Marsh, George Perkins

George Perkins Marsh is a figure often overlooked by historians of Western conservation movements and overshadowed by the later achievements of individuals such as Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson. Nonetheless, through his groundbreaking work Man and Nature (first published in 1864), Marsh provided one of the earliest arguments supporting the conservation of natural resources in the United States. His work was highly influential to later conservationists such as Pinchot and Muir and set a high standard for the scientific analysis of human impacts on the natural world. Though historians have shown that many of Marsh's ideas were not entirely unprecedented for his time, he nonetheless deserves acknowledgment as one of the fathers of conservation and scientific resource management in the modern ...