Review: Pilgrimage to
Vallombrosa: From Vermont to Italy in the Footsteps
of George Perkins Marsh
By
John Elder
Reviewed
by Ryder W. Miller
San Francisco,
USA
John
Elder. Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa: From Vermont to
Italy in the Footsteps of George Perkins Marsh. Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2006. 282 pp. ISBN:0-8139-2576-2 (cloth: acid-free paper)
$US29.95.
George
Perkins Marsh, generally regarded as one of America's first environmentalists,
wrote the influential conservation treatise Man and Nature (1863) which
helped inspire the environmental movement. John Elder traces his path in Italy,
where Marsh served as an American diplomat, and chronicles his effect on
subsequent environmental writers.
Man
and Nature
is a conservation classic which Elder references while trying to calculate the
impact Marsh had on others. Elder and Marsh, who was born there in 1801, are
both Vermonters. Elder now teaches English at Middlebury College. Elder's trip
to Italy on a Fulbright scholarship was a means to reflect upon the experiences
of Marsh, who sought to restrain human actions that would lead to the demise of
the natural environment that they depended upon.
Elder
writes: "Marsh's most important gift was his acuteness of physical observation
and his ability to bring all his learning to bear on the lineaments of a
particular landscape. He was a looker and remembered. Gazing out over a
deforested, eroded landscape in the Mediterranean world, he at once remembered
the ancient civilization that had flourished there before destroying its soil
and silting in its harbor and recalled the careless cutting around his
Woodstock home that had already displaced many farmers and ruined the fishing.
Describing both regions, his intent was to help his readers visualize the
inevitable effects of their actions unless they were quickly reversed" (p.
224).
Elder's
book is also a public pilgrimage to gather from Marsh's experiences lessons
that apply to modern problems; he finds arguments in the works of Marsh that
might successfully (perhaps more so than a "radical" preservationist)
convince a modern, mainstream audience to change. "From Marsh's stories,
as from the Greek myth and the Apache narrative, emerges the same insight: we
human beings are the potential catastrophe from which we seek to protect
the wilderness and diversity of the world. From which we ourselves must be
protected. We are the perpetually hungry hunters and the restless loggers. This
is the context within which the concept of stewardship needs to be cultivated,
as opposed to any sense of moral obligation or of sophisticated approaches to
"managing the earth" (p. 225).
Elder's
prose is inspiring and sophisticated, as he maps out three landscapes:
environmental history, poetry, and natural landscapes. One finds here
appreciation of the natural environment, and emotionally evocative prose. One
leaves the book convinced that action needs to be taken; if not for the rest of
the creatures we share the world with, then at least for ourselves.
Ryder
W. Miller <mdolphin1965@hotmail.com>,
Freelance environmental and science reporter who has been published in Sierra
Magazine, California Coast & Ocean, California Wild, and Hydrosphere.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Electronic Green Journal, Issue 25, 2007
ISSN: 1076-7975