Dartmouth’s Greatest Conservationist

HE WAS MORE THAN A Conservationist; he is the closest the College has ever come to producing a true Renaissance man. George Perkins Marsh, class of 1820, was one of America's leading experts on the Old Icelandic language, camels, forests, railroad regulation, and Renaissance art. He amassed the nation's finest collection of prints and engravings and sold it to the Smithsonian. It was Marsh who determined the final proportions of the Washington Monument and persuaded the army to form an experimental camel corps. He was also a leading figure in both federal and state politics (two-term Whig congressman, Vermont state railroad commissioner, statehouse commissioner, and fish commissioner). His 21-year term as minister to Italy remains the record for any chief of an American diplomatic mission.

But that is far from all. Perhaps the man's greatest achievement was his monumental book, Man andNature, which inspired American conservationists from Forest Service founder Gifford Pinchot to early environmentalist John Muir. Through a meticulous assemblage of facts and philosophy, Marsh argued that, "whereas others think the earth made man, man in fact made the earth." Drawing upon personal observations made around his childhood home in Woodstock, Vermont, as well as historic accounts of the ancient world, Marsh refuted the prevailing notion that ravaged land will recover when left alone. He warned that man was a despoiler and must become a conserver and a restorer of natural resources if his environment were not to worsen. Above all, he wrote of the value of trees. Forests, he maintained, not only produced a valuable crop but also acted as a reservoir for water and protected the soil. Man and Nature was an instant bestseller, and is still in print 136 years after its initial publication. Lewis Mumford calls it "the fountainhead of the environmental movement,"

One thing Marsh was not, however: a good businessman. Predicting that the book would never sell well, he gave the rights away shortly before it was published.

Marsh knew everything from camelsto railroads to Old Icelandic. But onthe environment he was a genius.