{"id":410,"date":"2025-10-21T15:07:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T19:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/?p=410"},"modified":"2025-11-03T11:47:02","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T16:47:02","slug":"clark-as-transformer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/clark-as-transformer\/","title":{"rendered":"Clark as transformer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-cover alignwide\" style=\"min-height:70vh;aspect-ratio:unset;\"><span aria-hidden=\"true\" class=\"wp-block-cover__background has-background-dim-0 has-background-dim\" style=\"background-color:#544634\"><\/span><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1830\" src=\"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/90\/Earth-rise.avif\" class=\"wp-block-cover__image-background wp-post-image\" alt=\"\u201cEarthrise,\u201d photographed on Dec. 24, 1968, by astronaut William Anders aboard Apollo 8.\" data-object-fit=\"cover\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/90\/Earth-rise.avif 2560w, https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/90\/Earth-rise-300x214.avif 300w, https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/90\/Earth-rise-1024x732.avif 1024w, https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/90\/Earth-rise-768x549.avif 768w, https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/90\/Earth-rise-1536x1098.avif 1536w, https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/90\/Earth-rise-2048x1464.avif 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\" \/><div class=\"wp-block-cover__inner-container is-layout-constrained wp-block-cover-is-layout-constrained\">\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-text-align-center has-large-font-size\" id=\"h-clark-as-transformer\">Clark as transformer<\/h2>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"intro\">In 1864, George Perkins Marsh \u2014 widely considered America\u2019s first environmentalist \u2014 published <em>Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action<\/em>, recognizing the irreversible impact of humankind\u2019s actions on the Earth.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Just over a century later, Clark took Marsh\u2019s hypothesis a step further when it hosted the ground-breaking conference, \u201cThe Earth as Transformed by Human Action.\u201d Organized by Clark geographers Robert Kates and Billie Lee Turner with Harvard\u2019s William C. Clark, the international symposium drew widespread attention from the scientific community, encouraged Clark\u2019s research in earth system science and sustainability science, and helped lay the foundation for the creation of the University\u2019s George Perkins Marsh Institute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Writing about the conference in the August 1988 issue of <em>The Professional Geographer<\/em>, Turner noted, \u201cThree years of planning and preparation for the conference centered around outlining and commissioning some 40 papers from leading experts or teams of experts around the world\u201d documenting global environmental changes and their impact on human society. As attendees Ian Douglas and Michael Chisholm wrote in <em>Area<\/em>, the journal of the Royal Geographical Society, the goal was to \u201ctease out the links between processes affecting the land, sea, and atmosphere\u201d and, ultimately, people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote has-text-align-left is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left\">\u201cThe book was deemed a landmark study and a wake-up call to the world.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThis challenge is being taken up, <em>inter alia<\/em>, by the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"double-bottom-margin\">Three years later, Cambridge University Press published the conference\u2019s papers in <em>The Earth as Transformed by Human Action<\/em>, co-edited by Turner with contributions from a number of Clark researchers and faculty, including Roger Kasperson, one of the first geographers to be elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and Robert Kates, who served as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. The book, a major stocktaking of the anthropogenic impacts on the planet and its ecosystems over 300 years, was deemed a landmark study and a wake-up call to the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-element-caption\">Above: \u201cEarthrise,\u201d photographed on Dec. 24, 1968, by astronaut William Anders aboard Apollo 8.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action published in 1864 by George Perkins Marsh was a landmark study and a wake-up call to the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-feature","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"departments":[14],"issues":[3],"class_list":["post-410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","departments-clarkives","issues-fall-winter-2025"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.2 (Yoast SEO v27.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Clark as transformer | Clark Magazine | Clark University<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/magazine\/clark-as-transformer\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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