Page 61 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1362 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

human history, made the most influential critique of trasts between a world of nature “out there” and people.
people’s attempts to second nature. Where Buffon The question of people’s place in nature has been
argued that Earth history is improved by the shift from answered ambiguously for the past two thousand years.
first nature to second nature, the U.S. Romantic tran- One of the dangerous ambiguities about nature is that
scendentalist and nature writer Henry David Thoreau it may both contain and exclude people. During the
(1817–1862) countered that Earth has its own history, nineteenth century critics of industrialism often argued,
which humans destroy by seconding nature. For the as Marsh and Thoreau do, that the artifices of people
Romantics people who embedded themselves in first had shifted from improvement to destruction and were
nature—returning at least to the countryside and at best not seconding but rather were disturbing nature’s his-
to more untrammeled spaces—countered what the tory. People and their artifices then become unnatural,
Romantics viewed as the growing dominance of alien to nature. Similarly, during the early twentieth cen-
mechanical philosophy and its attendant materialism tury two key figures in the age of ecology, Clements and
and repression of the innate spirit in life. Tansley, disagreed on the role of people in nature, with
Another key figure in the effort to place nature in his- Clements making a sharp distinction between the dis-
tory was a contemporary of Thoreau—the U.S. scholar turbance brought by the plow and presettlement prairie
George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882). Environmental biota (the flora and fauna of a region) and Tansley argu-
historians widely credit Marsh’s Man and Nature: or, ing that people can make ecologically sound changes by
Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action their artifices.
(1864) as the first comprehensive analysis of the harm- The U.S. environmentalist Aldo Leopold said that the
ful effects of human modifications on nature. Marsh twentieth century would require an ecology-based “land
compared soil erosion and forest destruction in Ver- ethic” that “changes the role of Homo sapiens from con-
mont with degraded environments in the Mediter- queror of the land-community to plain member and citi-
ranean basin and histories of land and resource use in zen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and
Europe and Asia and concluded that “man [sic] is every- also respect for the community as such” (Leopold
where a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, 1949, 204). Marsh, Clements, and Thoreau shared
the harmonies of nature are turned to discord” (Marsh Leopold’s view.
1965, 36). Marsh urged his contemporaries to be cau- This controversy over the role of nature in human
tious in seconding nature, always to consider what history continues into the twenty-first century. Most fun-
must be learned from the priorities of first nature. damental is the question of whether one may speak of
However, Marsh’s image of people as disturbers of a a nature as existing free from human modification.
pristine nature raises one of the most controversial Raymond Williams says that “we have mixed our labor
meanings of nature for contemporary environmental with the earth, our forces with its forces too deeply to
history. Marsh and Thoreau, like many people of the be able to draw back or separate either out” (Williams
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, make sharp con- 1980, 83). Drawing on Williams, the historian William
Cronon suggests that the trouble with wilderness is its
erasure of the history of human striving from natural
history, and the historian Richard White poses nature in
contemporary times as an “organic machine”—a sym-

This Maoist Chinese proverb says: Man Must
Conquer Nature.