Once and Future World

Nature changed

- George Perkins Marsh wrote /Man and Nature/ in 1864 and already had found much

about nature changed. **Most of the planet was not a threatened wilderness, but

had already been 'much modified in form and product'**

- Papyrus used by the Egyptians had nearly vanished from the Nile region by 1864.

- Marsh asked whether we were changing nature itself into something new,

something lesser, **something our ancestors might not even recognize.**

- He had written the first principle of Historical Ecology: **To know what is,

you must know what was**

- Child psychology study in 1995 by Peter H. Kahn and Batya Friedman from Colby

College found that only a third of kids in Houston, a very polluted Gulf Coast

city, felt environmental problems affected them.

- Study outlines: "what we perceive in the children we interviewed might well be

the same sort of psychological phenomenon that affects us all."

- "People may take the natural Environment they encounter during childhood as

the norm against which to measure pollution later in life"

- Memory conspires against Nature. The Forgetting can begin in the instant that

a change takes place: the human mind did not evolve to see its surroundings as

the focus of our attention