| Retrospective Review | Environmental History, 10.3

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.
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.	1
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.	2
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.	3
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.	4
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.	5
This may be why the volume had far less of an impact than later scientific books about anthropogenic environmental change. Scientists or authors with scientific training such as Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, Hougton Mifflin, 1962), Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb, Ballantine, 1968), and Barry Commoner (The Closing Circle, Alfred A. Knopf, 1971) had a far greater impact on the public's awareness of environmental problems than the authors of Man's Role did. A sense of urgency informed Carson, Ehrlich, and Commoner's books. Occasionally, such concerns appear in Man's Role. In the final chapter, Lewis Mumford agreed that humans had an enormous capacity to change the Earth, but worried that people were unwilling to control themselves. "If you force me to talk about probabilities," he wrote, "I would say that man's future seems black" (p. 1146). More than any other conference participant, Mumford recognized the problems inherent in nuclear weaponry and power. Carl Sauer lamented the prevailing faith in mechanization and celebration of unfettered growth that predominated in the 1950s. "The modern industrial mood (I hesitate to add intellectual mood) is insensitive to other ways and values," he lamented. Concerns about the hubris of mid-twentieth century science and society would become common as the environmental movement grew in the coming decades.	6
But these sentiments seem the exception during the conference. In relation to the oceans, one participant doubted that people could damage them in any meaningful or long-lasting way.	7
"It seems that the effect of man on the ocean has been small," wrote Michael Graham. "It may be rash to put any limit on the mischief of which man is capable, but ... it would, indeed, seem that here at the beginning and the end is the great matrix that man can hardly sully and cannot appreciably despoil" (p. 502). While other participants were not as sanguine as Graham, few expressed strong concerns about what humans had done to the environment. Their tone was detached, maybe even a tad indifferent. Given the prevailing tenor of the symposium (along with the fact that the volume was a large, edited collection) it is little wonder that the book failed to have much impact beyond the academy.	8
The volume is also an important document in the development of the field of environmental history and the discipline of geography. Geographers such as Sauer played a key role in organizing the symposium and geographers made up the largest share of the participants. Even so, when the environmental movement did burst upon the scene a decade later, the discipline of geography was in a poor position to contribute to it. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, geography sought to become a spatial science, and as such, had little patience for the details of environmental change or historical contingency. Geographers feared that any discussion of environmental questions might be mistaken as environmental determinism, which geographers had embraced earlier in the twentieth century. When environmental determinism went into disrepute in the 1930s, it almost took the discipline of geography in the United States with it. No geographer wanted to tread down that road again.	9
Geography's failure at the time to address environmental questions proved to be (as one senior environmental historian once told me) geography's great gift to the nascent field of environmental history. Historians were able to fill in a scholarly gap that geographers had dominated just two decades earlier. Given its position as a bridge between the natural sciences and the humanities, geography should have been better positioned to do environmental history than any other discipline, but few geographers pursued this sort of work. Since the 1980s, geographers have returned energetically to environmental matters. But as a geographer looking at Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth a half-century later, one can only be dismayed that geography did not seize an opportunity to serve as one of the intellectual cornerstones of the environmental movement during its formative years.	10
Robert M. Wilson recently finished a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of History and Philosophy at Montana State University—Bozeman and is now an assistant professor at Syracuse University in the Department of Geography. He is completing a book manuscript titled Seeking Refuge: An Environmental History of the Pacific Flyway.

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