The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  For most people it seemed that humankind was in control of nature. Nothing showed that more clearly than the raising of Chicago out of the mud. Built on the same level as Lake Michigan, Chicago was a city hampered by sodden grounds and epidemics. The city planners’ audacious solution was to raise entire blocks and multi-storey buildings by several feet in order to build new drainage systems beneath. As Marsh composed Man and Nature, Chicago’s engineers defied gravity by lifting up houses, shops and hotels with hundreds of hydraulic jackscrews while people continued to live and work in the very buildings.

  There seemed to be no limit to the ability nor to the greed of humankind. Lakes, ponds and rivers that had once abounded with fish had become eerily lifeless. Marsh was the first to explain why. Overfishing was partly to blame, but so too was pollution from industry and manufacturing. Chemicals poisoned the fish, Marsh warned, while the mill-dams stopped their migration upriver and sawdust clogged their gills. A stickler for details, Marsh underpinned his arguments with facts. He didn’t just state that fish disappeared or that railways were eating up forests, he also added detailed statistics of fish exports from across the world and exact calculations of how much timber was needed for each mile of rail track.

  Like Humboldt, Marsh blamed the reliance on cash crops such as tobacco and cotton for some of the damage. But there were other reasons too. As the income of ordinary Americans rose, meat consumption, for example, increased – which in turn had a big impact on nature. The ground required to feed the animals, Marsh calculated, was much greater than the size of the fields needed for the equivalent nutritional value in grains and vegetables. Marsh concluded that a vegetarian’s diet was environmentally more responsible than that of a meat eater.

  In tandem with wealth and consumption came destruction, Marsh claimed. For the time being, though, his concern for the environment was drowned in the cacophony of progress – the cranking noise of mill wheels, the hissing of steam engines, the rhythmic sounds of saws in the forests and the whistle of locomotives.

  Meanwhile Marsh’s financial situation had grown precarious. His salary in Turkey had not been sufficient, his mill had gone bust, his business partner had cheated him, and his other investments had all been disastrous. On the verge of bankruptcy, he was now looking for a job with ‘small duties & large pay’. Relief came in March 1861 when the newly elected President, Abraham Lincoln, appointed him as the ambassador of the United States to the recently established Kingdom of Italy.

  Like Germany, Italy had previously been composed of many independent states. After years of fighting, the Italian states had finally united, with the exception of Rome which was still under papal control and of Venetia in the north which was ruled by Austria. Since his first visit to Italy a decade previously, Marsh had been excited about Italy’s move towards unification. ‘I wish I was 30 years younger, and kugelfest’ – ‘bulletproof’ – he wrote to a friend because then he would have joined the fight. To become America’s envoy to this new nation was a thrilling prospect, as was the regular income. ‘I could not survive two more years,’ Marsh said, like ‘the past years’. The plan was to move to Turin, the temporary capital in northern Italy, where the first Italian parliament had assembled that spring. There was not much time to prepare but plenty to do. Within three weeks Marsh rented out his house in Burlington, packed up furniture, books and clothes, as well as his notes and draft sections for Man and Nature.

  With America about to descend into civil war, it was a good time to leave. Even before Lincoln was inaugurated on 4 March 1861, seven southern states had seceded and formed a new alliance: the Confederacy.1 On 12 April, less than a month after Lincoln appointed Marsh, the first shots were fired by Confederates as they attacked the Union forces stationed at Fort Sumter in Charleston’s harbour. After more than thirty hours of constant shelling, the Union surrendered the fort. It was the beginning of a war that would eventually kill over 600,000 American soldiers. Six days later Marsh bade his goodbye to a thousand of his fellow townspeople with an impassioned speech at Burlington town hall. It was their duty, he said, to provide money and men to the Union in their fight against the Confederates and slavery. This war was more important than the revolution of 1776, Marsh told them, because it concerned the equality and liberty of all Americans. Half an hour after his speech, sixty-year-old Marsh and Caroline boarded a train to New York from where they sailed to Italy.

  Marsh left a country that was tearing itself apart to move to one that was in the process of uniting. With America deeply divided by war, Marsh wanted to help as much as he could from a distance. In Turin he tried to convince the celebrated Italian military leader Giuseppe Garibaldi to help and join the Union in the American Civil War. He also wrote diplomatic dispatches and bought weapons for the Union forces. All the while his mind was also on his manuscript, Man and Nature, for which he was still collecting more material. When he met the Italian Prime Minister, Baron Bettino Riscasoli, a man who was known for the innovative management of his family estate, Marsh questioned him about agricultural subjects – in particular about the drainage of the Maremma, a region in Tuscany. Riscasoli promised a full report.

  This new diplomatic position, however, was a great deal more demanding than Marsh had hoped. Social etiquette in Turin required a constant round of visits and he also found himself having to deal with American tourists who treated him almost like a private secretary abroad: he had to find their lost luggage, organize passports and even advise them on the best sightseeing. There were incessant interruptions. ‘I have been entirely disappointed as to the rest and relaxation I looked for,’ Marsh wrote to friends back home. The idea of a job that demanded little but paid a lot quickly evaporated.

  There was the occasional hour or two when he could visit the library or the botanical garden in Turin. Situated in the Po Valley, Turin was hugged by the majestic snow-capped Alps. Whenever they found a moment, Marsh and Caroline made short excursions and drives into the surrounding countryside. Marsh adored mountains and glaciers, and soon began calling himself ‘ice-mad’. He still had stamina and ‘considering my age and inches (circumferentially),’ Marsh boasted, ‘I am not a bad climber.’ If he continued like this, Marsh joked, he would be climbing the Himalaya at the age of one hundred.

  As winter turned to spring, the countryside around Turin tempted them ever more. The Po Valley became a carpet of flowers. ‘We stole an hour,’ Caroline wrote in her diary in March 1862, to see thousands of violets competing with yellow primroses. The almond trees were in blossom and dangling willow branches were flushed green with their fresh leaves. Caroline enjoyed picking wildflowers but her husband thought it was ‘a crime’ against nature.

  Marsh snatched moments to work on his projects in the early morning hours. He returned to Man and Nature briefly in spring 1862, and then again during the winter when they lived for a few weeks on the Riviera near Genoa. Then, in the spring of 1863, the couple moved to the little village of Piòbesi, twelve miles south-west of Turin, with the half-completed manuscript of Man and Nature in Marsh’s trunks. Here in an old dilapidated manor house with a tenth-century tower overlooking the Alps, Marsh finally found the time he needed to finish his book.

  His study opened on to a broad sun-lit terrace next to the tower and he could see thousands of swallows nesting in the old walls. The room was filled with boxes and so many manuscripts, letters and books that he sometimes felt overwhelmed. He had been collecting data for years. There was so much to include, so many connections to make and so many examples to consider. As Marsh wrote, Caroline read and edited, also confessing to feeling ‘rather knocked out’ by it all. Marsh grew so desperate that Caroline feared he would commit a ‘libricide’. He wrote urgently, even rushed, because he felt that humankind needed to change fast if the earth was to be protected from the ravages of plough and axe. ‘I do this,’ Marsh wrote to the editor of the North American Review, ‘to get out of my brain phantoms which have long been spooking in it.’

 
As spring turned to summer, the heat became unbearable and flies were everywhere – on Marsh’s eyelids and the point of his pen. In early July 1863 he finished his last revisions and sent the manuscript to his publisher in America. He wanted to call the book ‘Man the Disturber of Nature’s Harmonies’ – a title he was dissuaded from by his publisher who felt it would damage sales. They agreed on Man and Nature, and the book was published a year later, in July 1864.

  Man and Nature was the synthesis of what Marsh had read and observed over the past decades. ‘I shall steal, pretty much,’ he had joked to his friend Baird when he started, ‘but I do know some things myself.’ Marsh had raided libraries for manuscripts and publications from dozens of countries to collect information and examples. He had read classical texts to find early descriptions of landscapes and agriculture in ancient Greece and Rome. To this he added his own observations from Turkey, Egypt, the Middle East, Italy and the rest of Europe. Marsh included reports from German foresters, quotes from contemporary newspapers, as well as data from engineers, excerpts from French essays and his own childhood anecdotes – and of course information from Humboldt’s books.

  Humboldt had taught Marsh about the connections between humankind and the environment. And in Man and Nature Marsh reeled off one example after another of how humans interfered with nature’s rhythms: when a Parisian milliner invented silk hats, for instance, fur hats became unfashionable – and that then had a knock-on effect on the decimated beaver populations in Canada which began to recover. Likewise farmers, who had killed birds in large numbers to protect their harvests, then had to battle with swarms of insects that had previously been the birds’ prey. During the Napoleonic Wars, Marsh wrote, wolves had reappeared in some parts of Europe because their usual hunters were occupied on the battlefields. Even minuscule organisms in water, Marsh said, were essential in nature’s balance: over-scrupulous cleaning of the Boston aqueduct had eliminated them and turned the water turbid. ‘All nature is linked together by invisible bonds,’ he wrote.

  Man had long forgotten that the earth was not given to him for ‘consumption’. The produce of the earth was squandered, Marsh argued, with wild cattle killed for their hides, ostriches for their feathers, elephants for their tusks and whales for their oil. Humans were responsible for the extinction of animals and plants, Marsh wrote in Man and Nature, while the unrestrained use of water was just another example of ruthless greed.2 Irrigation diminished great rivers, he said, and turned soils saline and infertile.

  Marsh’s vision of the future was bleak. If nothing changed, he believed, the planet would be reduced to a condition of ‘shattered surface, of climatic excess … perhaps even extinction of the [human] species’. He saw the American landscape magnified through what he had observed during his travels – from the overgrazed hills along the Bosporus near Constantinople to the barren mountain slopes in Greece. Great rivers, untamed woods and fertile meadows had disappeared. Europe’s land had been farmed into ‘a desolation almost as complete as that of the moon’. The Roman Empire had fallen, Marsh concluded, because the Romans had destroyed their forests and thereby the very soil that fed them.

  The Old World had to be the New World’s cautionary tale. At a time when the 1862 Homestead Act3 gave those who headed out to the American West 160 acres of land each for not much more than a filing fee, millions of acres of public lands were placed in private hands, waiting to be ‘improved’ by axe and plough. ‘Let us be wise,’ Marsh urged, and learn from the mistakes of ‘our older brethren!’ The consequences of man’s action were unforeseeable. ‘We can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble in the ocean of organic life,’ Marsh wrote. What he did know was that the moment ‘homo sapiens Europae’ had arrived in America, the damage had migrated from east to west.

  Others had come to similar conclusions. In the United States, James Madison had been the first to take up some of Humboldt’s ideas. Madison had met Humboldt in 1804, in Washington, DC, and later read many of his books. He had applied Humboldt’s observations from South America to the United States. In a widely circulated speech to the Agricultural Society in Albemarle, Virginia, in May 1818, a year after his retirement from the presidency, Madison had repeated Humboldt’s warnings about deforestation and highlighted the catastrophic effects of large-scale tobacco cultivation on Virginia’s once fertile soil. This speech carried the nucleus of American environmentalism. Nature, Madison had said, was not subservient to the use of man. Madison had called upon his fellow citizens to protect the environment but his warnings had been largely ignored.

  It was Simón Bolívar who had first enshrined Humboldt’s ideas into law when he had issued a visionary decree in 1825, requiring the government in Bolivia to plant 1 million trees. In the midst of battles and war, Bolívar had understood the devastating consequences of arid land for the future of the nation. Bolívar’s new law was designed to protect waterways and to create forests across the new republic. Four years later he had ordered ‘Measures for the Protection and Wise Use of the National Forests’ for Colombia, with a particular focus on controlling the quinine harvest from the bark of the wild-growing cinchona tree – a damaging method that stripped the trees of their protective bark and one that Humboldt had already noted during his expedition.4

  In North America Henry David Thoreau had called for the preservation of forests in 1851. ‘In Wildness is the preservation of the World,’ Thoreau had said, and then later concluded in October 1859, a few months after Humboldt’s death, that every town should have a forest of several hundred acres ‘inalienable forever’. Whereas Madison and Bolívar had seen the protection of trees as an economic necessity, Thoreau insisted that ‘national preserves’ should be set aside for recreation. What Marsh now did with Man and Nature was to bring it all together and dedicate an entire book to the subject, presenting the evidence that humankind was destroying the earth.

  ‘Humboldt was the great apostle,’ Marsh had declared when he began Man and Nature. Throughout the book he referred to Humboldt but expanded his ideas. Where Humboldt’s warnings had been dispersed across his books – little nuggets of insight here and there but often lost in the broader context – Marsh now wove it all into one forceful argument. Page after page, Marsh talked about the evils of deforestation. He explained how forests protected the soil and natural springs. Once the forest was gone, the soil lay bare against winds, sun and rain. The earth would no longer be a sponge but a dust heap. As the soil was washed off, all goodness disappeared and ‘thus the earth is rendered no longer fit for the habitation of man’, Marsh concluded. It made for gloomy reading. The damage caused by just two or three generations was as disastrous, he said, as the eruption of a volcano or an earthquake. ‘We are,’ he warned prophetically, ‘breaking up the floor and wainscoting and doors and window frames of our dwelling.’

  Marsh was telling Americans that they had to act now, before it was too late. ‘Prompt measures’ had to be taken because ‘the most serious fears are entertained’. Forests needed to be set aside and replanted. Some should be preserved as places of recreation, inspiration and habitat for flora and fauna – as an ‘inalienable property’ for all citizens. Other areas needed to be replanted and managed for a sustainable use of timber. ‘We have now felled forest enough,’ Marsh wrote.

  Marsh was not just talking about a parched spot in the south of France, an arid region in Egypt or an overfished lake in Vermont. This was an argument about the whole earth. Man and Nature’s power stemmed from its global dimension because Marsh compared and understood the world as a unified whole. Instead of looking at local occurrences, Marsh lifted environmental concerns to a new and terrifying level. The whole planet was in danger. ‘Earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant,’ Marsh wrote.

  Man and Nature was the first work of natural history fundamentally to influence American politics. It was, as the American writer and environmentalist Wallace St
egner later said, the ‘rudest kick in the face’ to America’s optimism. At a time when the country was racing towards industrialization – fiercely exploiting its natural resources and razing its forests – Marsh wanted to make his compatriots pause and think. To his great disappointment, the initial sales of Man and Nature were low. Then over the next few months, sales improved and over 1,000 copies were sold and his publisher began to reprint.5

  Man and Nature’s full impact was not felt for several decades but the book influenced a great number of people in the United States who would become key figures in the preservation and conservation movements. John Muir, the ‘father of the National Parks’, would read it, as would Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the United States Forestry Service, who would call it ‘epoch-making’. Marsh’s observations on deforestation in Man and Nature led to the passage of the 1873 Timber Culture Act which encouraged settlers on the Great Plains to plant trees. It also prepared the ground for the protection of America’s forests, leading to the 1891 Forest Reserves Act which took much of its wording from the pages of Marsh’s book and from Humboldt’s earlier ideas.

  Man and Nature resonated internationally too. It was intensely discussed in Australia and inspired French foresters as well as legislators in New Zealand. It encouraged conservationists in South Africa and Japan to fight for the protection of trees. Italian forest laws cited Marsh, and conservationists in India even carried the book ‘along the slope of the Northern Himalaya, and into Kashmir and Tibet’. Man and Nature shaped a new generation of activists and would in the first half of the twentieth century be celebrated as ‘the fountainhead of the conservation movement’.