The Invention of Nature

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.