...Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and the inorganic world are, as I have remarked, bound together by such mutual relations and adaptations...stability of existing arrangements are overthrown. Indigenous vegetable and animal species are extirpated, and supplanted by others of foreign origin,...

...the design of a culture that protects its children. Human Ecology as a Problem of Ecological Design Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he...foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords. — George Perkins Marsh The Problem of Human Ecology Whatever their particular causes, environmental...

...illustrate what George Perkins Marsh, a nineteenth-century father of ecological thinking, once noted: "Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he...plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discord."24 This history — which would have to be extrapolated from the few remaining patches of...

...George Perkins Marsh made the revolutionary and unfashionable statement in Man and Nature in 1864 that "man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he...foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords," it was rarely believed.5 How could the humans of the past with such low levels of culture and technology...

...about almost exclusively from human intrusions. "Man is everywhere a disturbing agent," declared Marsh. "Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords." (So strongly did Marsh embrace this point, in fact, that he originally proposed titling his work Man...

...for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste. [...]. Man everywhere is a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discord. The proportions and accommodations which insured the stability of existing arrangements are...

...conservation." Marsh was also an early wilderness proponent. "Man is everywhere a disturbing agent," he wrote. "Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords."5 And, perhaps anticipating the wilderness movement, he suggested setting aside reserves...

...harmony. All human impact was therefore deleterious: 'Man is everywhere a disturbing agent,' wrote Marsh. 'Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.'28 Marsh assumed that indigenous peoples and the inhabitants of the countryside lacked the...

...sustainability instability Monitoring | Evaluation and feedback 221 (Marsh 1965 edn: 19). He believed that 'Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he...foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords' (Marsh 1965 edn: 36). Marsh was the first modern scholar to see humans as a factor, and not merely...