George Perkins Marsh – Master of Footnotes

George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882), a polymath and polyglot, was born in Woodstock, Vermont and was a lawyer, congressman, and a US envoy to the Ottoman Empire and later to Italy, where he died.  One of the better known scholars of his times, Marsh’s scholarly interests are themselves interesting to examine.  He edited the first Icelandic grammar in English, and was familiar with the Old Norse language and literature.  Apparently he had knowledge of scholarly resources in as many as 20 languages!  Like many prodigious writers he has been claimed by many academic specialties as one of their own: geography, social science, ecology, conservation, folklorist etc.

In environmental circles he is best known for his 1864 book Man and Nature in which Marsh provided a forceful account of the impact of people on nature, especially their deleterious effects on forested lands. The book remains an influential reminder that the human use of nature imposes significant negative impacts on planetary resources and it anticipated by almost a century the broad contours of the environmental movements’ disquiet with human impacts on the environment.  This book along with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was the most influential environmental book of its times.

10 things wrong: the bricks and mortar of critique

I am accumulating the books I think I am going to need (from my own library) for the 10 things wrong writing in the coming months in a set of large tubs and keeping them in the basement a few steps down from where I write these days.  On the left are literary sources, the center tub has environmental science/ecology titles, and the right is philosophy.  The philosophy tub has grown the most rapidly but the ecology pile, spilling over the edges, remains the biggest.

I have another pile right beside my desk which includes those volumes, including library books, that I am using at the moment.  Most of the work of this book is reviewing material that I am pretty familiar with, but rereading takes quite a bit of time.  Naturally, I am discovering that books that had long been favorites are less intriguing and useful to me now.

Decomposing Thought

Living things are born and die.  And living things rely for their living on the dying of other living things.  This is a central ecological thought – the decomposing thought.  A thought compelling enough to sustain an enduring research program: investigations of decomposition of dead organic matter (DOM) remain at the core of ecosystem ecology. These studies have promoted an understanding of the importance of the upper 5cm of soil – Earth’s tumultuous rind – where the roiling community of decomposers consume and transmute the apparent uselessness of dead flesh into the currency of ecosystems.  Input: DOM.  Process: decomposition by microbes regulated by the tiny champing of soil fauna – mites, springtails, and their divers kind. Output: energy for decomposers and the mineralization of the organic into nutrients available to the living. 

A fragment on José Martí: indirect reflections on action

In the hierarchy of José Martí’s values, action comes first.  In his notebook he writes: “Before assembling a collection of my poems I would like to assemble a collection of my actions.”[1]  Movement is a favorite term for him; “movement” he claims “is contagious”[2] If much of the action of his life is occupied with revolutionary agitation, political organization, and in the end, armed struggle to achieve a democratic Cuba, little of this action is directly reflected in his verse.  In fact, Roberto González Echevarría notes the near absence of politics and love in his poetry[3].  This is an odd claim, however.  Stanzas drawn randomly for any Martí volume are in fact fully flavored with love and politics and violence. “Yesterday, at the art show,/I saw her, and yesterday/My heart from me flew/After that woman to follow.”[4]  Though the section then takes a darker turn [“On the grim earth for the weary/Grow neither violet nor thorn”] it is clear nevertheless that Martí, the somewhat notorious lover, is writing as himself, not in the name of someone else.  The poems have a visionary tone; the stanza that follows on the one just quoted is the one in which he predicts his death. (“Don’t in darkness let me lie/With traitors to come undone:/I am good and as the good die/I will die face to the sun.”[5])  Marti is a man of movement, and in his verse the movement is crystallized, and in that crystal the action is reflected upon.

[1]  Allen, Esther, ed. Jose Marti: Selected Writings. New York: Penguin, 2002, Notebook 5 73

[2] Ibid., Notebook 5 73

[3]  Ibid.,  pxxiv

[4]  Marti, Vesos Sencillos Translated by Manuel A Tellechea [1997] XXI, 71

[5] Ibid.

Reversing the Flow - a New Way of thinking about Restoration Management

Since this term "reversing the flow" is catching on in our research group I thought it might be useful for me to post the first time I used this term.  It was in a 2008 white paper written as part of the process leading to our successful Coupled-Natural-Human-Systems proposal (we now call this project RESTORE - Rethinking Ecological and Social Theories of Restoration Ecology).

The Central Metaphor

In 1900 the flow of the Chicago River was reversed in one of the most dramatic engineering projects in the region’s history.  The project was a solution to a problem that otherwise compromised the human and ecological health of Chicago (Lake Michigan was unsustainably both a source of water and ultimately a sink for waste).  A little more than a century later, we should attempt to solve another significant challenge: how can we enhance the management of protected terrestrial ecological systems - areas that are typically swamped by influences from the vaster unmanaged metropolitan lands that surround them - in a way that simultaneously enriches both the human and ecological health of the region?  We need to investigate if ecological systems designed and managed with resilience in mind (arguably the current best management practices for restoration do not produce resilience results, and quickly revert to a ‘degraded’ condition) can exert a stronger influence on the landscape on a larger scale (which includes these large unmanaged areas) than is currently the case.  In this way we can arguably “reverse the flow” of restoration influence or more precisely modify the fluxes, of influence between managed and unmanaged preserved systems. 

10 Things Wrong with Environmental Thinking: half a book

I have been entertained by Tim Morton's posts on the endgame for his book Realist Magic.  So inspired by these posts, I compiled into a single document all that I have written so far on "10 Things Wrong", my work in progress (WIP), and the namesake for this blog.  I have been writing this book as a suite of vignettes, paying very little attention so far to the way these all connect up.  However, I have a pretty comprehensive outline, and though the connector pieces will be less interesting to write the task should be relatively painless.

So the grand total so far is 40,000 words, a 200 page double spaced draft.  Though it feels like progress - the heft alone is a delight! - nonetheless, I know I am less than half way there.

All of this has been written since June - and demonstrates the unexpected advantages of open-heart surgery.  If it were not for my enfeebled condition, I would not have sat at home day after day for a few of months writing and editing.  I had forgotten - not sure how it was possible to forget this - that it is very difficult to fit in work on a project like this when other professorial duties prevail.  Since I am having an exciting quarter - great students, working on a new proposal, and trying to get a manuscript on our restoration experiment completed, launching the Institute for Nature and Culture's new blog - I cannot complain.  I am concerned though that I will loose the urgency to get this completed and I would love to have the entire first draft completed by next summer.