The Invention of Nature

The Old World had to be the New World’s cautionary tale. At a time when the 1862 Homestead Act³ gave those who headed out to the American West 160 acres of land each for not much more than a filing fee, millions of acres of public lands were placed in private hands, waiting to be ‘improved’ by axe and plough. ‘Let us be wise,’ Marsh urged, and learn from the mistakes of ‘our older brethren!’ The consequences of man’s action were unforeseeable. ‘We can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble in the ocean of organic life,’ Marsh wrote. What he did know was that the moment ‘

homo sapiens Europae’ had arrived in America, the damage had migrated from east to west.

Others had come to similar conclusions. In the United States, James Madison had been the first to take up some of Humboldt’s ideas. Madison had met Humboldt in 1804, in Washington, DC, and later read many of his books. He had applied Humboldt’s observations from South America to the United States. In a widely circulated speech to the Agricultural Society in Albemarle, Virginia, in May 1818, a year after his retirement from the presidency, Madison had repeated Humboldt’s warnings about deforestation and highlighted the catastrophic effects of large-scale tobacco cultivation on Virginia’s once fertile soil. This speech carried the nucleus of American environmentalism. Nature, Madison had said, was not subservient to the use of man. Madison had called upon his fellow citizens to protect the environment but his warnings had been largely ignored.

It was Simón Bolívar who had first enshrined Humboldt’s ideas into law when he had issued a visionary decree in 1825, requiring the government in Bolivia to plant 1 million trees. In the midst of battles and war, Bolívar had understood the devastating consequences of arid land for the future of the nation. Bolívar’s new law was designed to protect waterways and to create forests across the new republic. Four years later he had ordered ‘Measures for the Protection and Wise Use of the National Forests’ for Colombia, with a particular focus on controlling the quinine harvest from the bark of the wild-growing cinchona tree – a damaging method that stripped the trees of their protective bark and one that Humboldt had already noted during his expedition.⁴

In North America Henry David Thoreau had called for the preservation of forests in 1851. ‘In Wildness is the preservation of the World,’ Thoreau had said, and then later concluded in October 1859, a few months after Humboldt’s death, that every town should have a forest of several hundred acres ‘inalienable forever’. Whereas Madison and Bolívar had seen the protection of trees as an economic necessity, Thoreau insisted that ‘national preserves’ should be set aside for recreation. What Marsh now did with Man and Nature was to bring it all together and dedicate an entire book to the subject, presenting the evidence that humankind was destroying the earth.

‘Humboldt was the great apostle,’ Marsh had declared when he began Man and Nature.

Throughout the book he referred to Humboldt but expanded his ideas. Where Humboldt’s warnings had been dispersed across his books – little nuggets of insight here and there but often lost in the broader context – Marsh now wove it all into one forceful argument. Page after page, Marsh talked about the evils of deforestation. He explained how forests protected the soil and natural springs. Once the forest was gone, the soil lay bare against winds, sun and rain. The earth would no longer be a sponge but a dust heap. As the soil was washed off, all goodness disappeared and ‘thus the earth is rendered no longer fit for the habitation of man’, Marsh concluded. It made for gloomy reading. The damage caused by just two or three generations was as disastrous, he said, as the eruption of a volcano or an earthquake. ‘We are,’ he warned prophetically, ‘breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling.’

Marsh was telling Americans that they had to act now, before it was too late. ‘Prompt measures’ had to be taken because ‘the most serious fears are entertained’. Forests needed to be set aside and replanted. Some should be preserved as places of recreation, inspiration and habitat for flora and fauna – as an ‘inalienable property’ for all citizens. Other areas needed to be replanted and managed for a sustainable use of timber. ‘We have now felled forest enough,’ Marsh wrote.