Here are a few recently added Special Collections items in honor of Earth Week:
George Marsh’s, Man and Nature (New York, 1864. Call #: SpColl 333.72 M365m) is a landmark in the history of ecology (click to view title page). Considered “the first treatise on environmental history” and “the fountainhead of the conservation movement” Man and Nature offers a comprehensive overview of the ways humans influenced the natural world. In his preface Marsh makes clear that the book is also a call to action:
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 to the dangers of imprudence and the necessity of caution…
Environmental study and activism were only part of Marsh’s life, however. Among other things, he served as American minister to Turkey and published a book advocating the use of camels in the West.
In addition to the 1864 first American edition of Man and Nature, Special Collections also recently acquired a copy of the 1867 American edition as well as two other nineteenth-century items related to conservation, ecology, and land use:
Samuel Dana’s A Muck Manual for Farmers (Lowell, MA, 1842. Call #: SpColl 631.8 D171m) and George Ville’s The School of Chemical Manures (Philadelphia, 1872. Call #: 631.8 V728s) are two early works dealing with the use of chemical manure in agriculture. Not a particularly glamorous topic, perhaps, but one that plays an important role in the history of human manipulation of the natural world.
Dana offered his book as a practical resource (with a practical title) for farmers, and it was one of the earliest works of American agricultural chemistry.
The School of Chemical Manures, published thirty years later, was another important milestone in fertilizer literature, and the image above (click to view enlarged version) offers a graphical depiction of the advantages of using chemical fertilizers.
