
The object of the present volume is: to indicate the character and, approximately, the extent of the changes produced by human action in the physical conditions of the globe we inhabit; to point out the dangers of imprudence and the necessity of caution in all operations which, on a large scale, interfere with the spontaneous arrangements of the organic or the inorganic world; to suggest the possi...
Paperback: 660 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (August 11, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1974365123
ISBN-13: 978-1974365128
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.5 x 9 inches
Format: PDF ePub Text TXT fb2 ebook
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In 1864, George Perkins Marsh published Man and Nature, the book that was the granddaddy of the modern ecology movement. It was later expanded into The Earth as Modified by Human Action. Marsh was the U.S. Minister to Italy, and while overseas, he ...
the importance of the restoration of disturbed harmonies and the material improvement of waste and exhausted regions; and, incidentally, to illustrate the doctrine that man is, in both kind and degree, a power of a higher order than any of the other forms of animated life, which, like him, are nourished at the table of bounteous nature. In the rudest stages of life, man depends upon spontaneous animal and vegetable growth for food and clothing, and his consumption of such products consequently diminishes the numerical abundance of the species which serve his uses. At more advanced periods, he protects and propagates certain esculent vegetables and certain fowls and quadrupeds, and, at the same time, wars upon rival organisms which prey upon these objects of his care or obstruct the increase of their numbers. Hence the action of man upon the organic world tends to derange its original balances, and while it reduces the numbers of some species, or even extirpates them altogether, it multiplies other forms of animal and vegetable life.