You probably think I'm talking about Al Gore and his award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth, and I might as well be. But I'm not. I'm actually talking about George Perkins Marsh, who is sometimes considered to be the first true environmentalist. Marsh gave the speech described above in 1847, at a time when preserving nature, if it was thought of at all, was thought of strictly in terms of visible and tangible benefits. The idea that humans were harming the Earth in ways that they could not see was something that bordered on pseudoscience for most people in the 19th century (and, sadly, still does for many people today).
Marsh even correctly pointed out that human causes of climate change were not limited to heavy industry (which at the time was mostly limited to Europe). He noted that "the climate of even so thinly peopled a country as Russia was sensibly modified by similar causes". We now know, of course, that the felling en masse of large tracts of forest to make way for agricultural land can contribute to global warming just as much as greenhouse gases emitted by industry.
Marsh, sadly, never came up with any sort of solution to the problem he proposed. And those scientists who might have paid no attention to his warning. It would ultimately be nearly 150 years before the idea of global warming as Marsh imagined it became accepted scientific orthodoxy.
George Perkins Marsh was possibly the first person ever to make the connection between human activity and global warming, as far back as 1847.
