Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Transcript of the Proceedings Wenner - Gren International Symposium Princeton NJ June 16 -11, 1955

NY and Washington: Wenner - Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research with the collaboration of the National Science Foundation, 1955. 1st Edition. Hardcover. Near Fine. Presentation copy, inscribed in Volume 1 by one of the four organizers of the symposium, William L. Thomas, Jr, to another organizer all-around intellectual and philosopher Lewis Mumford: "For Lewis Mumford, champion of the human prospect, with fond memories of our week at Princeton. Bill Thomas" The symposium had 68 participants, all leading scholars in the sciences and humanities, plus 7 contributors who submitted papers, including French philosopher Teilhard de Chardin. Mumford's paper published here is "The Natural History of Urbanization". Three volumes of the proceedings: Volume 1, Sessions I-IV; Volume 2, Sessions V-VIII; and, Volume 3, Sessios IX-XII. Billed as the "first large-scale evaluation of what has happened and what is happening to the earth under man's impress," Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth" attempted to solicit viewpoints from all fields of knowledge upon "man's capacity to transform his physical-biological environment and upon his cumulative and irreversible alterations of the earth. Each volume uniformly bound in plain green cloth, gilt spine titles. Some loss to the cloth at the foot of one spine, else unused.