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Preface: Beginning with Rome

机译：前言：从罗马开始

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George Perkins Marsh chose to open Man and Nature, his magnum opus, with a discussion of the environmental decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The choice was no accident. Rome was for Marsh a case study that epitomised his thesis and was intended to serve as a preface to the entire volume, introducing each of the themes that would appear in the following chapters. Marsh begins his section on the Roman Empire by pointing out the natural advantages of the Mediterranean region, including its healthfulness, equable climate, fertile soil, plentiful natural resources, and waterways available for transportation. All of these invited the intelligent labour of humans ('man', in Marsh's dated prose) to expel the wilderness and enable the soil to produce more abundantly for their sustenance. The poets of Greece and Rome, he notes, became so enamoured of the landscape transformed by 'picturesque improvement' that they lost a feeling for the beauty of untamed nature. Then Marsh launches forth on one of the most appalling and encyclopaedic descriptions of landscape degradation ever written. It is too long to repeat here in its entirety, unfortunately, but it catalogues the scores of ways in which the originally advantageous territory of the Roman Empire had been reduced to various degrees of desolation by Marsh's own time. Forests have disappeared, rich soils have washed away, water supplies have been disrupted, streams dry up in summer and become torrents in winter, and harbours are blocked by erosive deposits. Much of what remains is 'no longer capable of affording sustenance to civilised man' (p. 10).
机译：乔治·珀金斯·马什（George Perkins Marsh）选择开放他的巨著《人与自然》，讨论了罗马帝国的环境衰落和衰落。选择绝非偶然。罗马为马什（Marsh）提供了一个案例研究，该研究总结了他的论文，并打算作为整本书的序言，介绍将在以下各章中出现的每个主题。沼泽开始他的罗马帝国专栏文章时指出了地中海地区的自然优势，包括其健康，气候适宜，土壤肥沃，丰富的自然资源和可供运输的水路。所有这些都邀请了人类的聪明才智（在沼泽过时的散文中为“人”）驱逐旷野，并使土壤能够更多地维持生计。他指出，希腊和罗马的诗人迷恋于“如画般的改善”所改变的风景，以至于他们对野性之美失去了感觉。然后，马什（Marsh）提出了有史以来最令人震惊的百科全书，描述了景观退化。不幸的是，要在此重复全部内容已经太久了，但是它列出了数十种方法，在这些方法中，罗马帝国本来有利的领土由于马什自己的时间而沦落到不同程度的荒凉。森林消失，丰富的土壤被冲走，供水中断，夏天的溪流干dry，冬天变成洪流，港口被侵蚀性沉积物堵塞。剩下的大部分东西“不再能够为文明人提供生活必需品”（第10页）。

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