Sixty years ago, in June of 1955, the Wenner-Gren Foundation convened an international symposium in Princeton, New Jersey, in honor of George Perkins Marsh’s 1864 book Man and Nature. The Princeton symposium, co-chaired by the geographer Carl O. Sauer, the zoologist Marston Bates, and the literary and cultural historian Lewis Mumford, brought together seventy participants from a range of academic fields. As the symposium unfolded, Bates reports in the published proceedings, “less and less was said in defense or in support of a …