George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation

  • David Lowenthal
University of Washington Press: 2000. 650 pp. $40, £26.95
Advance guard: Marsh was a century ahead of his time in recognizing environmental concerns.

George Perkins Marsh is not a household name, except perhaps in the households of environmental historians. There he is remembered for Man and Nature (1864), the first study of humans as a worldwide agent of geological and biological change. In nineteenth-century America he was moderately well known in higher political, social and intellectual circles. He was a scholar, lawyer, congressman and for two decades a US diplomat in the Levant and the Italian states. David Lowenthal's book, which started as a revision of his earlier biography, George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter (1958), blossomed into a fresh attempt to understand Marsh and his influence.

Lowenthal is perhaps the ideal biographer for Marsh. He is a geographer, and so shares Marsh's environmental interests. And he has been interested in Marsh for many years. This interest sustained him as he tracked his man through libraries and archives and followed in his footsteps across various landscapes.

Knowledge and enthusiasm are necessary, for formidable obstacles are placed in the biographer's path by the very diversity of Marsh's life. He was a polymath. He knew many languages and wrote on a wide variety of topics. His interests included the English language and several others, philology in general, agriculture, soil erosion, the influence of the Goths on European civilization, political economy, public affairs and camels.

Marsh's public career was equally diverse. He made one of the first studies of the environmental effects of the fishing industry and forest clearance, investigated Vermont's railroad companies, designed the Vermont State House, represented that state in Congress, and served as an American consul and minister. He was a lawyer, invested in railroads, and was partner in a marble quarry — among other ventures.

The obvious approach for a biography would be to focus on what Marsh is remembered for, his ideas about humans and their relation to nature. The book's subtitle suggests this tack, but the book is actually a more ambitious 'life-and-times'.

There are, in fact, two books here. One is the story of an American scholar, the other the record of Marsh as a prophet of environmental thought. Both are worthwhile, but for different reasons. The first puts Marsh in the context of his times. It was quite a context. Marsh lived through American politics from the anti-Masonic agitation around 1830 through to the end of Reconstruction (although he was out of the country for many of the later events). He saw American business expand from the shaky financing of the early nineteenth-century railroads to the industrial progress after the Civil War. He was involved in American scholarship and science in ways as different as the political manoeuvring that established the Smithsonian Institution and the 'dictionary battles' over American versus English usage and spelling.

Then there were the political events in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the background to Marsh's diplomatic efforts. In addition, Lowenthal describes Marsh's family life, his travels, financial troubles and political problems: it is easy to see how Marsh's career was related to events. He could not have written with authority on so many topics even a generation later. His career as diplomat and wandering scholar was equally a product of American and European involvement in the countries where he was stationed. The profusion of events and ideas in the book and the detail on Marsh's travels and studies will discourage some readers, but the result is a vivid portrait of Marsh against his intellectual and social background.

The second story is the more important. As Lowenthal admits, “it is above all for his crucial role in environmental history that Marsh's life warranted retelling here”. Most of that is described in the two chapters in which Lowenthal discusses Man and Nature and the final one on Marsh's ideas. But the environmental aspect runs throughout the text, for Lowenthal believes Marsh's circumstances and experiences shaped his ideas on conservation. He had seen the forests of his native Vermont fall to the axe and travelled over the eroded landscapes of the Middle East.

Experiences such as these, as much as formal knowledge of geology, made Man and Nature what it was. Lowenthal's assessments are judicious, usually more solid than startling, but occasionally bold. His comparison of Marsh and his contemporary Henry Thoreau should stir some thought. He rejects as a “latter-day construct” the idea that there was a division between biocentric and anthropocentric views, as represented respectively by Thoreau and Marsh, and finds many points of agreement between the two men. Then there is his view that, next “to Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Marsh's Man and Nature was the most influential text of its time to link culture with nature, science with society, landscape with history”. Well, maybe, but wasn't second place in this race a long way back?

There is something here for everyone. General readers will get a picture of Marsh and his times, American and European. Environmental historians and geographers will appreciate Lowenthal's discussion of Marsh as an environmental thinker, the fate of his ideas since 1864, and their relevance today. Everyone should come away with a better appreciation of a man who was a century ahead of the general run of scientists in recognizing many of our environmental concerns and who addressed them at a fundamental level. This is a useful study of an important figure.