. Thus, we no longer “live in an age too early to admit of a book being written on this subject,” but instead one in which Man and Nature has finally found its time.