Thomas R. Dunlap

Saving America's Wildlife

Through an account of evolving ideas about wolves and coyotes, Thomas Dunlap shows how American attitudes toward animals have changed.

Remaking the Land: The Acclimatization Movement and Anglo Ideas of Nature

An enthusiasm for introducing animals and birds that could be hunted or that re-minded settlers of home swept over the Anglo settler colonies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. The movement was much stronger in Australia and New Zealand than in Canada or the United States, for both biological and social reasons. It represented a generations ideas about nature and the relationship of human beings to nature—ideas deeply rooted in Western culture. We have inherited the landscapes that they shaped and their ideas as well, though today we express them in very different form.

How Does History Matter in Ecology

Cuddington, Kim, and Beatrix E. Beisner, editors. 2005. Ecological paradigms lost: routes of theory change. Theoretical Ecology Series. Elsevier, Burlington, Massachusetts. xxiv + 435 p.

Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

79.95, ISBN: 0-12-088459-3 (alk. paper).

Life and times of a pioneering polymath

Part I. Making the Land Familiar: 1. Natural history and the construction of nature 2. Remaking worlds: European models in New Lands Part II. Beyond Conquest: 3. Reaching limits, 1850-1900 4. National nature, part I 5. Changing science, 1880-1930 Part III. Finding Firm Ground: 6. Reaching limits, 1920-40 7. National nature, part II 8. An ecological perspective, 1920-50 Part IV. New Knowledge, New Action: 9. The diffusion of ecology, 1948-67 10. The new world of nature.

Nature Literature and Modern Science

George Perkins Marsh is not a household name, except perhaps in the households of environmental historians. There he is remembered for Man and Nature (1864), the first study of humans as a worldwide agent of geological and biological change. In nineteenth-century America he was moderately well known in higher political, social and intellectual circles. He was a scholar, lawyer, congressman and for two decades a US diplomat in the Levant and the Italian states. David Lowenthal’s book, which started as a revision of his earlier biography, George Perkins Marsh: Versatile Vermonter (1958), blossomed into a fresh attempt to understand Marsh and his influence. Lowenthal is perhaps the ideal biographer for Marsh. He is a geographer, and so shares Marsh’s environmental interests. And he has been interested in Marsh for many years. This interest sustained him as he tracked his man through libraries and archives and followed in his footsteps across various landscapes. Knowledge and enthusiasm are necessary, for formidable obstacles are placed in the biographer’s path by the very diversity of Marsh’s life. He was a polymath. He knew many languages and wrote on a wide variety of topics. His interests included the English language and several others, philology in general, agriculture, soil erosion, the influence of the Goths on European civilization, political economy, public affairs and camels. Marsh’s public career was equally diverse. He made one of the first studies of the environmental effects of the fishing industry and forest clearance, investigated Vermont’s railroad companies, designed the Vermont State House, represented that state in Congress, and served as an American consul and minister. He was a lawyer, invested in railroads, and was partner in a marble quarry — among other ventures. The obvious approach for a biography would be to focus on what Marsh is remembered for, his ideas about humans and their relation to nature. The book’s subtitle suggests this tack, but the book is actually a more ambitious ‘life-and-times’. There are, in fact, two books here. One is the story of an American scholar, the other the record of Marsh as a prophet of environmental thought. Both are worthwhile, but for different reasons. The first puts Marsh in the context of his times. It was quite a context. Marsh lived through American politics from the anti-Masonic agitation around 1830 through to the end of Reconstruction (although he was out of the country for many of the later events). He saw American business expand from the shaky financing of the early nineteenth-century railroads to the industrial progress after the Civil War. He was involved in American scholarship and science in ways as different as the political manoeuvring that established the Smithsonian Institution and the ‘dictionary battles’ over American versus English usage and spelling. Then there were the political events in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the background to Marsh’s diplomatic efforts. In addition, Lowenthal describes Marsh’s family life, his travels, financial troubles and political problems: it is easy to see how Marsh’s career was related to events. He could not have written with authority on so many topics even a generation later. His career as diplomat and wandering scholar was equally a product of American and European involvement in the countries where he was stationed. The profusion of events and ideas in the book and the detail on Marsh’s travels and studies will discourage some readers, but the result is a vivid portrait of Marsh against his intellectual and social background. The second story is the more important. As Lowenthal admits, “it is above all for his crucial role in environmental history that Marsh’s life warranted retelling here”. Most of that is described in the two chapters in which Lowenthal discusses Man and Nature and the final one on Marsh’s ideas. But the environmental aspect runs throughout the text, for Lowenthal believes Marsh’s circumstances and experiences shaped his ideas on conservation. He had seen the forests of his native Vermont fall to the axe and travelled over the eroded landscapes of the Middle East. Experiences such as these, as much as formal knowledge of geology, made Man and Nature what it was. Lowenthal’s assessments are judicious, usually more solid than startling, but occasionally bold. His comparison of Marsh and his contemporary Henry Thoreau should stir some thought. He rejects as a “latter-day construct” the idea that there was a division between biocentric and anthropocentric views, as represented respectively by Thoreau and Marsh, and finds many points of agreement between the two men. Then there is his view that, next “to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Marsh’s Man and Nature was the most influential text of its time to link culture with nature, science with society, landscape with history”. Well, maybe, but wasn’t second place in this race a long way back? There is something here for everyone. General readers will get a picture of Marsh and his times, American and European. Environmental historians and geographers will appreciate Lowenthal’s discussion of Marsh as an environmental thinker, the fate of his ideas since 1864, and their relevance today. Everyone should come away with a better appreciation of a man who was a century ahead of the general run of scientists in recognizing many of our environmental concerns and who addressed them at a fundamental level. This is a useful study of an important figure. ■ Thomas R. Dunlap is in the Department of History, Texas A & M University, College Station, Texas 77843-4236, USA.

DDT: Scientists, Citizens, and Public Policy

Science and nature appreciation have gone hand in hand since at least the time of John Rays The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691), and finding Gods marvels in the world the scientist saw was for more than a century a relatively easy task. Even the decline of natural religion in the 19th century did not kill the connection of science to sentiment; Romantic rapture simply replaced Godly awe.1 We commonly think of Darwinian evolution, showing nature as a war of all against all, devoid equally of Gods hand and moral lessons, as breaking that link, but this is too simple a formulation. It was an interpretive challenge to nature writers, but it presented no problems of specialized knowledge or vocabulary. The Origin of Species was written in ordinary English and could be understood by the educated nonscientist (perhaps the last scientific classic of which this could be said).2 The rise of the biological sciences in the late 19th century presented a more serious problem. Natural history split into a variety of specialized, academic disciplines, each requiring specialized training. Research became quantitative, tied to increasingly abstruse theory, and written in a special vocabulary. To abandon science as the basis for nature appreciation was possible, but that would have robbed nature literature of much of its appeal and authority, reducing it from enlightenment to sentiment. But where in these charts, graphs, tables, technical terms, and theories could be found joy in nature and awe at its sublimity? This-finding aesthetic and spiritual meaning in a quantitative, academic science-has been the central problem of 20th century American nature writing. It has shaped the genres