George Perkins Marsh, United States minister to Italy, renowned as a linguist and a geographer, was a fitting choice to be named arbiter of a disputed Italo-Swiss boundary segment, the alpe of Cravairola, north of Domodossola and west of Locarno, in 1874.
Content Index
While many of Marsh’s novel conservation insights were universal and true for citizens of all countries, his key warnings about degradation were characteristically American—having been interpreted, produced, and packaged by an American for Americans.
This article challenges the premise that Marsh was unique in laying out an ecological justification for conservation. It suggests that these principles were common currency in early American natural history.
This paper argues that Marsh was not simply influenced by American versus European contrasts in environmental change, nor was his work based only on conservation ideas, being influenced also by the examples of acclimatisation movements within the British empire settlement colonies.
This paper examines the reception of Marsh’s ideas in New Zealand in the 1870s along with the ideas of the largely-forgotten Titus Smith about human impacts upon the vegetation of Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century, prompting reflection upon the relevance of tales of environmental understanding from two colonial realms for the practice of environmental history in the twenty-first century.
This paper examines the history of forestry in the Russian North through a study area in the North Urals.
Controversy over the claim that sugar depleted the soil and stunted subsequent rice crops reached a stalemate when both sugar scientists and their critics were accused of selectively choosing evidence according to political bias…
From travellers’ accounts, Duarte discusses the conditions of exploration, and some aspects of the historical changes that took place in the territory.
This paper explores some routes into the history of plant transfers, especially during the period of European imperialism.
The author’s own research into the early years of European settlement plots an evolving cultural engagement with the indigenous environment, and in particular with forest or ‘bush,’ which ran parallel with its extensive replacement by agroecosystems.