In 1955, the climatologist C. Warren Thornthwaite presented a paper to the conference on Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth in which he proposed a way to improve the “water economy” of drought-prone regions. The language he used was one of “balance,” and the hope that he had was not that he would make the area better, but that he would correct “defects” in the climate. The rhetoric of “balance” pervaded the proceedings of the conference, from the introduction, which traced its ancestry back to the George Perkins Marsh’s 1864 work, Man and Nature, in which Marsh called for the possibility of restoring the “disturbed harmonies” of the natural world. In this talk, I will trace the usage of the words “balance” and “harmony” in a selection of papers delivered to the conference, including those by ecologist Paul Sears, geographer R.J. Russell, and climatologist C.W. Thornthwaite, as well as through the transcribed discussions from the conference. I will examine it in relation to their intellectual inspiration, Marsh, as well as changing ideas about the relationship between the economy and the environment in the 1950s.
