About Forests & People -- George Perkins Marsh

He pointed the way, others followed.

George Perkins Marsh wrote, Man and Nature in 1864, the book that raised concern about America’s forest practices and saved the American West from becoming a desert like north Africa or the Middle-East.  Marsh, born in 1801 in Vermont, was a man with huge intellect, huge curiosity and huge energy.  He became a lawyer, was elected to the House of Representatives four times, was fluent in twenty languages and was U.S. ambassador to Turkey, 1849 to 1854.  Marsh wrote the Vermont Fisheries Report in 1857, over a century later it was judged one of the most influential, prophetic, and thoughtful studies ever written on the subject.  From 1861 until his death in 1882 he served as ambassador to Italy.  It was during his Italian ambassadorship Marsh wrote,  Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action.  Marsh must have been one of those people who can look at what everyone looks at and see what no one else sees, plus he had the ability and energy to write about what he saw.  

People’s common understanding about nature had always been that mankind was meant to dominate nature, other than that, there was no relationship or obligation between people and the natural world.  Marsh put forth the radical thinking that man and nature are interrelated, interdependent and humankind cannot survive without a healthy nature.  Traveling the Mediterranean basin Marsh saw land that a few thousand years before had supported wonderful forests, productive agriculture, cities, empires and art, but, through the centuries, had become poor, poor land, poor people, dusty cities, a semiarid land and desert. 

During Roman Empire times the Atlas Mountains of northern Africa had forests that the Roman woodsmen cut.  The Atlas forests included the sandarac tree, a pine who’s wood was valued for its durability and color.  A table made from sandarac wood is said to have cost as much as seventeen pounds of gold.  All the sandarac trees were gone by the year 50 AD, every one had been cut.  Most forests in the North African mountains had similar fate and serious erosion set in, the forests never grew back.  The forests of Spain and Portugal were ravaged for fuel to smelter the silver that finance Rome’s growth.  It was an old story from previous empires being repeated.      (John Perlin, A Forest Journey, 1989, Harvard University Press)

Marsh recognized that over time mankind made the earth’s surface what it is.  He wrote about what he saw in Man and Nature.  He wrote about the damage done to mountains and waterways by over-cutting forests, overgrazing and the effects of soil erosion from these abuses.  When forests are cut the tree canopy that breaks the fall of rain and snow is gone so the raindrops hit the ground surface with an impact, that can be ok if there are still leaves, needles and other plant material covering the mineral soil.  The water gets absorbed slow and steady much of it is held in the dead and decaying vegetation, that’s called duff.  It  is the kind of “cultivation” that will allow trees for a new forest to grow back.  But, if sheep, goats and cattle graze and overgraze where the trees were cut, really bad things start to happen.  The duff that is such an important sponge is trampled into small bits, the grass and shrubs and small trees are grazed and browsed again and again until they are killed.  The soil is exposed to the elements, rain and hot sun, it crusts and won’t absorb water when the storms come.  The rain and snowmelt rush down the slopes tearing it apart, first the small particles are washed down slope, then the larger particles and rocks.  The exposed soil and rock can’t hold the moisture, the slopes are barren of any protective plants.  The result is torrential flooding where dirty streams become raging dirty rivers in the valleys.   

Through 7000 years of agriculture and civilization this chain of events has evolved time after time.  The results are a string of failed civilizations.  Most history books concentrate on wars and conquest and politics as reasons this empire rose and another failed, we need to look deeper than wars and ask “Why.”  Why wars all the time?  Is it the need for more  crop land, more resources (wood)?  Why, are theirs gone?  Used up?  Why?  Does short term planning have anything to do with these failures?  Are we repeating their mistakes?

Let’s digress here for a moment to John Perlin’s book, A Forest Journey, page 79.  In the fifth century BC the Greek cities Priene and Myus and Ephesus  were seaports.  The Greek cut the nearby forests and grazed the cutover land.  With no vegetation to cushion and absorb the rain the floods came, the torrents and erosion, followed by efforts to dredge and keep the harbors open.  The dredging couldn’t keep up with eroding soil.  Less than 500 years later, second century AD, these cities were more than five miles from the sea, five miles of land eroded from what had been productive forested hills and mountains.  Point made.

But, we need to get back to Marsh, what is important is, Marsh wrote about it, in 1864.  He warned against these effects and advocated stewardship of land globally.  Marsh wanted to see large scale planning to manage forests for wood products and care for the soil and water quality.  He advocated scientific forest management before there was forest science.

Influential Americans read Man and Nature , it started to change attitudes toward forests and land.  It took time, but America began to respect nature.  We established Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the Government’s Division of Forestry was established in 1886, the nation’s first Forest Reserves in 1891 and in 1905 Congress made the Reserves into National Forests with the Forest Service as their manager.  Universities across the nation developed curricula in natural sciences and forestry to supply scientific information and trained people to manage forests.

Marsh’s book, Man and Nature, is still in print by the University of Washington Press.  It is worth having for the Forward and Introduction, even if you don’t read the whole thing, although you probably will. 

During the last half of the 1800’s Americans were pushing west across the 100th Meridian into semiarid land where rainfall was less than that 20 inches per year.  Americans were getting ready to enter a land like the Middle-East was thousands of years before civilizations destroyed the forests and land productivity.  Word was getting around about Marsh’s observations and the implications it had for the semiarid American West.