The Invention of 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.