Who was the first environmentalist?
I tend to regard this as a trick question. If an environmentalist
is someone who advocates preservation or improvement of the natural
world, clearly there must have been environmentalists since the beginning
of time. "Don't defecate upstream," "don't kill what
you won't eat," "leave that flower be for others to enjoy,"
are all phrases that seem likely to have been first uttered long,
long ago.
That said, we can debate who initiated our modern concepts of environmentalism.
According to our crack research associate, Ali Travis, the first
was George Perkins Marsh.
Marsh was a brilliant and privileged child, born in Woodstock,
Vermont in March 1801, and was one of the first Americans to take
a step beyond simple conservation and sanitation, to perceive people's
harmful effects on nature. What's more, he was among the first to
speak out about it. While serving as an ambassador in Italy in the
early 1860s, Marsh wrote the book Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography
as Modified by Human Action, which describes the ways in which humanity
turned lush and fertile land in China, Europe and North Africa into
desert.
The book detailed the ways in which destruction of grass and forestland
had had serious environmental consequences. Although it did not
receive much publicity at the time it was published, the book was
"re-discovered" in the 1930s, helping to popularize the
concept of ecology for the first time. This and more earned Marsh
the title "fountain-head of the conservation movement."
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