George Perkins Marsh was the first US Minister to the United Republic of Italy and, as an early advocate of sustainable development, is widely considered to be America’s first environmentalist. Born in Vermont, Marsh died in Vallombrosa, Tuscany, and today his remains lie in Rome’s Non-Catholic cemetery. Marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of his prescient book, Man and Nature (1864), last week’s conference at the Villa Aurelia celebrated a figure whose life represents a bridge between Italian and American experience. Developed collaboratively by the American Academy in Rome and the Centro per un Futuro Sostenibile, the symposium was cohosted by AAR Director Kim Bowes, FAAR’06, and President of the Centro per un Futuro Sostenibile Francesco Rutelli.
In the first half of the evening, a series of distinguished panelists discussed the details of Marsh’s life as a diplomat, linguist, writer and naturalist, placing his vision in historic context. Professor Daniele Fiorentino of Università Roma Tre outlined Marsh’s political worldview as shaped by the Republican politics of Civil War America and Risorgimento Italy. Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker pointed out how the deforestation of Vermont in the early nineteenth century would have had a formative influence on the young Marsh who, unlike Darwin, viewed man as unlike other animals in his destructive power. President of the Tuscan Region Enrico Rossi explained that Marsh, who, like the Romantics of his age, gravitated to the Tuscan countryside, inspired the groundbreaking sustainable policy legislation that has made his region a model for the rest of Italy.
The second half of the evening was dedicated to innovative thinkers who are assessing those realities and exploring possible solutions. The economist Aldo Ravazzi Douvan, who serves as President of the OECD Environmental Performance Country Reviews Committee, reviewed specific ways in which Marsh’s views have prefigured current approaches to sustainable development. Nicholas de Monchaux, associate professor of architecture and urban design at Berkeley and FAAR’14, asserted that only adaptive models of city planning can respond to the inevitable complexities of climate change to create more robust and responsive urban environments. If the human population is often seen as an obstacle, current Fellows in landscape architecture Kim Karlsrud and Daniel Philips demonstrated that by reversing this perception and instead viewing people as a resource, small-scale projects like their seed-bomb dispensers can assume massive positive potential. “This generation of designers and planners,” summarized Bowes, “has witnessed the failure of top-down solutions like the Kyoto Protocol and must try to find ways to deal with impending realities.”