Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and the inorganic world are bound together by such mutual relations and adaptations as secure,  if not the absolute permanence and equilibrium of both, at least a very slow and gradual succession of changes in those conditions. But man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.  George Perkins Marsh Man and Nature p 35-36

9.1 The rise of the industrial revolution in England, which soon spread to America to transform the face of the continent, was seen by many as opening up a new age of wealth and optimism. Railways cut through the land opening up vast areas to be exploited for crops, cattle and mining. Settlements grew into towns, and towns to cities as the population expanded at a feverish pace.

9.2 But one dissenter from the new religion of industrial growth, was George Perkins Marsh. Andrea Wulf introduces this American heir of Humboldt’s intellectual legacy. “Buried in his work in Burlington, Marsh had become the ‘dullest owl in Christendom’, as he wrote to a friend... He had returned to Burlington from New York, he said ‘like an escaped convict to his cell’. Hunched over piles of papers, book and manuscripts, he hardly left his study and rarely spoke to anybody. He was writing and writing, he told a friend, ‘with all my might’ and with only his books as company. His library contained 5,000 volumes from all over the world with one entire section dedicated to Humboldt

9.3 “Humboldt was the ‘greatest of the priesthood of nature’, Marsh said, because he had understood the world as an interplay between man and nature – a connection that would underpin Marsh’s own work because he was collecting material for a book that would explain how humankind was destroying the environment.”

9.4 The book he eventually produced was titled “The Earth as Modified by Human Action”. Written in 1864, more than a hundred years before the age of the internet and easy global travel, when the study of geology, meteorology and biology were in their infancy, and when Darwin’s idea of evolution had only recently been published, its scale and vision are astonishing. As though spinning the globe in his hand, he roams from continent to continent and age to age through history, envisioning in great detail the specific impact of human civilization upon the natural environment, beginning with the greatest empire of ancient times. “The Roman Empire, at the period of its greatest expansion, comprised the regions of the earth most distinguished by a happy combination of physical conditions. 

9.5 The provinces bordering on the principal and the secondary basins of the Mediterranean enjoyed in healthfulness and equability of climate, in fertility of soil, in variety of vegetable and mineral products, and in natural facilities for the transportation and distribution of exchangeable commodities, advantages which have not been possessed in any equal degree by any territory of like extent in the Old World or the New. The abundance of the land and of the waters adequately supplied every material want, ministered liberally to every sensuous enjoyment.” But now, “If we compare the present physical condition of the countries of which I am speaking, with the descriptions that ancient historians and geographers have given of their fertility and general capability of ministering to human uses, we shall find that more than one-half their whole extent – not excluding the provinces most celebrated for the profusion and variety of their spontaneous and their cultivated products, and for the wealth and social advancement of the inhabitants – is ether deserted by civilized man and surrendered to hopeless desolation, or at least greatly reduced in both productiveness and population.”8.5 And the cause? “The decay of these once flourishing countries is partly due, no doubt, to that class of geological causes whose action we can neither resist nor guide, and partly also to the direct violence of hostile human force: but it is, in a far greater proportion, either the result of man’s ignorant disregard for the laws of nature, or an incidental consequence of war and of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny and misrule.”

9.6 He goes on to give example upon example of the destructive human impact throughout the ages upon forests, rivers, fields, vegetation and wildlife, observing “Similar abuses have tended to perpetuate and extend these evils in later ages, and it is but recently that, even in the most populous parts of Europe, public attention has been half awakened to the necessity of restoring the disturbed harmonies of nature, whose well-balanced influences are so propitious to all her organic offspring, and of repaying to our great mother the debt which the prodigality and the thriftlessness of former generations have imposed upon their successors – thus fulfilling the command of religion and of practical wisdom, to use this world as not abusing it.” No words could better capture the motivation of Dr Servettaz, eighty years later, in saving the lake from the ‘prodigality of urbanization’ and ‘restoring the disturbed harmonies of nature’ caused by sewage in the lake.’

9.7 George Perkins Marsh continues in a notable paragraph to outline a philosophical turning point the understanding of Man’s relation to Nature and with it his original vision of an entirely new field of scientific research – today we call it ecology.

9.8  “The revolutions of the seasons, with their alternations of temperature and of length of day and night, the climates of different zones, and the general conditions and movements of the atmosphere and the seas, depend upon causes for the most part cosmical, and, of course, wholly beyond our control. The elevation, configuration, and composition of the great masses of terrestrial surface, and the relative extent and distribution of land and water, are determined by geological influences equally remote from our jurisdiction. It would hence seem that the physical adaptation of different portions of the earth to the use and enjoyment of man is a matter so strictly belonging to mightier than human powers, that we can only accept geographical nature as we find her, and be content with such soils and such skies as she spontaneously offers.8.10 But it is certain that man has reacted upon organized and inorganic nature, and thereby modified, if not determined, the material structure of his earthly home. The measure of that reaction manifestly constitutes a very important element in the appreciation of the relations between mind and matter, as well as in the discussion of many purely physical problems. But though the subject has been incidentally touched upon by many geographers, and treated with much fullness of detail in regard to certain limited field of human effort and to certain specific effects of human action, it has not, as a whole, so far as I know, been made matters of special observation, or of historical research, by any scientific inquirer.”

9.9  “At present, then, all that I can hope is to excite an interest in a topic of much economical importance, by pointing out the directions and illustrating the models in which human action has been, or may be most injurious or most beneficial in its influence upon the physical conditions of the earth we inhabit. We cannot always distinguish between the results of man’s action and the efforts of purely geological or cosmical causes. The destruction of the forests, the drainage of lakes and marshes, and the operations of rural husbandry and industrial art have unquestionably tended to produce great changes in hygrometric, thermometric, electric and chemical condition of the atmosphere, though we are not yet able to measure the force of the different elements of disturbance, or to say how far they have been neutralised by each other, or by still obscurer influences: and it is equally certain that the myriad forms of animal and vegetable life, which covered the earth when man first entered upon the theatre of a nature whose harmonies he was destined to derange, have been through his interference, greatly changed in numerical proportion, sometimes much modified in form and product, and something entirely extirpated.”

9.10  And so George Perkins Marsh showed that earth was not so vast and the impact of man not so small. In fact as human population grows without apparent check and industrialization and urbanization intensify to support it, the relationship between man and nature was becoming ever more unbalanced, with nature the victim.