A long-time diplomat, Marsh served 21 years as ambassador to Italy and a shorter term in Turkey. He was a skilled lawyer, a Congressman from Vermont, a many-times-failed businessman, a learned scholar, and master of numerous languages. He was also author of Man and Nature: Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action,a book that Gifford Pinchot called "epoch-making" and that Lewis Mumford, in The Brown Decades, described as "the fountainhead of the conservation movement." Rene Jules Dubos described Marsh himself as "the first American prophet of ecology" and not a few have ascribed to him the actual founding of the science.

Marsh was born and grew up in Woodstock, Vermont, or as he put it, he was "born in the woods." As a young person, poor eyesight turned...