Marsh, George Perkins

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Marsh, George Perkins

George Perkins Marsh (1801-1882), an American geographer, is known today primarily as the founding father of the conservation movement. His contemporaries regarded him as the most comprehensive American scholar of the time. His enduring contributions to knowledge stemmed from an unusual combination of historical and ecological insights. As a social historian, Marsh broke new ground in treating the story of mankind as the history of the use and misuse of resources. As an ecologist, he saw the history of nature com-mingled with that of man and traced the motives, the techniques, and the consequences of man’s impact on the earth. Although he was not a trained naturalist, Marsh manifested an extraordinary awareness of the fragile interdependence of all aspects of nature, physical and biological, and of their multiform significance for mankind.

The scion of a patrician family in frontier Vermont, Marsh graduated from Dartmouth College and practiced law in Burlington, meanwhile engaging in business—farming, lumbering, woolen manufacturing, railroad development, marble quarrying—and in politics. He served in the state legislature and for six years in Congress. As a reward for services to the Whig and Republican parties, he was appointed United States minister to Turkey from 1849 to 1853 and to Italy from 1861 to 1882, the latter an unequaled tenure of office. This diplomatic career gave him an opportunity to travel widely and made possible the leisure essential for his scholarly work.

Marsh’s first contributions were in linguistics. Attracted by new developments in the study of Teutonic languages, folklore, and cultural origins, he edited the first Icelandic grammar in English, delved into the history and literature of Old Norse and related tongues, and became the American promoter for C. C. Rafn’s monumental Antiquitates americanae, a collection of Icelandic sagas bearing on the Iceland–Greenland–Vinland settlements. Marsh’s historical studies of the English language were the standard texts during the 1860s, and he was in continual demand as editor, adviser, and critic of dictionaries, including the New English Dictionary. Familiarity with an extraordinary range of source materials in twenty languages made Marsh a first-rate, if not profoundly original, etymologist.

His work as a scientific middleman was of more lasting significance. In the House of Representatives, Marsh helped to create, to staff, and to shape the Smithsonian Institution, guiding its early ventures in archeology and in natural science and guarding its research endowment against congressional incursions. He himself added animal specimens from Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine to the Smithsonian collections. On his return from Turkey he strongly urged the introduction of camels as beasts of burden in the American West—an enterprise initially successful but aborted by the Civil War.

A utilitarian zeal directed and inspired Marsh’s best work. As early as the 1840s he publicly advocated measures of physical improvement and conservation: the establishment of nurseries for forestry research and the regulation of logging to prevent excessive and flashy runoff and consequent flooding and desiccation. Not until he returned to Italy in 1861, however, did Marsh bring together the materials he had long been collecting into a systematic analysis of man’s manipulation of the natural environment. Published in 1864, Man and Nature showed how man differs from nature, how nature operates within itself, and what happens to woods and waters, mountains and deserts, when men clear, farm, dam, and build.

In surveying man’s impact, conscious and unconscious, Marsh did not overlook the improvements but stressed the accompanying and resulting damage. Technology had enabled man to derange natural balances and might ultimately, Marsh feared, reduce the surface of the earth “to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species” ([1864] 1965, p. 44). Man and Nature was the first book to controvert the American myth of an inexhaustible earth. Its immediate impact was more moral than practical, but by 1907, when it had gone through three editions, the basic principles of Man and Nature were embodied in the national conservation program.

In geography, Marsh is also important as an early and effective critic of environmental determinism, then popularized in the works of Arnold Guyot. How could man be viewed as the product of environment, when man himself had the power to alter that environment—and had in fact done so over most of the earth’s surface? The mistakes man had made through ignorance or greed could, Marsh thought, in most cases be rectified by applying scientific principles of land management, by avoiding waste, and by public control of resources.

David Lowenthal

[For discussion of the subsequent development of Marsh’s ideas, seeConservation.]

WORKS BY MARSH

1856 The Camel: His Organization, Habits, and Uses, Considered With Reference to His Introduction Into the United States. Boston: Gould & Lincoln.

(1860 a) 1885 Lectures on the English Language. Rev. ed. New York: Scribner.

1860 b The Study of Nature. Christian Examiner 68: 33-62. ? An unsigned article.

(1862) 1898 The Origin and History of the English Language, and of the Early Literature It Embodies. Rev. ed. New York: Scribner.

(1864) 1965 Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. Edited by David Lowenthal. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. ? See the introduction to the 1965 edition by David Lowenthal. Revised editions were published between 1874 and 1907 as The Earth as Modified by Human Action.