THE SOIL APOCALYPSE OF GEORGE PERKINS MARSH

JEORGE PERKINS MARSH FOUNDED AMERICAN ECOLOGY with his 1864 Man and Nature, a study of the Earth as modified by human action. Here is his vision of the nineteenth-century destruction of a landscape:

With the disappearance of the forest, all is changed. . . . The face of the earth is no longer a sponge, but a dust heap, and the floods which the waters of the sky pour over it hurry swiftly along the slopes, carrying in suspension vast quantities of earthly particles which increase the abrading power and mechanical force of the current, and augmented by the sand and gravel of falling banks, fill the beds of the streams, divert them into new channels and obstruct their outlets. . . . From these causes, there is constant degradation of the uplands, and a consequent elevation of the beds of water-courses and of lakes by the deposition of the mineral and vegetable matter carried down by the waters. . . .

The washing of soil from the mountains leaves bare ridges of sterile rock, and the rich organic mould which covered them, now swept down into the dank low grounds, promotes a luxuriance of aquatic vegetation that breeds fever and more insidious forms of mortal disease, by its decay and thus the earth is rendered no longer fit for the habitation of man.