From the works of Smith and Malthus two further important pathways can be
traced. One, through social scienceelaborated lastingly by Marx: the other, through
natural scienceelucidated first, and again lastingly, by the mid-nineteenth-century
output from Darwin, reinforced by the late nineteenth-century writing of the
lesser appreciated Marsh.^5
Charles Darwin, in hisOrigin of Species (1859) put the secular cat among the
theistic pigeons. North America was won; Australasia, temperate Latin America
and Southern Africa were being settled by Euro-Christian colonists; and every
exertion of mind and muscle, coupled to technological invention
and limitless resources, produced more and yet more food and
energy for consumption.
The tropics and subtropics were mostly bypassed, for often
these regions were already colonized (notably Latin America and
India), or were eitheralready densely peopled and well organized
(China, Thailand, Japan), or were lands of little attraction for
European exploitation or settlement (tropical Africa). Never-
theless wherever the tropical areas could produce resources or
labour as grist to the European industrial maw, they too were
opened up to exploitation.
Darwin witnessed this in the course of the global journey
recorded in his Voyage of the Beagle (1839). With the exception of
some views on Brazilian slavery, and a sideswipe at what he dis-
cerned to be sloth in the Antipodes, his observation of human
social conditions were not notable. On the other hand his
scientific treatise The Origin of Species perceived the existence of
what we would now identify as an ecological interdependence
and adaptation. This raised a furore because it challenged the
Judaic-Christian anti-mutation orthodoxy head on. Humankind,
Darwin illustrated, was not ordained by a moral premiss of
superiority to consume at will from the planetary resource base.
Furthermore, in the New World, he observed how incoming
animal and plant species soon modified primordial nature. His
observations of plant and animal mutation and adaptation, the
‘survival of the fittest’ reasoning (also attributed to Herbert
Spencer), and the dominance of some species (leading to an
elaboration of social Darwinism) were all expressed as scientific
certainties. Abuse nature, as he witnessed with cattle grazing on
the Pampas and rabbit browsing in Australia, and several options
became closed.
Then G. P. Marsh published Man and Nature (1864), a capsule
title so imaginative and lively (although unconsciously sexist)
that it remains as thematically significant now as it was when first
produced. In it he wrote about the influence environment has on
culture and, more significantly, the effect of cultural processesupon
the environment. Marsh was recognized ultimately as the patron
of ecology, an expression first used by Ernst Haeckel in 1868,
which led to the ‘new geography’ studies of MacKinder (1887).76 Practice
DOWN-SIDE PARADIGM
SHIFT- Deforestation
- Noxious alien
flora and fauna - Topsoil erosion
and silting - Water-way and
water-table
pollution - Air pollution,
smog, acid rain - Ambient
temperature rise
[greenhouse
effect] - Nuclear threats
and disasters - Production of
unassimilable
toxins [DDT,
CFCs, nuclear
wastes] - Waste discard
accumulations - Resource
depletions - Reduced bio-
diversity of life
form - Human
disorders and
diseases.