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Show 28 that Ezra Carr drew heavily on the theories of George Perkins Marsh. And Marsh's Man and Nature, in turn, has been taken by no less an authority than Lewis Mumford as the "fountainhead of the conservation movement." Certainly Muir would draw upon many of the details of Marsh's monumental book when he came to argue for the preservation of the forests in the seventies and the nineties, but he saw during his Walk that his philosophy was founded on quite different assumptions about Man's place in Nature. Man was the center of Marsh's theory of conservation, and was central even to the original title of his book, Man the Distruber of Nature's Harmonies. Marsh had argued well enough to convince a skeptical Sir Charles Lyell that Man had been a dominant force in the landscape, that Man was one of the most important ecological forces on earth. Marsh did not doubt Man's supreme power over Nature, and only wished to discourage its misuse. He tried to convince civilized men that their energies ought to be the result of foresight, rather than of ignorance, war, tyranny, and misrule, as had been the case in past history. Ezra Carr followed Marsh in pointing out that Man changed Nature, produced "mutations" which were "unforseen through natural consequences of acts performed for narrower and more immediate ends." Yet neither Marsh nor Ezra Carr had questioned Man's ultimate supremacy. Marsh's biographer explains that "There was nothing sacred about Nature; man must rebel against her demands, subjugate her, and create his own order in her world." |