George Perkins Marsh

George Perkins Marsh PDF Author: David Lowenthal
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295989858
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 656

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Book Description
George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) was the first to reveal the menace of environmental misuse, to explain its causes, and to prescribe reforms. David Lowenthal here offers fresh insights, from new sources, into Marsh’s career and shows his relevance today, in a book which has its roots in but wholly supersedes Lowenthal’s earlier biography George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter (1958). Marsh’s devotion to the repair of nature, to the concerns of working people, to women’s rights, and to historical stewardship resonate more than ever. His Vermont birthplace is now a national park chronicling American conservation, and the crusade he launched is now global. Marsh’s seminal book Man and Nature is famed for its ecological acumen. The clue to its inception lies in Marsh’s many-sided engagement in the life of his time. The broadest scholar of his day, he was an acclaimed linguist, lawyer, congressman, and renowned diplomat who served 25 years as U.S. envoy to Turkey and to Italy. He helped found and guide the Smithsonian Institution, shaped the Washington Monument, penned potent tracts on fisheries and on irrigation, spearheaded public science, art, and architecture. He wrote on camels and corporate corruption, Icelandic grammar and Alpine glaciers. His pungent and provocative letters illuminate life on both sides of the Atlantic. Like Darwin’s Origin of Species, Marsh’s Man and Nature marked the inception of a truly modern way of looking at the world, of taking care lest we irreversibly degrade the fabric of humanized nature we are bound to manage. Marsh’s ominous warnings inspired reforestation, watershed management, soil conservation, and nature protection in his day and ours. George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation was awarded the Association for American Geographers' 2000 J. B. Jackson Prize. The book was also on the shortlist for the first British Academy Book Prize, awarded in December 2001.

George Perkins Marsh

George Perkins Marsh PDF Author: David Lowenthal
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295989858
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 656

Get Book Here

Book Description
George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) was the first to reveal the menace of environmental misuse, to explain its causes, and to prescribe reforms. David Lowenthal here offers fresh insights, from new sources, into Marsh’s career and shows his relevance today, in a book which has its roots in but wholly supersedes Lowenthal’s earlier biography George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter (1958). Marsh’s devotion to the repair of nature, to the concerns of working people, to women’s rights, and to historical stewardship resonate more than ever. His Vermont birthplace is now a national park chronicling American conservation, and the crusade he launched is now global. Marsh’s seminal book Man and Nature is famed for its ecological acumen. The clue to its inception lies in Marsh’s many-sided engagement in the life of his time. The broadest scholar of his day, he was an acclaimed linguist, lawyer, congressman, and renowned diplomat who served 25 years as U.S. envoy to Turkey and to Italy. He helped found and guide the Smithsonian Institution, shaped the Washington Monument, penned potent tracts on fisheries and on irrigation, spearheaded public science, art, and architecture. He wrote on camels and corporate corruption, Icelandic grammar and Alpine glaciers. His pungent and provocative letters illuminate life on both sides of the Atlantic. Like Darwin’s Origin of Species, Marsh’s Man and Nature marked the inception of a truly modern way of looking at the world, of taking care lest we irreversibly degrade the fabric of humanized nature we are bound to manage. Marsh’s ominous warnings inspired reforestation, watershed management, soil conservation, and nature protection in his day and ours. George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation was awarded the Association for American Geographers' 2000 J. B. Jackson Prize. The book was also on the shortlist for the first British Academy Book Prize, awarded in December 2001.

George Perkins Marsh, Prophet of Conservation

George Perkins Marsh, Prophet of Conservation PDF Author: David Lowenthal
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 9780295983158
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 662

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Book Description
G.P. Marsh wrote what William Cronon calls in his foreword, one of America's three most important environmental texts, Man and Nature (1864) (the other two were Silent Spring and Sand County Almanac). Man and Nature argued that deforestation led to the demise of civilization: that because the ancients cut down their trees, there was erosion, drought alternating with floods, and climate change, the latter because moist forests no longer evaporated water into the atmosphere to cause rain and cooler temperatures. Environmental disaster then led to economic and social disaster. Perkins seems to have predicted the future, but this time it will no longer be confined to this or that area. In addition to Man and Nature, Marsh was a linguist who spoke some 20 languages, as well as a congressman, lawyer, and diplomat who served as U.S. envoy to Turkey and Italy for 25 years. He also helped found and guide the Smithsonian Institution. Lowenthal, emeritus professor of geography, University College, London, published an earlier biography of Marsh in 1958. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

George Perkins Marsh, Prophet of Conservation

George Perkins Marsh, Prophet of Conservation PDF Author: David Lowenthal
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 9780295979427
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 670

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Book Description
Like Darwin's Origin of Species, Marsh's Man and Nature marked the inception of a truly modern way of looking at the world, of taking care lest we irreversibly degrade the fabric of humanized nature we are bound to manage. Marsh's ominous warnings inspired reforestation, watershed management, soil conservation, and nature protection in his day and ours."--

Man and Nature

Man and Nature PDF Author: George Perkins Marsh
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 9780295983165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
First published in 1864, Marsh's ominous warnings inspired environmental conservation and reform. By linking culture with nature, science with history, "Man and Nature" was the most influential text of its time next to Darwin's "On the Origin of Species."

The Origin and History of the English Language and of the Early Literature it Embodies

The Origin and History of the English Language and of the Early Literature it Embodies PDF Author: George Perkins Marsh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 618

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Book Description


Quest for the Unity of Knowledge

Quest for the Unity of Knowledge PDF Author: David Lowenthal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429876432
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Is unity of knowledge possible? Is it desirable? Two rival visions clash. One seeks a single way of explaining everything known and knowable about ourselves and the universe. The other champions diverse modes of understanding served by disparate kinds of evidence. Contrary views pit science against the arts and humanities. Scientists generally laud and seek convergence. Artists and humanists deplore amalgamation as a threat to humane values. These opposing perspectives flamed into hostility in the 1950s "Two Cultures" clash. They culminate today in new efforts to conjoin insights into physical nature and human culture, and new fears lest such syntheses submerge what the arts and humanities most value. This book, stemming from David Lowenthal’s inaugural Stockholm Archipelago Lectures, explores the Two Cultures quarrel’s underlying ideologies. Lowenthal shows how ingrained bias toward unity or diversity shapes major issues in education, religion, genetics, race relations, heritage governance, and environmental policy. Aimed at a general academic audience, Quest for the Unity of Knowledge especially targets those in conservation, ecology, history of ideas, museology, and heritage studies.

Earth Repair

Earth Repair PDF Author: Marcus Hall
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813923413
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Just as the restoration of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment sparked enormous controversy in the art world, so are environmental restorationists intensely divided when it comes to finding ways to rehabilitate damaged ecosystems. Although environmental restoration is quickly becoming a widespread pursuit, debate over the methods and goals of this endeavor often halts progress. The same question confronts artistic and environmental restorationists: Which systems need restoring, and to what states should they be restored? In Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration, Marcus Hall explores the answer to this question while offering an alternative to the usual narrative of humans disrupting and spoiling the earth. Hall’s purpose is not to deny that humans have done lasting damage but to show that those who believed in restoration did not always agree on what they wanted to restore, or how, or to what form. With guidance from the pioneer conservationist George Perkins Marsh, the reader travels between the United States and Italy to see that restoration has taken many forms over the past two hundred years, from maintaining and repairing, to gardening and naturalizing. By contrasting land management in these two countries and elsewhere, Earth Repair clarifies different meanings of restoration, shows how such meanings have changed through time and place, and suggests how restorationists can apply these insights to their own practices.

Inherit the Holy Mountain

Inherit the Holy Mountain PDF Author: Mark Stoll
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019023086X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 441

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Book Description
Inherit the Holy Mountain puts religion at the center of the history of American environmentalism rather than at its margins, demonstrating how religion provided environmentalists with content, direction, and tone for the environmental causes they espoused.

Larding the Lean Earth

Larding the Lean Earth PDF Author: Steven Stoll
Publisher: Hill and Wang
ISBN: 1466805625
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
A major history of early Americans' ideas about conservation Fifty years after the American Revolution, the yeoman farmers who made up a large part of the new country's voters faced a crisis. The very soil of American farms seemed to be failing, and agricultural prosperity, upon which the Republic was founded, was threatened. Steven Stoll's passionate and brilliantly argued book explores the tempestuous debates that erupted between "improvers," who believed in practices that sustained and bettered the soil of existing farms, and "emigrants," who thought it was wiser and more "American" to move westward as the soil gave out. Stoll examines the dozens of journals, from New York to Virginia, that gave voice to the improvers' cause. He also focuses especially on two groups of farmers, in Pennsylvania and South Carolina. He analyzes the similarities and differences in their farming habits in order to illustrate larger regional concerns about the "new husbandry" in free and slave states. Farming has always been the human activity that most disrupts nature, for good or ill. The decisions these early Americans made about how to farm not only expressed their political and social faith, but also influenced American attitudes about the environment for decades to come. Larding the Lean Earth is a signal work of environmental history and an original contribution to the study of antebellum America.

Genealogies of Environmentalism

Genealogies of Environmentalism PDF Author: Clarence Glacken
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813939097
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Clarence Glacken wrote one of the most important books on environmental issues published in the twentieth century. His magnum opus, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, first published in 1967, details the ways in which perceptions of the natural environment have profoundly influenced human enterprise over the centuries while, conversely, permitting humans to radically alter the Earth. Although Glacken did not publish a comparable book before his death in 1989, he did write a follow-up collection of essays—lost works now compiled at last in Genealogies of Environmentalism. This new volume comprises all of Glacken's unpublished writings to follow Traces and covers a broad temporal and geographic canvas, spanning the globe from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Each essay offers a brief intellectual biography of an important environmental thinker and addresses questions such as how many people the Earth can hold, what resources can sustain such populations, and where land for growth is located. This collection—carefully edited and annotated, and organized chronologically—will prove both a classic text and a springboard for further discussions on the history of environmental thought.