My OperaThe Lost Eden - true or false?
Wednesday, January 26, 2011 9:10:21 AM
Review of: "The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History".
By A. T. Grove and Oliver Rackham. Yale University Press, 2001.
Mediterranean Europe—southern Portugal and Spain, France, Italy, the Balkans, Greece, and the Mediterranean islands—is often interpreted as a “Lost Eden,” once verdant and fertile, then progressively degraded and desertified by human mismanagement and the ignorance and folly of successive civilizations. In this engaging book, two distinguished scholars challenge this pessimistic view.
A. T. Grove and Oliver Rackham trace the evolution of climate and vegetation in southern Europe from prehistoric times to the present.
The theory that the Mediterranean was a Ruined Landscape, or Lost Eden, arose from the Enlightenment and persists in works of political ecology to this day. The story goes that the lands were once covered with tall forests, as in northern Europe. When men cut down the trees to make ships or charcoal, and goats devoured the underbrush, the soil was loosened and washed into the plains. The land grew barren, the climate became more arid. That should be the cause why Greece looks as it does today.
In fact, all these assumptions are wrong, according to this wry, scholarly and beautifully written book by Dick Grove, a geographer and emeritus Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, and Oliver Rackham, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and author of definitive histories of woodland and the English landscape.
The perpetrators of the myth mentioned above were people who had not been to the places they wrote about, or who lazily took other scholars' explanations for what they saw. The rot set in, say Rackham and Grove with Renaissance poets and Baroque painters, such as Nicolas Poussin. They clothed their landscapes in the lush woodlands they knew from Normandy or Italy. So when travellers reached the drier parts of the Mediterranean, they did not find what they expected and assumed that the land had eroded.
The authors have consulted original sources, studied pollen records, visited allegedly degraded parts of Crete, France, Spain and the Peloponnese and analysed the tree cover at the time of the Roman Empire, which was very far from the wildwood of Baroque imagination. They conclude that Xenophon would have recognised the landscape of modern Greece - except that the fens have been drained.
The first objection to the Ruined Landscape theory, say Rackham and Grove, is that it is much too generalised. It is possible that one side of a mountain was degraded, but not always the other. The second objection is that the Mediterranean climate - a wet winter growing season and harsh dry summers - has been typical for about 5,000 years. Floods do seem to be worse than they used to be, but people have been saying this for centuries and tend to underestimate natural variability. Erosion from rocky "badlands" to the sea is a natural process that can dwarf the human-caused problem of farmland. Ruined Landscape theory has it that estuaries in Italy, France and Spain that were harbours in ancient times are wide deltas today as a result of erosion. Grove and Rackham point out that the erosion happened in the 16th and 17th centuries, not under Imperial Rome, when the use of the hills was heaviest.
Mediterranean vegetation, they say, is lower and more indestructible than it is given credit for. Most trees, once felled or browsed, just grow as maquis - which is where Homer's boar hunts really took place. Grazing pressure has been heavy before: prehistoric Crete, with its pygmy hippos, pygmy elephants and slow deer, was heavily browsed. Sardinia's forests, which were felled in the 19th century, have re-grown and now cover a larger area, the authors found. All round the Mediterranean, woodlands are now increasing at the expense of grassland. Forests have survived - in Crete and around Rome - precisely because they had an economic use as the source of ships or charcoal.
Grove and Rackham rightly value old ways of living with nature - and the ecology that results from them. Mediterranean agriculture is an agro-ecological strategy, an adjustment to particular climatic conditions in Mediterranean zones: mild, humid winter with no or very little frost, and a warm, dry summer. The strategy is made up of a complex of four components: rainfed annual crops based on the winter rain on hillside built terraces, permanent treecrops surviving the dry summer, transhumance avoiding the dry summer in the lowland plaines, and irrigation compensating the lacking summer precipitation this way opening the possibility for more than one annual crop. Farmers shared water in Spain for hundreds of years, as Islam came and went.
The real scarcity in modern Europe, the authors
conclude, is not soil but water. In southern Spain and Greece, groundwater has been over-exploited, so that sea water may now be sucked into aquifers, causing the salting of fresh water on a scale unknown to the ancients.
Finally, they point to the real threats to Mediterranean landscapes in the recent past (especially after WW II) and the immediate future: not only coastal development, but also bulldozing, excessive irrigation, and the consequences of depopulation in the interior rural areas.
The authors' polemic against Ruined Landscape theory sometimes fails to convince. I would have liked a less terse explanation of how North Africa stopped being Rome's grainbasket and why the ruined cities of Leptis Magna and Timgad now stand amid desolation. Just as it challenges belief that the whole of the Mediterranean is a ruined landscape, it is also difficult to believe that none of it is.
The reader may find another concise review of this book here.
Mediterranean Europe—southern Portugal and Spain, France, Italy, the Balkans, Greece, and the Mediterranean islands—is often interpreted as a “Lost Eden,” once verdant and fertile, then progressively degraded and desertified by human mismanagement and the ignorance and folly of successive civilizations. In this engaging book, two distinguished scholars challenge this pessimistic view.
A. T. Grove and Oliver Rackham trace the evolution of climate and vegetation in southern Europe from prehistoric times to the present.
The theory that the Mediterranean was a Ruined Landscape, or Lost Eden, arose from the Enlightenment and persists in works of political ecology to this day. The story goes that the lands were once covered with tall forests, as in northern Europe. When men cut down the trees to make ships or charcoal, and goats devoured the underbrush, the soil was loosened and washed into the plains. The land grew barren, the climate became more arid. That should be the cause why Greece looks as it does today.
In fact, all these assumptions are wrong, according to this wry, scholarly and beautifully written book by Dick Grove, a geographer and emeritus Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, and Oliver Rackham, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and author of definitive histories of woodland and the English landscape.
The perpetrators of the myth mentioned above were people who had not been to the places they wrote about, or who lazily took other scholars' explanations for what they saw. The rot set in, say Rackham and Grove with Renaissance poets and Baroque painters, such as Nicolas Poussin. They clothed their landscapes in the lush woodlands they knew from Normandy or Italy. So when travellers reached the drier parts of the Mediterranean, they did not find what they expected and assumed that the land had eroded.
The authors have consulted original sources, studied pollen records, visited allegedly degraded parts of Crete, France, Spain and the Peloponnese and analysed the tree cover at the time of the Roman Empire, which was very far from the wildwood of Baroque imagination. They conclude that Xenophon would have recognised the landscape of modern Greece - except that the fens have been drained.
The first objection to the Ruined Landscape theory, say Rackham and Grove, is that it is much too generalised. It is possible that one side of a mountain was degraded, but not always the other. The second objection is that the Mediterranean climate - a wet winter growing season and harsh dry summers - has been typical for about 5,000 years. Floods do seem to be worse than they used to be, but people have been saying this for centuries and tend to underestimate natural variability. Erosion from rocky "badlands" to the sea is a natural process that can dwarf the human-caused problem of farmland. Ruined Landscape theory has it that estuaries in Italy, France and Spain that were harbours in ancient times are wide deltas today as a result of erosion. Grove and Rackham point out that the erosion happened in the 16th and 17th centuries, not under Imperial Rome, when the use of the hills was heaviest.
Mediterranean vegetation, they say, is lower and more indestructible than it is given credit for. Most trees, once felled or browsed, just grow as maquis - which is where Homer's boar hunts really took place. Grazing pressure has been heavy before: prehistoric Crete, with its pygmy hippos, pygmy elephants and slow deer, was heavily browsed. Sardinia's forests, which were felled in the 19th century, have re-grown and now cover a larger area, the authors found. All round the Mediterranean, woodlands are now increasing at the expense of grassland. Forests have survived - in Crete and around Rome - precisely because they had an economic use as the source of ships or charcoal.
Grove and Rackham rightly value old ways of living with nature - and the ecology that results from them. Mediterranean agriculture is an agro-ecological strategy, an adjustment to particular climatic conditions in Mediterranean zones: mild, humid winter with no or very little frost, and a warm, dry summer. The strategy is made up of a complex of four components: rainfed annual crops based on the winter rain on hillside built terraces, permanent treecrops surviving the dry summer, transhumance avoiding the dry summer in the lowland plaines, and irrigation compensating the lacking summer precipitation this way opening the possibility for more than one annual crop. Farmers shared water in Spain for hundreds of years, as Islam came and went.
The real scarcity in modern Europe, the authorsconclude, is not soil but water. In southern Spain and Greece, groundwater has been over-exploited, so that sea water may now be sucked into aquifers, causing the salting of fresh water on a scale unknown to the ancients.
Finally, they point to the real threats to Mediterranean landscapes in the recent past (especially after WW II) and the immediate future: not only coastal development, but also bulldozing, excessive irrigation, and the consequences of depopulation in the interior rural areas.
The authors' polemic against Ruined Landscape theory sometimes fails to convince. I would have liked a less terse explanation of how North Africa stopped being Rome's grainbasket and why the ruined cities of Leptis Magna and Timgad now stand amid desolation. Just as it challenges belief that the whole of the Mediterranean is a ruined landscape, it is also difficult to believe that none of it is.
The reader may find another concise review of this book here.
