"The extension of agricultural and pastoral industry involves an enlargement of the sphere of man's domain, by encroachment upon the forests which once covered the greater part of the earth's surface otherwise adapted to his occupation. The felling of the woods has been attended with momentous consequences to the drainage of the soil, to the external configuration of its surface, and probably, also, to local climate; and the importance of human life as a transforming power is, perhaps, more clearly demonstrable in the influence man has thus exerted upon superficial geography than in any other result of his material effort. Lands won from the woods must be both drained and irrigated; river banks and maritime coasts must be secured by means of artificial bulwarks against inundation by inland and by ocean floods; and the needs of commerce require the improvement of natural, and the construction of artificial, channels of navigation. Thus man is compelled to extend over the unstable waters the empire he had already founded upon the solid land."
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Lawyers from the United StatesEnvironmentalists from the United StatesUnited States Ambassadors to Turkey and the Ottoman EmpireUnited States Ambassadors to ItalyDartmouth College alumni
Original Language: English
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(1st edition 1864; edited by )
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Perkins_Marsh
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George Perkins Marsh
(March 15, 1801 – July 23, 1882) was an American lawyer, linguist, , politician, diplomat, and advocate of the wise use of natural resources, as well as educational opportunities for women. During his lifetime he was widely considered North America's foremost scholar of Scandinavian literature. Today he is famous as the author of the book Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action and is often called America's first environmentalist. From 1843 to 1849 as a member of the ,
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