Trade with its Money, its credit, its Steam, its Rail- roads, threatens to upset the balance of Man, and establish a new, universal Monarchy more tyrannical than Babylon or Rome."
Ralph Waldo Emerson's cri de coeur in his Journals (1840) reflected the fear among 19th-century naturalists that the rise of industry was threatening the American wilderness.
the late 19th century, a new breed of "conservationists," notably George Perkins Marsh, author of Man and Na-ture (1864), was beginning...