The Invention of Nature

Marsh was not just talking about a parched spot in the south of France, an arid region in Egypt or an overfished lake in Vermont. This was an argument about the whole earth. Man and Nature’s power stemmed from its global dimension because Marsh compared and understood the world as a unified whole. Instead of looking at local occurrences, Marsh lifted environmental concerns to a new and terrifying level. The whole planet was in danger. ‘Earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant,’ Marsh wrote.

Man and Nature was the first work of natural history fundamentally to influence American politics. It was, as the American writer and environmentalist Wallace Stegner later said, the ‘rudest kick in the face’ to America’s optimism. At a time when the country was racing towards industrialization – fiercely exploiting its natural resources and razing its forests – Marsh wanted to make his compatriots pause and think. To his great disappointment, the initial sales of Man and Nature were low. Then over the next few months, sales improved and over 1,000 copies were sold and his publisher began to reprint.⁵

Man and Nature

’s full impact was not felt for several decades but the book influenced a great number of people in the United States who would become key figures in the preservation and conservation movements. John Muir, the ‘father of the National Parks’, would read it, as would Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the United States Forestry Service, who would call it ‘epoch-making’. Marsh’s observations on deforestation in Man and Nature led to the passage of the 1873 Timber Culture Act which encouraged settlers on the Great Plains to plant trees. It also prepared the ground for the protection of America’s forests, leading to the 1891 Forest Reserves Act which took much of its wording from the pages of Marsh’s book and from Humboldt’s earlier ideas.

Man and Nature resonated internationally too. It was intensely discussed in Australia and inspired French foresters as well as legislators in New Zealand. It encouraged conservationists in South Africa and Japan to fight for the protection of trees. Italian forest laws cited Marsh, and conservationists in India even carried the book ‘along the slope of the Northern Himalaya, and into Kashmir and Tibet’. Man and Nature shaped a new generation of activists and would in the first half of the twentieth century be celebrated as ‘the fountainhead of the conservation movement’.

Marsh believed that the lessons were buried in the scars that the human species had left on the landscape for thousands of years. ‘The future,’ he said, ‘is more uncertain than the past.’ By looking back, Marsh was looking forward.

¹ The seven slave states that first seceded were: South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana and Alabama. By May 1861 four more had followed: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina.

² Humboldt had already seen these dangers and warned that the scheme to irrigate the Llanos in Venezuela by canal from Lake Valencia would be irresponsible. In the short term it would create fertile fields in the Llanos, but the long-term effect could only be an ‘arid desert’. It would leave the Aragua Valley as barren as the deforested surrounding mountains.

³ Everyone who was twenty-one and older and who had not fought against the United States could apply. The requirement was to live on the land for at least five years and to ‘improve’ it.

⁴ Bolívar made the removal of any tree or timber from state-owned forests a punishable offence. He also worried about the possible extinction of the wild herds of vicuñas.

⁵

Marsh donated the copyright of Man and Nature to a charity that helped wounded Civil War soldiers. Luckily for Marsh, his brother and nephew quickly bought the copyright back before the sales picked up.

22

Art, Ecology and Nature

Ernst Haeckel and Humboldt

THE DAY HE heard about Alexander von Humboldt’s death, twenty-five-year-old German zoologist Ernst Haeckel felt miserable. ‘Two souls, alas, live in my chest,’ Haeckel wrote to his fiancée, Anna Sethe, using a well-known image from Goethe’s Faust to explain his feelings. Where Faust is torn between his love for the earthly world and the longing to soar to higher realms, Haeckel was torn between art and science, between feeling nature with his heart or investigating the natural world like a zoologist. The news that Humboldt was dead – the man whose books had inspired Haeckel’s love for nature, science, explorations and painting since early childhood – had triggered this crisis.