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Retrospective Review
| Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Edited by William L. Thomas, Jr. Chicago: Published for the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the National Science Foundation by the University of Chicago Press, 1956. xxxviii + 1193 p. Illustrations, maps, bibliography.
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| Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth is a superb window into mid- twentieth century views on the environment. The contributors to the volume will be familiar to many environmental historians: Carl Sauer, Lewis Mumford, Paul Sears, James Malin, Karl Wittfogel, and Clarence Glacken to name but a few. The symposium that spawned the volume was remarkable for its interdisciplinary approach. The organizers realized that scholarship addressing human alterations of the environment was not confined to one discipline. They were able to assemble a remarkable group of geographers, anthropologists, historians, and scientists to assess the many ways people had affected the environment. |
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The inspiration for the symposium came from George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature (Charles Scribner, 1864). The conference organizers (as well as many environmental historians now) recognized Marsh's importance in alerting the public to the scope and consequences of human modifications of nature. Marsh adopted an international perspective, using examples from Europe, the United States, and the Middle East to show the destructiveness of various civilizations. Like the symposium participants, Marsh emphasized the need for synthesis to illuminate environmental change. |
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The book is as big as its subject. Marsh mostly focused on deforestation, soil erosion, and desertification; the symposium examined these processes as well as the environmental effects of urbanization and industrialization, the disposal of wastes, and the human impact on the atmosphere. The symposium also devoted many papers to what we would now call environmental history. H. C. Darby and Andrew Clark, two of the best-known historical geographers of the past century, examined the deforestation of Europe and the impact of invasive species on grasslands. Karl Wittfogel presented an overview of his argument about the relationship between irrigation and civilization, which was later published in a longer form as Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (Yale, 1957). In general, the volume's chapters clearly illustrate the anthropologists or cultural geographers' fascination with the development of cultural landscapes. There are few praises of untouched wilderness here. |
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Despite its extensive coverage, some omissions seem glaring from our perspective in the twenty-first century. Except for a chapter about ocean fisheries and coastlines, there is no discussion of the oceans. There is a section on the atmosphere, but the chapters mostly examine changes in rural and metropolitan climates. There is no sense that people are capable of altering the planet's climate as a whole. Overall, this is a terrestrially oriented book. The presenters show more concern for changes to the landscape rather than the environment, a broader term that better encapsulates the connection of the biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. |
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The tone of the volume is also striking. The chapter authors dutifully note the extent of human transformations of the land, but rarely comment on whether such changes were beneficial or harmful. The authors mostly adopt a voice characteristic of detached, scholarly reflection. While the authors do not necessarily praise the mammoth changes people have wrought on the planet, most do not lament them either. |
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