Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa: From Vermont to Italy in the footsteps of George Perkins Marsh

Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa: From Vermont to Italy in the Footsteps of George Perkins Marsh

Volumn , Issue , 2012, Pages

  Elder, John ^a  

^a MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 84891584922     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (170)

1. Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865-1895 (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 78.
2. Henry David Thoreau, "Walking," in The Norton Book of Nature Writing, College Edition, ed. Robert Finch and John Elder (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 180.
3. David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 369. I am indebted throughout this project to David Lowenthal-for his masterful study of Marsh, his authoritative edition of Man and Nature, his generous conversation, and his help in identifying the principal Marsh archives and collections.
4. George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature, Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Nature, ed. David Lowenthal, Weyerhaeuser Environmental Classics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 43.
5. Marsh, Man and Nature, 279, 280.
6. Wendell Berry, "Conservation Is Good Work," in Wild Earth: Wild Ideas for a World Out of Balance, ed. Tom Butler (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2002), 148.
7. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 30.
8. Joan Chittister, Heart of Flesh: A Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman's, 1998), 160.
9. Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 37.
10. I would like to express my gratitude to Sheila Connor of the Arnold Arboretum for locating this letter, as well as to David Lowenthal for donating the Caroline Crane Marsh papers to the Special Collections at the University of Vermont.
11. Charlene Spretnak, The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 35.
12. Robert Frost, "Directive," in The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Henry Holt, 1979), 377.
13. Zadock Thompson, Natural History of Vermont (1853; repr., Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972).
14. Marsh, Man and Nature, 38, 39.
15. William Cronon, foreword to Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, xi.
16. Mumford, The Brown Decades, 72.
17. Marsh, Man and Nature, 35.
18. Dante, The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio, vol. 1, trans. Charles Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 143.
19. Dante Alighieri, Tutte le opereieri, Tutte le opere, ed. Luigi Blasucci (Florence: Sansoni, 1965), 341 ("florentinus natione non moribus").
20. Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 366.
21. Sayers quoted in Mark Musa's introduction to his translation of Dante's Inferno (New York: Penguin, 1984), 53.
22. An interesting sidelight on these affinities between the two writers comes from George Perkins Marsh's handwritten list of books in his library. This inventory, now held in the Special Collections of University of Vermont's Bailey-Howe Library, reveals that Marsh owned five different sets of the Divina commedia in Italian.
23. Robinson Jeffers, The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (New York: Random House, 1938), 262.
24. The concept of "the middle landscape" is eveloped in Nora Mitchell and Rolf Diamant's essay "Stewardship and Sustainability: Lessons from the 'Middle Landscape' of Vermont," in Wilderness Comes Home: Rewilding the Northeast, ed. Christopher McGrory Klyza (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Middlebury College Press, 2001). The authors write
25. Robert P. McIntosh, The Background of Ecology: Concept and Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 2.
26. Marsh, Man and Nature, 96.
27. Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 239-41.
28. Marsh, Man and Nature, 190.
29. Frederick Law Olmsted, "Report on the Management of Yosemite, 1865 or the yosemite valley and the mariposa big tree grove," in America's National Park System: The Critical Documents, ed. Lary M. Dilsaver, http://www.cr.nps.gov/history (accessed November 30, 2005).
30. Mumford, The Brown Decades, 79.
31. Rolf Diamant, conversation with the author, July 2002.
32. Paul Bray, "The Abruzzo and the Adirondack," Sanctuary 38, no. 1 (September/October 1998): 14.
33. Mauro Agnoletti, "Monks, Foresters, and Ecology: Silver Fir in Tuscany from XIV to XX Century," in Le sapin: Enjeux anciens, enjeux actuels, ed. Andrée Corvol (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001), 192. My general summary of transformations in the Vallombrosa forest also comes from this survey by Agnoletti.
34. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 203.
35. Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 366.
36. Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 339.
37. Frost, Poetry, 379.
38. Wendell Berry, Collected Poems, 1957-1982 (New York: North Point Press, 1994), 151.
39. Antonio Gabrielli, "The Forest before Silviculture," in The Forest and Man, ed. Orazio Ciancio (Florence: Accademia Italiana di Scienze Forestal, 1997), 117.
40. In addition to Agnoletti's previously cited essay in Le sapin, he, Bronzi, and Gabrielli have all contributed essays on the history of Vallombrosa's forest to L'Italia Forestale e Montana, 55, no. 6 (December 2000).
41. Another historical overview is provided by Donald P. Duncan in "Forest Practice at Vallombrosa in Central Italy," Journal of Forestry 44 (1946): 347-53.
42. Ernesto Allegri, Index Plantarum Vallis Umbrosae, extract from vol. 1 (1970) of Annali Dell'Istituto Sperimentale per la Selvicoltura Arezzo, 40.
43. Letter to C. S. Sargent from Vallombrosa, July 20, 1882, as transcribed by Caroline Crane Marsh and read in the Special Collections of University of Vermont's Bailey-Howe Library.
44. Also cited in Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 369.
45. Caroline Crane Marsh's Memoir of G. P. Marsh, manuscript in University of Vermont's Bailey-Howe Library. See discussion of watersheds in Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 344.
46. William Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 346.
47. John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 300-304, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1935), 19.
48. Edward Chaney, "Milton's Visit to Vallombrosa: A Literary Tradition" (1991), in his The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 278-313. Cited in Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 528, n. 103.
49. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 286-91.
50. Eva Sanders, Indiana University, e-mail message to author, February 2001.
51. Conversations with my Middlebury colleague Christopher McGrory Klyza have helped me to become more aware of such corollaries to the rewilding of Vermont.
52. Antonio Gabrielli discusses a similar contrast between monastic approaches to forests, in this case between the Vallombrosians and the Calmaldoli order in Casentino, in "Le trasformazioni del paesaggio forestale in Toscano: Un tentativo di sintesi storica," Annali dell'Accademia Italiana di Scienze Forestali 46 (1997): 113-17, on 128.
53. The significance of "calvario" paths in Italy was pointed out to us by the environmental historian Marcus Hall, during one of the peripatetic conversations we enjoyed with him in Italy.
54. Gary Nabhan, Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves: An American Naturalist in Italy (New York: Penguin, 1993), chapter 5, "La Verna's Wounds."
55. Leslie Marmon Silko, "Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination," in The Norton Book of Nature Writing, ed. Robert Finch and John Elder (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 1007.
56. Marsh, Man and Nature, 93.
57. Suzanne W. Simard, et al., "Net Transfer of Carbon between Ectomycorrhyzal Tree Species in the Field," Nature 388 (August 1997): 579-82. The precis begins, "Different species can be compatible with the same species of mycorrhyzal fungi, and can be connected to one another by a common mycelium."
58. Marsh, Man and Nature, 96.
59. J. Donald Hughes, Pan's Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 179.
60. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 200-204.
61. John Muir, Nature Writings (New York: Library of America, 1997), 473.
62. Gary Nabhan, Cultures of Habitat (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint Press, 1997), 3.
63. Joseph Bruchac, The Faithful Hunter: Abenaki Stories (Greenfield Center, NY: Greenfield Review Press, 1988), 9, 10.
64. Janet Shapiro informed us that it was the Medici "who really introduced the olive into the Tuscan region where the contadini preferred to grow wheat and had to be forced into planting olives at first. This is apparently one of the reasons that they have always been pruned and kept small here so that the wheat could still be seeded underneath."
65. Gambero Rosso, no. 6 (1996).
66. The Slow Food Manifesto was adopted in Paris on November 9, 1989, and is reprinted on the organizational Web site at http://www.slowfood.com/principles/manifest.html (accessed November 30, 2005).
67. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1995), 119;
68. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 267.
69. Linda Starke, ed., State of the World 2002 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 127-30.
70. Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974), 34.
71. Marsh, Man and Nature, 187.
72. Snyder, "Entering the Fiftieth Millennium," in The Gary Snyder Reader (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999), 394.
73. L'Unità, December 15, 1985.
74. A. R. Ammons, Sphere: The Form of a Motion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 15.
75. Marsh, Man and Nature, 35.
76. Jean-Regis Harmel, The Tympanum of Conques in Detail, translated by John O'Callaghan OSB (St. Jean de Vedas: Collection Anais, 1998), 20.
77. Marsh, Man and Nature, 43.
78. Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (New York: Avon Books, 1977), 11.
79. Reflections offered by the guide who led our tour group through the caverns of Pech-Merle.
80. Frost, Poetry, 22, 23.
81. Hughes, Pan's Travail, 91. A thoughtful complication of Hughes's argument appears in Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 95-101.
82. The Brothers Grimm, The Complete Fairy Tales, introduction by Padraic Collum (Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1997), vii.
83. Charles Darwin, The Illustrated Origin of Species, ed. Richard Leakey (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 223.
84. Marsh, Man and Nature, 464, 465.
85. Peter Fritzell has explored the complex integrity within Leopold's apparent paradoxes. See his "Aldo Leopold," in American Nature Writers, ed. John Elder (New York: Scribner's, 1996), 541-45.
86. E. O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Knopf, 2001), 22-23.
87. Eric Freyfogle, letter to author, December 14, 2001.
88. Leopold, Sand County, 129-30.
89. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 1.
90. Aldo Leopold, For the Health of the Land, ed. J. Baird Callicott and Eric Freyfogle (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999), 219, 220.
91. Mitchell and Diamant, "Stewardship and Sustainability," 217.
92. Marsh, Man and Nature, 190. Lowenthal has pointed out to me that Marsh's Nation articles against states' rights placed an equally strong emphasis on the need for a strong central state at home (e-mail message to author, fall 2003).
93. Callicott and Freyfogle, introduction to For the Health of the Land, 5.
94. Leopold, For the Health of the Land, 162, 164.
95. George Perkins Marsh, So Great a Vision: The Conservation Writings of George Perkins Marsh, ed. Stephen C. Trombulak (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), 19.
96. Carson, Silent Spring, 202.
97. Leopold, "1947 Foreword," appendix to Baird Callicott, ed., Companion to "A Sand County Almanac" (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 286. This original foreword is placed in context with a brief introduction by Dennis Ribbens. Eric Freyfogle drew my attention to it as a concise expression of Leopold's tragic vision; the use of the word "litany" to describe Leopold's catalogue of losses also comes from Freyfogle.
98. Martha Freeman, ed., Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 249, 255.
99. Carson, Silent Spring, 258.
100. Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989), 3.
101. Stephanie Mills, In Service of the Wild: Restoring and Reinhabiting Damaged Land (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 208.
102. Edward Hoagland, "Edward Abbey: Standing Tough in the Desert," New York Times Book Review, May 7, 1989, 44.
103. Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 39.
104. Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, 203.
105. King James Bible, Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 25, verses 29-30.
106. Wordsworth, "Michael," in Selected Poems and Prefaces, 146, 156.
107. For a discussion of this process of agricultural transformation, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 96-99.
108. Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa (New York: Penguin, 1966), 113.
109. Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, 366.
110. Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, 446, 447.
111. Lowenthal notes Marsh's own "relish for hard facts" and "zest for homely details" (George Perkins Marsh, 311).
112. Robert Hass, ed., The Essential Haiku (New York: Ecco Press, 1994), 38.
113. Bashō, Narrow Road to the Interior and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Sam Hamill (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1998), 19.
114. Reference from Professor Tom Moran, Middlebury College, Department of Chinese.
115. Frost, Poetry, 338.
116. Bashō, Narrow Road to the Interior, 31.
117. Marsh, Man and Nature, 187.
118. Silko, "Landscape, History," 1007.
119. Marsh, Man and Nature, 464.
120. Silko, "Landscape, History," 1014.
121. Leopold, For the Health of the Land, 164.
122. Wordsworth, Selected Poems, 368.
123. Thoreau, "Walking," 200.
124. A groundbreaking discussion of the dialogue between conservation and literary theory was SueEllen Campbell's "The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet," in Western American Literature 24 (1989): 199-211.
125. Frost, Poetry, 17.
126. Seamus Heaney, speaking in "Robert Frost," part 1 of Voices and Visions, videorecording (New York: New York Center for Visual History; Santa Barbara, CA: Annenberg/CPB Project Intellimation, 1988).
127. William Pritchard and William Meredith, in "Robert Frost," Voices and Visions.
128. John Dewey, Dewey on Education, ed. Martin S. Dworkin (New York: Teachers College Press, 1959), 107.
129. Robert Faggen, in Robert Frost, Early Poems, ed. Faggen (New York: Penguin, 1998), 265.
130. Quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 121.
131. Anne Ferry, "Frost's 'Land of the Golden Treasury,'" in Under Criticism: Essays for William H. Pritchard, ed. David Sofield and Herbert Tucker (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998), 249-65.
132. Kenner, The Pound Era, 122. The "visitor" in question was William Arrowsmith. My attention was drawn to the discussions in Ferry and Kenner by Herbert Tucker.
133. Frost, Poetry, 242.
134. Thoreau, "Walking," 127.
135. Frost, Poetry, 221.
136. William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996); Wendell Berry, "Conservation Is Good Work," 148.
137. Zen Master Hakuin, "Chant in Praise of Zazen," trans. Philip Kapleau, in Daily Chants and Ceremonies (Shelburne: Vermont Zen Center), n.p.
138. Bashō, in Haiku, by R. H. Blyth (Tokyo: Hokuseido; San Francisco: Heian International, 1981), 1:89. The original characters and the transliteration are from Blyth; the translation is mine.
139. Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 149.
140. Stanley Cavell, "Thinking Like Emerson," in The Senses of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 138. My attention was drawn to this wonderful passage by a reference in Robert Pogue Harrison's Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 265.
141. Esther Munroe Swift, Vermont Place-Names: Footprints of History (Brattleboro, VT: Stephen Greene Press, 1977), 520.
142. See Christopher McGrory Klyza and Stephen C. Trombulak, The Story of Vermont: A Natural and Cultural History (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), chaps. 4 and 5.
143. Lowenthal, introduction to Marsh, Man and Nature, xxv.
144. Marsh, Man and Nature, 35.
145. Frost, Poetry, 348.
146. Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," 69.
147. Frost, Poetry, 377.
148. For an overview of Billings's practice and philosophy, see Mark Madison, Landscapes of Stewardship, Report Commissioned by Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, 1999, 22-52.
149. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 203.
150. William Wordsworth, The Essential Wordsworth, ed. Seamus Heaney (New York: Ecco Press, 1988), 33.
151. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 9.
152. Marsh, Man and Nature, 235 n. 180. Lowenthal appends a note: "This was Mt. Tom, in Woodstock, Vermont, owned in part by Marsh's father." He goes on to identify it as the site planted with Norwegian spruce, European larch, and white ash in the 1880s by Billings.
153. Frost, Poetry, 378.
154. Marsh, Man and Nature, 17, 280 n. 250.
155. Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," 85.
156. Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1985), 122.
157. Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness," 5.
158. Thoreau, "Walking," 192.
159. Keith Basso, "Stalking with Stories," in On Nature, ed. Daniel Halpern (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), 114, 113, 112.
160. Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World (New York: Nathan Cummings Foundation, 2004), 34.
161. George Perkins Marsh, "Report, Made under Authority of the Legislature of Vermont, on the Artificial Propagation of Fish," in So Great a Vision, 67, 68.
162. Julie Campoli, Elizabeth Humstone, and Alex MacLean, Above and Beyond: Visualizing Change in Small Towns and Rural Areas (Chicago and Washington, D.C.: American Planning Association, 2002), xiii.
163. Mauro Agnoletti, ed., Il paesaggio agro-forestale toscano: Strumenti per l'analisi, la gestione e la conservazione (Florence: ARSIA [Agenzia Regionale per lo Sviluppo e l'Innovazione nel Settore Agricolo-forestale], 2002), 158. The original reads: "La qualità del paesaggio rappresenta infatti non solo un valore culturale ma un punto di forza del nostro sistema, riasumendo al suo interno equilibri ambientali e socio-economici frutto di un positivo rapporto uomo-natura."
164. Eric Sorenson, letter to author, December 15, 2002.
165. Marsh, Man and Nature, 258.
166. Leopold, For the Health of the Land, 164.
167. Wilson, The Future of Life, 23.
168. Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 18.
169. Barry Lopez, "Children in the Woods," in Crossing Open Ground (New York: Vantage, 1989), 149, 150.
170. Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 45.