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Article Excerpt
Since World War II, an army of advocates and agitators, some of them scientists, have shaped our attitudes toward nature. Among the best known is Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring, first published in 1962, warned that chemical weed killers and insecticides were despoiling the environment and threatening human health. Carson called such agents "elixirs of death," explaining, "For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death." (1)
Carson's eloquent alarm derived in part from her unalloyed devotion to nature, but her environmentalism was also a product of her career in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from 1936 to 1952. Explaining a series of twelve booklets that she produced for the agency under the rubric "Conservation in Action," she deplored the accelerating destruction of nature in the Western Hemisphere and declared, "Wildlife, water, forests, grasslands--all are parts of man's essential environment; the conservation and effective use of one is impossible except as the others also are conserved." (2) In Silent Spring Carson noted that people had long liked to believe "that much of Nature was forever beyond the tampering reach of man ... that, however the physical environment might mold Life, that Life could never assume the power to change drastically--or even destroy--the physical world." (3) It now seemed manifestly evident to her that the foundations of this belief were dissolving.
Carson overstated her case by warning against the destruction of the physical world. That world would remain, if in modified form, no matter what human beings might do. But in calling attention to how human beings were altering the natural world to the mutual disadvantage of both, she placed herself in a historical line of good company. Prominent among them was the corps of agitators for nature who emerged in the nineteenth century and that included Henry Thoreau, John Muir, and George Perkins Marsh. Thoreau and Muir advanced a kind of antimodernism, celebrating nature as a haven from the technological metropolis. Marsh embraced scientific knowledge and methods as a means of using nature without irrevocably destroying it. Together, they expressed an ambivalence toward the scientific and technological exploitation of the Earth that has marked attitudes toward nature, including Carson's, since the Industrial Revolution.
Marsh, a diplomat, businessman, and polymathic scholar, advanced his views most comprehensively in 1864, in Man and Nature; or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. Here he argued with passion and authority that man was fast making the earth "an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant." He attributed the alteration partly to geological causes and partly to war and misrule, but he argued that much of the blame could be credited to man's unwitting, "ignorant disregard of the laws of nature." (4) The originality of his book resided in its exposition of nature's intricate interconnectedness and in his argument, which ran contrary to most scientific thinking at the time, that man's small disturbances of nature's equilibria could accumulate to transform the land and its creatures. For example, when human beings killed insect-eating birds, such as robins, the insects increased and in turn attacked trees.
What absorbed Marsh most was the human impact on an essential resource of his era--the forests in modern Europe and the United States, a subject to which he devoted more than a third of his book. Marsh pointed out that forests were not only sources of wood but retainers of soil and moisture, indispensable to the maintenance of watersheds that fed the streams and supplied the cities and towns. Marsh was not a pure preservationist. On the contrary, he expected that people would--and should--continue to exploit nature for material purposes. Impatient with the romantic impulse to flee the mechanical and commercial age, he approached nature with the sensibilities of the practical man of affairs that he was--without sentimentality. What was striking about Marsh's treatise was precisely its establishment of the renewal of nature, no matter the region, as a joint imperative with the material use of it.
The interests of human beings occupied John Muir less than did those of trees and mountains. A native of Scotland, Muir grew up in Wisconsin, in the 1850s, under the hand of a harsh, Calvinist, and acquisitive father. But during two years at the University of Wisconsin, he read the works of Henry Thoreau among similar writers; and on a trip to Canada he experienced a kind of epiphany, finding himself, on a walk one day, weeping for joy upon encountering the exquisite beauty of the flower calypso borealis. By 1868, he had made his way to California, where he reveled in the storms, the fauna, the great trees, and especially the mountains, reading, as he put it, "the glacial manuscripts of God." (5) For Muir, nature, especially mountainous nature, had become a religion. In nature he found a religion that was dissociated from his father's harsh discipline, a Jehovah that was joyful.
His new faith transcended all human measures, including the scale that relegated nature to the service of human needs and desires. From his first days in the Sierras, Muir felt called to "preaching these mountains like an apostle." (6) He sang the natural wonders of the West in The Mountains of California, a book that distilled all his readings of nature into a kind of extended poem. He turned themes of groundwater into lyrical celebrations of the Sequoia, and he lamented that "man is in the woods, and waste and pure destruction are making rapid headway," continuing, "If the importance of forests were at all understood, even from an economic standpoint, their preservation would call forth the most watchful attention of government." Yet Muir's call for forest preservation was energized far less by economics than by devotion to a romantic religion of nature. (7)
George Perkins Marsh's book was ultimately recognized as a classic of American environmental literature, and in its own day it did not go unnoticed. Marsh's arguments helped prompt a number of states--the first was Nebraska, in 1872--to establish an Arbor Day for the planting of trees, and they helped stimulate the movement for forest protection that led to the creation after 1885 of the Adirondack State Park and Preserve, in New York, a huge upstate reserve of forest and stream that in 1894, in their new constitution, the state's voters declared should be kept "forever wild." However, the measure was enacted not only to sustain the spirits of the citizens of New York but also to maintain the great watershed the Adirondacks comprised and that fed the needs of the downstate metropolis.
Meanwhile, the federal government had gotten busy on behalf of nature, too. Between 1891 and 1897, by presidential proclamation, it set aside close to 40 million acres in new forest reserves in most of the Western states. The actions infuriated many Westerners, who took them to mean that the forests were to be forever locked away from all use. In the Senate, Westerners declared that they were victims of Eastern imperialism, emphasizing that their constituents needed timber for homes and mines. The reserves were maintained, but Congress insisted that they be subjected to managed use and development under the control of the Secretary of the Interior.
A hybrid outlook pervaded the politics of trees and forests. In the late nineteenth century, with the frontier closing, millions of Americans loved trees,...
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