For those wishing to establish a point in history when checking out the impact of human activities on the environment became a thing worth doing, a good date is 1864, and the event is the publication by George Perkins Marsh of his book, 'Man and Nature, or Physical Geography Modified by Human Action'. In his travels as an American diplomat, Marsh was well placed not only to document environmental change, but also to evaluate it. In this respect he is remembered for the way he forcefully pointed out the difference in attitudes between the native people's and European's attitudes to the natural world. The native leaves a slight footprint on the Earth, whilst civilisation "assumes an aggressive attitude, and thenceforward strives to subdue to his control and subject to his uses, all her productivity and all her motive powers". Another way of stating this difference is that preindustrial production systems are characteristic of 'inscribed groups', who organise for the sustained exploitation of local natural resources. They are inscribed, or embedded, into local ecosystems by being linked to the productivity of a narrow range of biophysical flows which limit the number of people who can partake of the local resources. Modern production systems are characteristic of 'constructive groups' who construct a landscape to serve their economic aspirations, populating it beyond the limits of the local natural productivity, importing goods and services from elsewhere, thereby destroying its ecosystems. Costructive groups gather around sites where there is an application of inventions for mass production. Workers migrate attracted by better wages and prospects, taking advantage of improved communications.
'Man and Nature' was the most comprehensive statement about land management that had ever appeared. It was culled from Marsh's own farming experiences in New England and his research into the works of European naturalists, geographers, foresters and hydrologists. There is no better exposition of need for environmental impact assessment and its precautionary principle than the following:
The equation of animal and vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human intelligence to solve and we can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble in the ocean of organic life
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