On a recent trip to Venice, my wife and I experienced high water. Since we were there in late summer, when the water is usually low, we were surprised and unprepared. So were the Venetians. The next day’s newspaper headlined a “nightmare storm that paralyzed half the province.” Seasonal high water—acqua alta—usually begins in November. Pushed by onshore winds, an amplified tide rolls through the narrow channels that link the Venetian lagoon to the Adriatic. When the tide turns, the wind holds some water against the shore, so with each succeeding high tide, the lagoon gets fuller. The flooding we were experiencing was caused by a heavy rainstorm. A combination of the two events—torrential rain and wind-driven high water—hit Venice in 1966.1 The one-two punch nearly drowned the city. A return of that fatal combination is what Venetians dread.
Everyone knows that flooding on this devastating scale is a recent threat.2 And everyone knows that Venice is sinking. Rising seas, the city’s own weight, and a falling water table drive it deeper into the mud every year.3 Storm sewers in any other city would have carried the rainwater away, but in Venice there is no “away.” The city has sewers, but they drain into the lagoon. When the tide is in, water rises above the sewer outlets, so rain pools in the streets and piazzas until the next tide. The water runs off only if the lagoon level falls enough.
Venice is the most Mediterranean of cities, not because it is typical—it is certainly not that—but because it is directly linked to the sea and affected daily, even hourly, by the dynamics of sea winds and waves. Because of this unbreakable link, Venice is the canary in the mine for the entire Mediterranean basin. The city’s health gives warning of things to come, and at this moment the bird is gasping for breath. Understanding how Venice came to be poised on the brink of disaster points the way to an evaluation of the whole region. Though not as imperiled as Venice, it is certainly under stress. On behalf of the Mediterranean as a whole, Venice poses this urgent question: When and how did our environment become so endangered?
A capsule history of Venice breaks down into two unequal parts.4 From its founding sometime in the late Roman imperial era to the end of the eighteenth century, it was an independent city-state. Since then it has been a mere city under the rule of outside forces. Napoléon captured Venice in 1797 and stripped it of its assets before he deeded it to Austria. In 1870 the Austrians gave way to the Italians. None of these conquerors had much of an understanding of the city they took over. Their lack of comprehension should come as no surprise. Imagine a powerful, rich, and influential civilization that in 1800 had no use for horses and little use for the wheel. It had few machines more powerful than clocks and relied on human muscle for mobility. A metropolis without roads, it was surrounded not by fields and pastures but by expanses of water. What was any sensible person to think? The sensible Austrian and Italian planners who took control devoted their efforts to making Venice more like the mainland cities they knew.
The environmental crisis in modern Venice is the result of repeated attempts to fix something that was not broken originally but became damaged, perhaps irreparably, by ill-considered mending. The local artisans and managers who had guided the city’s development and maintained its ecology for generations were replaced by outsiders who did not understand how Venice worked. The result of their misguided repairs splashes underfoot in the city today. Looking at the outline of Venice on a map, many people see the image of a fish. Like a fish, the city swims in the waters of the lagoon. But in a most unfishlike way, Venice nearly drowns in those waters on an annual basis. It is a fish on a leash, bound to the land by an umbilical causeway that force-feeds it an unending diet of visitors.
Modern Venice is a fish on a leash.
Historical Venice could not have been described as a fish, because before 1800 Venice was not limited to that fishy outline on the map. The city stretched across the lagoon with its multiple islands, mud banks, and sandbars. This curious metropolis was linked by waterways that reached from the barrier islands deep into the marshy mainland coast. The Venetian Empire, comprised primarily of Mediterranean islands, extended the pattern. The urban center was bound to its lagoon—the Laguna Veneta—not just by navigable channels, as it still is today, but in a hundred other ways. Food from island and inland gardens came to the city in boats across the lagoon waters, which themselves provided the fish that formed a major part of the Venetian diet. The traditional relationship between the city and the lagoon was much like the one that existed between terrestrial cities and the fields and farms that surrounded them, except that Venetians farmed the waters as well as that little earth they possessed.
Historical Venice comprised both land and water, as did its colonial empire, which extended far beyond the Laguna Veneta.
Today sewage and industrial waste poison the lagoon. Most of the islands are abandoned to smugglers, looters, and illegal fishermen. The outlines of ancient aquaculture remain, but the fish are few and poisoned by chemical effluents. Over time the very perception of the lagoon has changed. What was once understood as a region under cultivation—an agricultural landscape, though an anomalous one—is now classified as wild. Modern Venice is a world heritage urban site set in the middle of a fouled ecological preserve. These irreconcilable identities cancel the historical interdependence of the city and its lagoon and hamstring efforts to reverse the damage to both.5
It may be too late for Venice, just as it may be too late for the Mediterranean region as a whole. There is a good chance that humans have already abused not just one city or region but the earth itself to a point beyond its ability to recover health. Continuing failure is all too apparent as nations struggle to articulate their responsibility to the planet and act for its benefit. A whirlwind of controversy and doubt surrounds global warming. Is it real? Is it our fault? Can we fix it? What will happen if we do nothing? As we struggle for clarity, we are all but blinded by myths and misconceptions that disguise our own biological nature and downplay our absolute dependency on the limited resources of our planet. There is a conspiracy of sorts—ad men, pundits, and politicians blow smoke and flash mirrors—but deliberate mystification is just a small part of the problem. A more significant part, and one more difficult to discern, is played by our intellectual inheritance from the nineteenth century. Much of what we think of as axiomatic in the debate about environmentalism today is a version of one or another nineteenth-century theory. More often than not, we have forgotten the theorists and the background of their thought; we remember their conclusions, though, and take them for truths.
The contemporary environmental crisis is the endgame in a prolonged and culture-wide historical chess match. In a real sense, the global crisis is both an echo and an outgrowth of the Mediterranean disaster.
The Mediterranean can be narrowly defined as a great inland sea and its coast. As a climate zone, it roughly corresponds with the range of the domestic olive tree. Historically and culturally, however, the Mediterranean stretches well beyond these boundaries. When we speak of Europe or European culture, even when we speak of the West or the Western cultural heritage, these vague concepts are largely underwritten by events and movements that flourished first in the Mediterranean. For millennia, Mediterranean societies attracted admiration and envy and served evolving cultures as a model or a foil. Mediterranean nations were the first colonial powers in the world, and the Westernization and modernization of Africa, Asia, and the Americas all began under the influence of Spain and Portugal. Colonialism and its evils matured under the dominance of northern European nations, but in spreading the influence and culture of the West for good or ill, Mediterranean powers cast the mold. The Mediterranean region magnified itself over the long span of its history both physically and in terms of its influence, and we can trace that movement well beyond the Mediterranean Sea.
While Venice has been sinking underwater during the past two hundred years, Mediterranean societies and their scattered offspring worldwide have been experiencing an extended bout of what sociologists call anomie—life without rules—in relation to the earth and ecology. Anomie often follows severe social disruptions, like the Napoleonic Wars that plunged eighteenth-century Venice into crisis. The causes of modern confusion run deeper than any single cataclysm, but today we find ourselves in an equally bad situation. Caught in a desperate state of affairs, people find it exceptionally difficult to articulate problems and to solve them. Without an accepted set of principles or standards that decision makers can appeal to, right and wrong are up for grabs. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” as William Butler Yeats puts it. To make matters worse, in turbulent times the stakes are abnormally high. The wrong decision is easy to make, and the consequences of error are certain to be more dire than they would be in a period of stability.
Before we rush to judgment and ask ourselves yet again, What is to be done?, it might be worth pausing and asking the questions that the fate of Venice prompts. Have things always been this way? Is the present precarious state of affairs the historical norm? Have Mediterranean societies ever responded coherently to the fundamental questions of living on earth? Bear in mind that the roll call of the societies at issue includes many to which we owe some spiritual or intellectual debts and others toward which many of us feel substantial degrees of kinship. Mesopotamia (the Fertile Crescent), Israel, ancient Greece and Rome, the nations of Europe and the Muslim world—could all these societies have come into existence and flourished for so long continually plagued, as we are plagued, by indecision and confusion about issues that are basic to survival on this planet? Did they make their life and death choices with nothing more to guide them than we have? Did they, like us, willfully plunder the land for short-term gain while they compromised the comfort and security of their neighbors, their children, and themselves? Or did they live differently and in harmony with that portion of the earth that they recognized as the source of their well-being?
Looking back, many environmentalists have concluded that the present emergency is just the crisis stage of a malaise that afflicted Mediterranean societies from the start. If we listen to the polemics of some of the more radical among them, we might be convinced that the problem began when human societies turned from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and took up new technologies of cultivation and domestication. The rallying cry of these activists is “Back to the Paleolithic”—back to following game animals and living directly from what the earth offers unpersuaded and uncoerced. Few of us would survive under such rigorous conditions, and most of those who study the Mediterranean past do not advocate such a radical turnaround.
They might logically do so, however, because many of those who critique our deep environmental history base their polemics on more or less the same turning point: the Neolithic invention of agriculture. Nutritionists argue that the human species is adapted genetically to the Paleolithic diet and that we have had insufficient evolutionary time to readjust to the increased starch and decreased activity that communities embraced when cultivated grains replaced a diet based on foraging and hunting. They trace the roots of modern obesity and heart disease back to the Neolithic. One popular writer on ecological history, Jared Diamond, has been among the most vocal critics of the Neolithic. He has portrayed Mesopotamian agriculture as a prolonged disaster directed by self-interested elites who managed their resources for the benefit of themselves and their families while others’ needs went unmet. Other environmentalists have joined Diamond in his effort to portray Mesopotamian agriculture not as a triumph of social organization and land management but as the start of a prolonged slide into the infertility that haunts the Fertile Crescent today.6
The historian Lynn White argued many years ago that “the roots of our current environmental crisis” lay in the book of Genesis.7 In the story of the creation, God commanded the first human to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over … every living thing” (Gen. 1:29). God’s fiat would seem to justify any amount of human manipulation or exploitation of nature, and White argued that the Christian community had carried out this divine instruction to the letter. For White, Mesopotamian societies were not the culprit; the blame lay in the Holy Land.
The ecologist Aldo Leopold had his own idea about the roots of the crisis. He did not see environmental degradation springing from official mismanagement or obedience to a divine commandment but arising as the consequence of a long-standing moral vacuum. In one of his most influential essays, Leopold argued for the existence of an evolutionary or progressive trend in the ethical thinking of Mediterranean societies.8 His argument was based on the gradual expansion of rights that can be seen as a deep background theme in Western culture. Rights of full participation in the community were once the privilege of the noble few. Over time these rights extended to all free males, then to those who had once been held in bondage, to women, and in lesser degree to children. At present some activists are arguing for the extension of rights to unborn fetuses; others press for animal emancipation. Leopold believed that this historical expansion of rights would encompass the biological world someday and that we would come to understand ourselves as citizens of the ecosystem and not solely of the human community.
Many other theories of similar character trace the current environmental crisis into the past and posit different starting points for disaster. The response that all these theories provoke is this: If the crisis is so deeply rooted, why did its effects take so long to be felt? While some equivocate, suggesting that Mediterranean ecology was compromised almost from the start of the agricultural revolution, the best data do not support that position. Things have been starkly, demonstrably bad in the past two hundred years, and they were far better before that. Indeed, compared to the present state of the region, even the most extreme view of past environmental damage must acknowledge it as benign.
The more common answer accepts as a given the contrast between the ecologically healthy past and the demonstrably abused present. Its response to the question of Why now? typically assumes a gradual worsening to the crisis stage or points to technology. Proponents of the technological argument agree that although ancient societies may have been inept, misdirected, or lacking in ethical attitudes, the consequences of their ignorance were muted because the societies were technologically limited. In this view, nothing really bad happened before the nineteenth century, when the crescendoing use of mechanical and chemical energy gave societies the means to carry out their designs on the earth.
I offer a different picture of the origins of our crisis. I argue that the present state of affairs both regionally and worldwide is much like the situation of Venice. Today’s crisis is not an extension but a contravention of the norms of the historical past: our era came to birth when a once-powerful consensus on the constructive management of the earth, a consensus that had developed along with agriculture, was eroded to extinction. The slow process of erasing this constructive worldview—which I have called First Nature—was substantially complete by the late eighteenth century, and when the last vestiges of the consensus were eradicated, there was nothing to take its place. There were no rules, customs, or standards of conduct to limit exploitation. So technology did its damnedest. With proper cultural guidance, technology might have been a powerful force for human and planetary well-being, as it promises to be in a more enlightened future.
I explore this historical development from the forging of First Nature through its perseverance to the current age of crisis. Finally, I propose remedies to the modern environmental disaster that are based on a creative reworking of the principles that sustained the Mediterranean region for so long. The First Nature vision can be revived and renewed to make it an effective tool for recovering world ecological health.
