Man and nature
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Man and nature
（Weyerhaeuser environmental classics）
University of Washington Press, c2003
- Other Title
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Physical geography as modified by human action
Man and nature, or, Physical geography as modified by human action
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Note
"Man and nature ... was originally published in 1864. The edition edited by David Lowenthal was published by Harvard University Press in 1965 and is reprinted here"--Verso t.p
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In Man and Nature, first published in 1864, polymath scholar and diplomat George Perkins Marsh challenged the general belief that human impact on nature was generally benign or negligible and charged that ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean had brought about their own collapse by their abuse of the environment. By deforesting their hillsides and eroding their soils, they had destroyed the natural fertility that sustained their well-being. Marsh offered his compatriots in the United States a stern warning that the young American republic might repeat these errors of the ancient world if it failed to end its own destructive waste of natural resources. Marsh's ominous warnings inspired conservation and reform. In linking culture with nature, science with history, Man and Nature was the most influential text of its time next to Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published just five years earlier.
In his Introduction to this new edition, David Lowenthal places Man and Nature in the context of recent scholarship and evaluates its significance for the environmental movement that has emerged since the latter part of the twentieth century. He also paints a vivid portrait of the book's brilliant, passionate, wide-ranging, and sometimes choleric author.
Although what we know and what we fear about the environment have vastly amplified since Marsh's day, his appraisal of forest cover and erosion remains largely valid, his cautions about watershed control still cognent, and his call for stewardship ever more pertinent. Man and Nature is worth reading not only for having taught lessons crucial in its day, but for teaching them still so well.
Table of Contents
Foreword: A Classic of Conservation
Introduction to the 2003 Edition
A Note on the Text
Preface
Introductory
Transfer, Modification and Extirpation of Vegetable and of Animal Species
The Woods
The Waters
The Sands
Projected or Possible Geographical Changes by Man
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
