Man and Nature or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action by George Perkins Marsh.by | 22-11-2016 18:43 |
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 In the United States the modern environmental movement is rooted in a 19th-century New England philosophical movement called transcendentalism, whose leaders included the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and the naturalist and author Henry David Thoreau. In their writings, both men expressed a reverence for the natural world, believing that humans and nature shared a divine spirit. Emerson asserted that nature was eternal and capable of recovering from mistreatment at the hands of humans. Thoreau, more protective and pessimistic, has been quoted as saying, ?Thank God, men cannot yet fly and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.? Although Emerson and Thoreau wrote eloquently about the value of nature and its spiritual importance to humans, neither of them undertook a systematic analysis of the effects that humans have on their environment. That task was left for 19th-century American diplomat George Perkins Marsh. In 1864 Marsh published Man and Nature or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, considered the first book to demonstrate that human activity could cause dramatic and irreversible damage to Earth. Marsh explained how some agricultural practices had led to deforestation, loss of wetlands, desertification (the process of land becoming desert), species extinction, and changes in weather patterns. |
