The Saunterer

George Perkins Marsh on the cumulative effect of all axes and hoes

    So far as the Saunterer knows, the first book ever on conservation ecology is George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature, published in 1864. David Lowenthal, editor of the 1965 Harvard University Press edition, writes in the preface:

Anyone wielding a hoe or an ax knows what he is doing, but before Marsh no one had assessed the cumulative effect of all axes and hoes.

    How well have we learned to assess the cumulative effects of humans on nature, and of nature on humans, reciprocating on and on?

    Near the end of Man and Nature, Marsh says and warns:

The human operations mentioned in the last few paragraphs do act in the ways ascribed to them, though our limited faculties are at present, perhaps forever, incapable of weighing their immediate, still more their ultimate consequences. But our inability to assign definite values to these causes of the disturbance of natural arrangements is not a reason for ignoring the existence of such causes in any general view of the relations between man and nature, and we are never justified in assuming a force to be insignificant because its measure is unknown, or even because no physical effect can now be traced to it as its origin.
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    For a brief biography of George Perkins Marsh, click here.

Rosalyn Tureck on the value of books and nature

    Musician Rosalyn Tureck (piano, harpsichord, clavichord, organ) explains the value of books and nature to her art:

As you can see from the collection of books I’ve amassed over the years, the subject matter covers philosophy, literature, art, science, etc. The collection includes almost any subject you can think of. They all deepen my perspective of life in some way. Next, my great love is nature, especially the sky. I walk in the countryside whenever I can because I can see the sky so much more clearly there. Much as I would like to have enjoyed sports, I never indulged in any except on occasional moments because of possible injury to the hands. The only exception to this is swimming, although I’m certainly not the world’s greatest. Snorkeling, for me, is a fantastic activity because I see such variety of life under the sea. I have done snorkeling in the Mediterranean, in the south of France. It’s another world, and it gives me a great sense of the immensity and the individuality of nature. When I first saw underwater life, I thought, “My God, what music a composer could have written had he seen this!”

    There are artists as we usually think of them – painters, poets, musicians, dancers, writers, . . .  And there are artists as we seldom think of them – universal artists who create works in all fields outside of art – entrepreneurs, administrators, scientists, engineers, foresters, librarians, teachers, nurses, . . . . And here and there are artists in the arts of daily living. Quite conceivably, they and their creative works would be increased if they made a regular practice of experiencing the “great sense of the immensity and the individuality of nature.”

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    For a brief biography of Rosalyn Tureck, click here.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on developing a love of the Great and the Whole

    Why read the Odyssey? Or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Or study theories of cosmology? These are some of the ways of gaining a love of the Great and the Whole. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s words,

Should children be permitted to read romances, and relations of giants and magicians and genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my faith in the affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great and the Whole. Those who have been led to the same truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess. They contemplate nothing but parts, and all parts are necessarily little. (Quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 192.)
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    For a brief biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, click here .