The Victorian Anthropocene: George Marsh and the Tangled Bank of Darwinian Environmentalism

Abstract

There is an important  19th century  turning-point in thinking about the Anthropocene.  Vermont environmentalist George Marsh's 1864 Man and Nature: or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action is a seminal account of how the unintended consequences of human action give humans a previously unsuspected role to play in secular terrestrial change. The role that Darwinian 'natural materialism' played in  shaping Marsh's insights is profound, and grasping the particular developments in biological thinking that made his work feasible casts a useful side-light on our own current assumptions about humanity's relationship to the environment, and suggests some ways of thinking about which of those assumptions have the potential to shape further thought and large-scale human action.