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Economy, Environment and Environmental History: Case Notes from Agriculture*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Michael Turner
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Extract

In 1956 in an international symposium at Princeton on the theme Man's role in changing the face of the Earth, one of the principal contributors, Carl Sauer, reflected that as much as anything it was a festival of remembrance to George Perkins Marsh. Marsh was perhaps the inspiration for viewing man within his natural world, within his ecological setting, but a setting which had evolved as much as anything by the actions of his own hand as it had been by natural agents. Marsh's great work Man and Nature, has been dubbed ‘the fountainhead of the conservation movement.’ Thus Sauer suggests that this study is based on man's:

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , April 1997 , pp. 125 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

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26. For a contrary view which suggests that the stinting of commons and commonable places was not always well managed see Turner, M., English Parliamentary Enclosure (Folkestone, 1980), chapter 6.Google Scholar

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37. Summers, , The Great Level, pp. 252–3.Google Scholar And for what is probably, historically the more usual form of environmental loss through water management, see the effects of irrigation and salinisation on the environment of the very cradle of civilisation in Ponting, A Green History, esp. pp. 69–71.

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46. MAFF, Agricultural Research Projects, refs, CTE 9405, 9406 and 9407 respectively.

47. Paraphrasing from Lowenthal, (ed.), Man and Nature, p. xxvi.Google Scholar