Forest History Today-F01

This paper was the banquet presentation at the conference Making Environmental History Relevant in the 21st Century, a joint meeting of the Forest History Society and the American Society for Environmental History in March 2001. The author’s George Perkins Marsh, Prophet of Conservation, was published in the University of Washington Press’s Weyerhaeuser Environmental series in 2000. MARSH’S MAN AND NATURE IN THE 21ST CENTURY BY DAVID LOWENTHAL an and Nature is a title that crosses Mtime: Marsh’s 1864 classic speaks to our own environmental angst. Forests engrossed Marsh first and last; “forest- born,” he held that few people had “as good a claim to personality as a respectable oak.”1 Man and Nature’s key chapter is “The Woods,” whose loss had triggered far-reaching global impacts. “The too general felling of the woods,” he sums up, is “the most destructive among the many causes of the physical deterioration of the earth.”2 Rapid runoff and soil loss from forest clearance were for Marsh man’s worst wound to nature, forest renewal the prime remedy. Yet his title proved troublesome. It was a problem at the outset because Marsh’s publishers feared “Man and Nature” too vague to make its point; the phrase seemed metaphysical, not material. Hence the sec- ond edition reversed title and subtitle. Less memorably crisp, “The Earth as Modified by Human Action” was candidly down-to- earth. All through life Marsh stressed his “earthy, material” “mudpile” bent.3 George Perkins Marsh, conservationist and author of the 1864 Man and Nature, or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. An acclaimed linguist, lawyer, congressman, and diplomat, he served 25 years as U.S. envoy to Turkey and then to Italy. He helped found and guide the Smithsonian Institution. ARCHIVES, WOODSTOCK, VERMONT BILLINGS FAMILY FOREST HISTORY TODAY | SPRING/FALL 2001 57 “Man and Nature” today poses a dif- foreseeable and incalculable, varying with Linguistic history confirmed deforesta- ferent problem, one unseen even when time-scale, technology, and social condi- tion: many ancient Italian towns bore Harvard reissued the book in 1965. But tion. Human agency was also morally tree-names like abete, àcero, càrpino, castag- soon afterwards, feminism began to imbued. Free-willed men ought to steward no, fàggio, fràssina, noce, pino, quèrcia. But proscribe the inclusive use of “man”; nature: they were answerable for any dam- by Marsh’s time these towns were devoid “human” or “humankind” became de age they did, whether from ignorant zeal of forest—and also of their former pros- rigueur. Environmental like other history or insensate greed. perity. Owing in part to geological caus- today bends to the vogue for salving our Thus began environmental history as es, but largely to “man’s ignorant forebears’ linguistic sins. It was hard for now seen. Well-informed on tree growth disregard of the laws of nature” and atten- the publisher of my new biography to and riparian regimes, soil absorption and dant “tyranny and misrule, . the fairest allow “man” in the generic sense Marsh erosion, Marsh deployed natural science and fruitfulest provinces of the Roman meant. Harder still to leave nature as to explain plant and animal history, Empire” were now exhausted, decrepit, “her”: despite Marsh’s deference to resource use, and land cover change. He infertile, barren.7 nature’s needs, he saw man as being reviewed dune control and watershed “above” and “conquering” “her.” management, irrigation and empolder- THE PREHISTORY OF The modern vogue for regendering ment, domestication and desertification, ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY man and nature barely scratches the sur- from the Alps to Appalachia, the Sahara to face of awkward lexical change. The long the Great Salt Lake, the Roman Campagna Marsh’s precursors were of course not century since Marsh has seen nature not to the Mississippi, Midwestern prairies to blind to man’s links with nature. Indeed, only neutered and idolized but national- the Po plain. natural history mirrored human history, ized, politicized, economized, not to for- His chronicles blend data from things the book of nature echoed the annals of get poisoned, purified, and cloned. The and from words— mountains and man- mankind. The earth gave food and shel- myriad meanings of nature explicated by uscripts, topography and toponymy. Why ter, sanctuary and spirit. The reciprocal Raymond Williams4 continue to metas- had Old-Norse no name for sand dunes? effects of locale and life had long intrigued tasize. And if like Marsh’s publishers we Because “only since the comparatively historians, who invoked landscape and ter- seek a down-to-earth proxy, we fare no recent destruction of the forests of rain, climate and soils, to explain why peo- better with “environment” or “landscape,” Jutland [had] the shifting coast-downs ples differed. In Western thought, both of which today are as messily multi- excited any interest as a source of danger dominion over nature was divinely form as “nature”. to the cultivated soil.”6 Like Darwin, decreed and spurred by Enlightenment Marsh devised an archaeology of knowl- science. To environmental determinists edge long before Foucault coined the nature was mankind’s master, to apostles MARSH’S PIONEERING phrase. But where Darwin built evolu- of progress mankind’s servant. But both ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY tion from fossil beings and reproductive stressed the two realms’ disparities and Our convenors’ aim—an environmental processes, Marsh derived ecology from scanted their parallels. Nature was mun- history to inform public policy—was also fossil language, artifacts, and landforms. dane and mindless, humans alone fash- Marsh’s: he termed it “important to the Darwin rewrote biological history as life ioned in God’s sublime image. This chasm interests of the American people to show science; Marsh fused environmental with made it clear to most, with Cambridge the evils resulting from too much clearing human events in a history combining Regius professor Charles Kingsley, that and cultivation, and often so-called man and nature. “history is the history of men and women, improvements.”5 His method was histor- For instance, ancient brickwork in and of nothing else.”8 ical: chronicling Old World environmen- Rome pointed to fuel scarcity owing to Later seers tried to tailor human his- tal follies and nascent reforms, he cited deforestation: tory to supposed laws of nature. Marx and past events to explain present conditions. Hegel likened social progress to the Man and Nature was the first historical The oldest bricks are very thin, and growth of living organisms. Toynbee and glimpse of human global impact. very thoroughly burnt. A few genera- Eliade equated the rise and fall of social Before Marsh, human agency was muf- tions later the bricks were thicker and orders to fixed planetary orbits; econo- fled by biblical prophecy or dominated by less well burnt. In the [late Empire] the mists ascribed fluctuations of boom and terrain and climate. Man’s link to nature bricks were still thicker, and generally bust, even war and peace, to sunspot was foreordained: for certain doom, as soft-burnt. This is due to the abun- cycles.9 But such analogies are too sim- 17th century divines said; or for predes- dance and cheapness of fuel in earli- plistic to explain complex and contingent tined progress, as 18th century er, and its growing scarceness and history. Historians rightly dismiss meta- philosophes held. Marsh scrapped airy pre- dearness in later, ages. When wood narratives that account for the cosmos but judgment for attested fact: he showed that cost little, constructors could afford to collapse at every aberrant event. They also human impress had differed with locale, burn their brick thoroughly; but as the mistrust environmentalism, both the old intensified over time, reflected myriad price of fire-wood advanced, they were determinism that makes society a pawn diverse causes and choices. Man and Nature able to consume less wood in brick- of all-powerful nature, and the new prim- chronicles manifold effects—beneficial and kilns, and the quality and quantity of itivism that fears to upset nature’s fragile harmful, intended and unsought, deliber- brick used in building were gradually harmony. Environmental history has ate and heedless, immediate and remote, reversed in proportion. pretty well outgrown such shibboleths. 58 FOREST HISTORY TODAY | SPRING/FALL 2001 Human history is still unique within like the conversion of Australian forest into the remotest planets, but the observa- the vast saga of nature. The changes and grassland and desert by Aboriginal fire — tions of six thousand years have added stases of mankind’s brief annals conform are seen to act in tandem with far swifter nothing to our knowledge of the irreg- little with the longer-range shifts and disruptions—such as the extirpation of ularities of our own seasons. rhythms of global and stellar time-spans. major fauna by precolumbian North Consciousness, imagery, and communi- American hunters. Meanwhile, cosmic Science had dispelled fears of planetary cations unexampled in the biosphere make aberrations beyond mankind’s present con- collision, but left earthquakes and volcanic human history singular and human impact trol episodically impact both natural and eruptions in fearsome limbo. formidable. Memory and intent, awareness human history. In short, the closer one peered, the less of death and of former and future lives, The refutation of Clements’s ecologi- constant nature looked. “Disturbing caus- uniquely enrich our annals with hindsight cal paradigm, Mart Stewart’s “splendid es, infinite in number, and various in oper- and foresight. In sum, brief recency, tran- consensus” of the 1960s and 1970s, deprives ation,” undermined every presumed scendent awareness, and archival cumula- us of what seemed a sure model of regularity and subverted general laws. “Led tion set human history apart.10 nature.11 But the collapse of old certitudes to expect uniformity, we are embarrassed is, in my view, not dismaying but liberat- and confounded with variety.”14 So too ing.

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