Early Environmentalism

Our workshop in class on Wednesday provoked thoughtful discussions surrounding the general lack of usage of the environment and subsequent environmental factors to more effectively study the past. I was interested in the lack of both modern and ancient texts, as well as a lack of representation more generally, on how the environment shaped Ancient Greek and other Mediterranean societies. Investigating such epistemic gaps in the collective social resources, as well as why they may exist in the first place are crucial for understanding not only the past, but also how we, in modern times, conceptualize the past. What is at stake when environmental factors (such as failing to take pollen samples from ancient wells) are largely ignored in early studies and scholarship of the Greeks and other past societies? Why weren’t the Greeks more aware of depleting natural resources in such a geographically insular community? Is is hard for modern minds to comprehend such abundance of resources that may have lead to Greeks and other ancient societies to exercise such disregard for the environment and natural resources?

I would argue that ignoring the environmental aspect of any society is a failure to approach an attempts of fostering deeper understanding correctly. This failure also rings of modern attitudes towards not taking the role the environment plays in our everyday lives very seriously. We see this in the majority of society’s slow, or even failure to, uptake the reality of climate change and global warming, even when confronted with massive amounts of data and evidence documenting this climate crisis. Perhaps this is due to a perceived lack of agency reflected in human interactions with the environment. That is to say, environmental factors are a manifestation of such a vast concept of the environment, as well as so uncontrollable and unpredictable, that people have a hard time believing that they can affect such massive and ultimately destructive changes in their individual environments, and even the global environment as a whole. This uncontrollability aspect of theorizing about environmental attitudes could also lead to the belief of many societies throughout time viewing the environment as something needing to be conquered else it could do harm unto the people themselves.

A book that I read called The Unnatural History of the Sea, by Callum Roberts deals with similar issues of conceptualizing human impacts on a large- and small-scale basis across time. What most struck me in reading this book, so much so that I recall it even now, years later, was the notion that environmental degradation and collapse are simply the last chapters in a long history of disregard for the environment. Roberts uses firsthand accounts of early explorers, pirates, merchants, fishers, and travelers to imaginatively reconstruct oceans of the past as so rich with marine life, the accounts are nearly unbelievable. This notion speaks to the unawareness of ancient societies of their role in depleting natural resources. Such resources seem to be so abundant, an infinite supply almost, until everything is gone, and the consequent realization of their expendability is reached. A failure to recognize the possibility of such occurrences as well as environmental attitudes and factors more generally, by modern scholarship is an epic failure that could potentially trace its roots to the very environmental theories of ancient societies that they are failing to study.