Marsh was born in Woodstock, Vermont. The family estate, later purchased by Frederick Billings and last owned privately by Billings’ granddaughter, Mary French Rockefeller, is now the site of the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park whose focus is on conservation history and the evolving nature of land stewardship in America.

At the age of five, Marsh began learning Latin and Greek and reading every book he could find. Marathon readings of the encyclopedia in poor light left seven-year-old Marsh nearly blind and unable to read for four years. So his family and friends read to him, feeding his intellect and helping develop his already prodigious memory and sensibility to sound. As a result, his keen ear was finely tuned for foreign languages and music, to the point that he could identify by tone alone the type and number of instruments in a band. And since he couldn't read books, Marsh spent much of his childhood "reading" nature and developing an enduring love for it.

By the end of his life, Marsh, largely self-taught, was fluent in 20 languages. He became a lawyer, banker, farmer, manufacturer, architect, politician, naturalist, and diplomat. A progressive thinker and reformer, Marsh advocated for the abolition of slavery and women’s rights to an education and to vote. Marsh shaped the design of many public buildings, including the Vermont State House and Washington Monument. He helped found the Smithsonian Institute and served as a Republican U.S. Congressman and U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Italy.

Rising high above his notable accomplishments, however, is Marsh’s pioneering work in conservation. David Lowenthal, author of the recent biography George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation, concludes that "Next to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Marsh’s Man and Nature of 1864 was the most influential text of its time to link culture with nature, science with society, landscape with history. Its influence endures." Sadly, Marsh’s seminal work receives little more than an obligatory mention in most textbooks and classrooms, and Marsh is unknown or misunderstood by most people today, even in his native Vermont.

The writing of Man and Nature stemmed from the widespread deforestation and environmental degradation Marsh witnessed in Vermont and throughout our nation, and from his extensive touring of the already degraded Mediterranean region. Marsh realized that human civilization had profoundly reshaped the face of nature, with disastrous consequences. He forewarned global climate change and loss of biodiversity. He wrote, "Man is everywhere a disturbing agent ... wherever he plants his foot, harmonies of nature are turned to discords." He advocated great caution and governmental oversight when changing nature, and for restoring and preserving wild nature where possible.

Curiously, few people who know of Marsh today think of him as an advocate for "inviolate woodlands." Instead he is most often portrayed as a strict utilitarian, a dominion-over-nature conservationist–the wise use counterpoint to "preservationists" like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. Marsh’s biographer, David Lowenthal, explains that conservationists, looking for cheap and easy solutions, "adopted only half of Marsh’s analysis and a fraction of his reforms. Gleaning what they wanted from Man and Nature, they welcomed his positive messages–reforms that were straightforward, widely beneficial, and allied with productive growth. They ignored or forgot his negative admonitions–watershed protection, inviolate woodlands, irrigation cautions, and warnings of irreparable damage from unintended impacts."

Marsh advocated ardently for good forestry and wilderness preservation; he admired the preservationists and they admired him. Marsh often read aloud the "exquisitely poetic" Thoreau, and Muir relied heavily on Marsh’s writings to support his successful advocacy to protect Yosemite’s watersheds and establish the nation’s first forest preserves, which later became national forests.

Making clear his belief that both responsible stewardship of forests and wilderness preservation were needed, Marsh wrote: "Some large and easily accessible region of American soil should remain, as far as possible, in its primitive condition, at once a museum for the instruction of the student, a garden for the recreation of the lover of nature, and an asylum where indigenous tree, and humble plant that loves the shade, and fish and fowl and four-footed beast, may dwell and perpetuate their kind."

In this year, the two hundredth anniversary of George Perkins Marsh’s birth, tension remains within the conservation movement between those who emphasize stewardship and kindly ("wise") resource use, and those who emphasize preservation and restoration of wild nature and the ecological processes that shape biodiversity. All of us would be wise to take this moment to reflect on Marsh’s belief that these two streams of conservation thinking are natural complements–both must succeed if our natural and cultural landscape is to regain and maintain good health.