Abstract
There is an important 19th century turning-point in thinking about the Anthropocene. Vermont environmentalist George Marsh's 1864 Man and Nature: or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action is a seminal account of how the unintended consequences of human action give humans a previously unsuspected role to play in secular terrestrial change. The role that Darwinian 'natural materialism' played in shaping Marsh's insights is profound, and grasping the particular developments in biological thinking that made his work feasible casts a useful side-light on our own current assumptions about humanity's relationship to the environment, and suggests some ways of thinking about which of those assumptions have the potential to shape further thought and large-scale human action.
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Schedule a callMore From: Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)
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