Environment and Civilization

Those who look at the Parthenon, that incomparable symbol of the achievements of an ancient civilization, often do not see its wider setting.

Behind the Acropolis, the bare dry mountains of Attica show their rocky bones against the blue Mediterranean sky, and the ruin of the finest temple built by the ancient Greeks is surrounded by the far vaster ruins of an environment which they desolated at the same time. In the centuries before the Golden Age of Athens, those same mountains were covered by forests and watered by springs and streams. The philosopher Plato saw evidence of the changes that had occurred not long before; there were buildings in Athens with beams fashioned from trees that had grown on hillsides which by his day were eroded and covered only with herbs, and he visited shrines once dedicated to the guardian spirits of flowing springs which had since dried up.

The huge Roman cities of North Africa have only recently been excavated from the drifted sands of the Sahara Desert which had covered them for centuries. Now the long, wide streets, the theaters and marketplaces stand uninhabited in a sterile landscape, but in ancient times they supported large populations and exported wheat, olive oil, and other agricultural products to Rome. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire evidently had an environmental dimension.

The cedar forests of Lebanon supplied the best wood not only for the construction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, but also for numerous cities of the Near East. Today a few tiny, protected groves manage to survive among whole mountain ranges of dry, eroded rock. The once-prosperous capital cities of Mesopotamia are now mounds of clay in the desert, where the courses of dry canals may be traced under dust and sand blown there by the winds. The famous “Fertile Crescent” of early agriculture once arched from the borders of Egypt through Syria and Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf, but pictures taken from space by the astronauts show that it is now a shrunken remnant.

Throughout the Mediterranean Basin and the adjoining Near East, the ruins of ancient civilizations stand amid the evidences of depleted environment. The conclusion seems inescapable that the natural environment and the course of civilizations were interrelated. In order to study that interrelationship from the viewpoint of environmental history, one needs to attempt to apply the insights of ecology to human history. An effort such as this requires digging into the records of ancient civilizations, studying both their writings and their archaeological remains. For the author, it requires familiarity with ancient history and environmental science.

It is a subject on the borderline between two vast fields, but an ecological view of ancient civilizations in that part of the world where modern Western society found its roots promises to be rewarding, since it may reveal insights not only into the fates of those vanished civilizations but also into the development of human relationships with and attitudes toward the natural environment down to the present day.

Ecology, as understood in this regard, is the study of the interrelationships of living things to one another and their surrounding environment. Thus considered, it is a branch of biology, the study of living things. Ecology is a wide-ranging study of whole assemblages of living things as they interact with one another. These interacting assemblages are called ecosystems.

Ecology avoids concentrating too long on any one animal or plant in isolation, and tries to see that everything is connected to everything else. The human species is no exception to this last statement, and in a discussion of ecology and ancient civilizations, interest centers on mankind.

The very word ecology, in its Greek roots, reflects an early concern with humanity. Oikos means home or house in Greek, and by extension it came to mean the whole inhabited earth, the oikoumene, the home of all mankind. Logos, meaning reason or study, is a common suffix applied indicating the human mind at work on a given subject. Human ecology, then, is a rational study of how mankind interrelates with the home of the human species, the earth; with its soil and mineral resources; with its water, both fresh and salt; with its air, climates, and weather; with its many living things, animals and plants, from the simplest to the most complex; and with the energy received ultimately from the sun.

In the historical study of the relationship of human civilizations to the natural environment, certain themes present themselves, and among these, three seem basic and central: first, the influence of the environment on the development of civilizations; second, human attitudes toward nature; and third, the impact of civilizations upon the natural environment. The natural environment had a constant, formative influence on ancient civilizations. This first theme has been considered by many of the sciences, many writers, beginning with Hippocrates, the Greek father of medicine, who noticed the effect of climate on human health, temperament, and intelligence and remarked that civilizations arose in lands of moderate or warm climate with light rainfall, where water supply was a major challenge.

One of the most striking contrasts between the ancient and modern worlds is the more direct dependence on the natural world which ancient peoples both had and felt. There was no vast technology then interposing between human beings and nature. Intimacy with nature and sensitivity to its cycles was the rule, not the exception.

Of course, the natural environment is not the only influence on developing civilizations; cultural traits, the past experience of peoples, mobility, and the level of technological development are important, too. But it is a major factor. The Greeks and Phoenicians, with ready access to the sea, were much more likely to develop naval and merchant skills than the landlocked Assyrians and Persians. The types of soil and terrain available to a society placed limits on the nature and extent of the food supply. The thin, hilly soil of Attica, for example, was suited to growing olive trees and grapevines but not to extensive grain cultivation. The presence or absence of various minerals and stone for quarrying was important; the Egyptians erected stone monuments, but the Mesopotamians in their alluvial valley built with clay bricks. The manufacture of bronze depended on tin, and some ancient nations had to import tin from mines hundreds of miles away.

The kinds of animals and plants in the environment affected civilizations, too. Some could be domesticated or cultivated and introduced to other areas where the climate was favorable to them. The Greeks introduced the olive almost everywhere they settled.

The art and literature of all civilizations are full of motifs inspired by the natural world. Examples such as the Minoan frescoes of octopuses and leaping dolphins, the Assyrian reliefs of lions, or Homer’s description of the forest near the Cave of Calypso in the Odyssey occur to mind. Philosophy was affected, too; Thales, who said the world was made of water, lived on the island-dotted shore of the Aegean Sea, not in the arid interior of Asia. Religion was deeply imbued with nature. Most early religions emphasized fertility and honored certain animals, plants, and locations; Christians use wine and bread in the sacrament because these were the staple food and drink of the land of Christianity’s birth. This list of influences of the natural environment on civilizations is far from complete. The theme of environmental influence on civilization is vast and pervading, and has been the subject of many prior studies. In an article such as this one, some comment upon it is unavoidable. But the other two themes mentioned above, which emphasize human response to and effects on the natural environment, have received significantly less attention and will be the major concerns here.

The relationship of these ancient civilizations to the natural environment was determined in part by their characteristic attitudes toward nature. Certainly the actions of a people tend to reflect their perceptions and their values. A people who, for the most part, regard certain natural objects as sacred will treat them in a different way from those who regard them merely as things to use. Modern attitudes find precedents in the ancient world; if some modern environmental problems are similar to those faced by ancient peoples, some of them may also be due to the perpetuation of ancient attitudes, attitudes varying from worship and curiosity to domination and use. In this book, considerable attention will be given to the question, What were the attitudes of ancient peoples toward nature?

Human civilizations have altered the environments in which they developed. Some of the effects have been advantageous for mankind and have made it possible for people to live in a symbiotic balance with nature. The examples which began this article, however, the deforestation of Greece and Lebanon and the invasion of Roman and Mesopotamian cities by the desert, are evidence of human mistreatment of nature, and the conclusion seems inescapable that nature has had her revenge in the fall of civilizations.

The dichotomy of human activities and the natural environment is false, even though it is useful for the purpose of discussion, since mankind is part of nature and both acts upon and is acted upon by the rest of the natural world. But to a greater extent than any other creature, mankind has shown an ability to alter, shape, and interfere in the interrelationships of all creatures. This ability and its results are a major cause of the successes and failures of ancient civilizations. As Ellen Semple wisely observed.

“The causes of decline are to be sought . . . in denudation of the hillside soil, deforestation with the failure of springs, destruction of irrigation works by barbarian or nomad attack, collapse of orderly government under repeated barbarian inroads, and possibly to exhaustion of the soil, causing agricultural decline.”

It is this aspect of the relationship between civilization and the environment, that is, the impact of human activities on the natural world, along with the human attitudes which help to shape those activities, which should be studied thoroughly. How did civilizations alter the natural environment, and why?

Environmental history is a rapidly expanding discipline, and it is the author’s hope that new investigations will add to our knowledge of environment and mankind in the ancient period, and thus help us in our understanding of our present environmental crisis.