The civic intent of George Perkins Marsh's anthrocentric environmentalism

New England Quarterly-A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters

Volumn 82, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 80-111

  Gregory Garvey, T ^a  

^a STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 72849109052     PISSN: 00284866     EISSN: 19372213     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/tneq.2009.82.1.80     Document Type: Review

References (62)

1. Henry David Thoreau, Excursions: The Writing of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 202
2. George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864), ed. David Lowenthal (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 42. References to Man and Nature hereafter will be cited in the text as MN
3. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 306-7
4. Richard W. Judd. "A 'Wonderful order and balance': Natural History and the Beginnings of Forest Conservation in America, 1730-1830," Environmental History 11 (January 2006): 8-36
5. During the same period in Europe, scientific inquiry was being applied to resource management. See Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
6. esp. "The Beginnings of Global Environmentalism: Professional Science, Oceanic Islands, and the East India Company, 1768-1838," pp. 309-79
7. See Donald J. Pisani, "Forests and Conservation, 1865-1890," Journal of American History 72 (September 1985): 340-59
8. and Char Miller, Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Washington: Island Press, 2001), pp. 55-57
9. The fullest account of environmentalism during the Progressive era remains Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959)
10. see also Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 182-90 and passim
11. David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (1958; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), p. 405. In the revision, Lowenthal greatly expands his analysis of Man and Nature, dividing his commentary into separate chapters on "The Making" and "The Meaning."
12. Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, pp. 28-30
13. William Jones Rhees, ed., The Smithsonian Institution: Documents Relative to Its Origin and History, 2 vols. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1901), 1:5-6
14. William Howard Taft, "The Smithsonian Institution - Parent of American Science," Science, 25 February 1927, p. 191
15. Paul H. Oehser, The Smithsonian Institution (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), pp. 108-10
16. Marlana Portolano, "Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge: Ethos of Science and Education in the Smithsonian's Inception," Rhetoric Review 18 (Autumn 1999): 67
17. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, The Formation of the American Scientific Community: The American Association for the Advancement of Science (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), pp. 16-40 and passim
18. Rhees, The Smithsonian Institution, 1:132
19. See also Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), pp. 374-75
20. and Joseph Wheelan, Mr. Adams's Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams's Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), pp. 111-19
21. See also Richard William Leopold, Robert Dale Owen: A Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940), pp. 219-30
22. George Perkins Marsh, Speech of Mr. Marsh, of Vermont, on the Bill for Establishing the Smithsonian Institution, April 22, 1846 (Washington: J. & G. S. Gideon, 1846), p. 6
23. Marsh, Speech of Mr. Marsh, p. 12
24. See Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 8-10
25. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson et al., 6 vols. to date (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971-), 1:69
26. Oehser, The Smithsonian Institution, pp. 24-35
27. Taft, "The Smithsonian Institution," pp. 191-94
28. Laura Dassow Walls defines this discourse as a central dimension of the emergence of professional science in the United States. See Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 15, 205-17
29. and E. F. Rivinus and E. M. Youssef, Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), pp. 152-55
30. George Perkins Marsh, "Address Delivered before the Agricultural Society of Rutland County," in So Great a Vision: The Conservation Writings of George Perkins Marsh, ed. Stephen C. Trombulak (Hanover: Middlebury College Press, 2001), pp. 5-23
31. See John T. Cumbler, Reasonable Use: The People, the Environment, and the State, New England, 1790-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. "Cities and Industry, Sewage and Waste"
32. and Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 21-31
33. The case against the Essex Corporation in 1856-57 culminated in a mixed result but ultimately favored the rights of the mill company. It was adjudicated by Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, who concluded that the Essex Corporation's prior agreement to compensate fisheries upstream of its thirty-two-foot dam at Lawrence also applied in the case Massachusetts brought against it. See Cumbler, Reasonable Use, pp. 84-86
34. George Perkins Marsh, "Report, Made Under Authority of the Legislature of Vermont, on the Artificial Propagation of Fish" (1857), SGV, pp. 62-73
35. Peter Coates, Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 40-55, 72-81
36. See Martin Guntau, "The Natural History of the Earth,"
37. and Michael Dettelbach, "Humboldtian Science," both in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 211-29 and 287-304, respectively
38. See also Peter J. Bowler's chapters on "The Heroic Age" in the emergence of natural science in The Norton History of the Environmental Sciences (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), pp. 193-247
39. Lowenthal tracks the development of the equilibrium theory from the nineteenth century to the present in George Perkins Marsh, pp. 410-11
40. Laura Dassow Walls, "'Hero of Knowledge, Be Our Tribute Thine': Alexander von Humboldt in Victorian America," Northeastern Naturalist 8 (2001): 127
41. Walls, Emerson's Life in Science, pp. 172-79
42. and Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 77-88
43. Philip F. Gura describes the influence of German biblical criticism on the transcendentalists in American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), pp. 25-33
44. Alexander von Humboldt, Essai sur la Geographie des Plantes (Paris, 1807)
45. as quoted in Dettelbach, "Humboldtian Science," p. 290
46. Marsh had a complex view of race and ethnicity, but one largely typical of his age. In 1843 he published a book titled The Goths in New-England: A Discourse Delivered at the Anniversary of the Philomathesian Society of Middlebury College (Middlebury, 1843) in which he argued that the strength of New England is largely derived from its racial origins, yet he also leaned toward antislavery when he was a congressman in the 1840s and he joined the Republican Party in 1856. Although he served as a diplomat in Italy for twenty years, he was notably anti-Catholic and objected to open borders
47. and Samuel Kliger, "George Perkins Marsh and the Gothic Tradition in America," New England Quarterly 19 (December 1946): 524-31
48. Arnold Guyot, The Earth and Man: Lectures on Comparative Physical Geography, in Its Relation to the History of Mankind (Boston: Gould, Kendall, and Lincoln, 1849), p. 16
49. Walls interprets Guyot in relation to natural history in the United States in Emerson's Life in Science, pp. 136-39
50. George Sessions, Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Shambhala, 1995), p. xiii
51. Marsh was aware of Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers, but they did not significantly affect his thought. Lowenthal argues that "Marsh . . . rejected Darwinian claims that common origin could be proven by structural similarities, despite gaps in the fossil and written records. Marsh distrusted such speculative genealogies" (p. 307). Marsh was, nonetheless, aware of Darwin's work, and he refers to Darwin several times in Man and Nature. For Darwin's reception by the American scientific and natural history communities, see David R. Stoddard, "Darwin's Influence on the Development of Geography in the United States, 1859-1914," in The Origins of Academic Geography in the United States, ed. Brian W. Blouet (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1981), pp. 265-78, on Marsh, pp. 265-66
52. and Margarita Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 106, 120, 192-94
53. Thoreau, of course, makes this case most emphatically in the "Economy" chapter of Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971)
54. Robert L. Dorman, A Word for Nature: Four Pioneering Environmental Advocates, 1845-1913 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 19-21
55. See John Gatta, Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and the Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. chap. 4, "Revelation to US: Green Shoots of Romantic Religion in Antebellum America."
56. Nash grounds the literary sources for Muir's attitude toward the wilderness almost equally in Emerson and Thoreau (Wilderness and the American Mind, pp. 125-29)
57. See Coates, Nature, pp. 22-39
58. Emerson remarks in English Traits that "England is a garden. Under the ash-colored sky, the fields have been combed and rolled till they appear to have been finished with a pencil instead of a plough" (Collected Works, 5:18)
59. See SGV, pp. 24-33
60. See also George Perkins Marsh, The Camel, His Organization, Habits and Uses, Considered with Reference to His Introduction into the United States (Boston, 1856)
61. and Odie B. Faulk, The US Camel Corps: An Army Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976)
62. For a description of the norms of the culture of reform as they emerged during Marsh's lifetime, see my Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), esp. pp. 4-9