1. Lauritzen, Venice Preserved, 23–31.
2. Lauritzen, Venice Preserved, 33–35.
3. Fletcher and Da Mosto, La scienza per Venezia, 32–43.
4. McGregor, Venice from the Ground Up; Lauritzen, Venice Preserved, 35–73.
5. Salvadori, Per e contro Venezia, 81–109.
6. Diamond’s critique is based on theories about the origins of agriculture that are no longer accepted by prehistorians. See Chapter 4.
7. White, “Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.”
8. Leopold, “The Land Ethic,” in Sand County Almanac, 201–26.
1. The title of King’s article, “The Reputed Fossil Man of the Neanderthal,” refers to the site and not yet to the hominid, and “Neanderthal man” occurs with the same geographical sense throughout the article. King describes the find, the haphazard preservation of the bones, and their preliminary study. He notes earlier finds and also counters the arguments that these were animal bones or those of a diseased or “primitive” modern human.
2. In 1871, after Origin’s positive scientific reception, Darwin published The Descent of Man. There he pointed to the links between humans, chimpanzees, and apes and speculated that the origins of human life were to be found in Africa.
3. The debate was live and unscripted. No single authoritative account of it survives. Those who attended remembered it in very different ways, and over time an account of a supercilious, mocking fundamentalist countered by a serious and eloquent spokesman for pure science emerged as the accepted version. Wilberforce’s published review of Origin shows the cleric’s appreciation both for Darwin’s work and for the scientific method in general. By the time King discovered conclusive evidence in the fossil remains of a Neanderthal man, the lines in the debate had already been drawn. Creationists today are still forced to reckon with the quarrymen’s discoveries, which have been augmented by hundreds of others that represent dozens of extinct hominid species. Some among them still draw rather forlornly on Virchow’s alternative explanation.
Bones of premodern humans had been discovered before the Neanderthal finds. A premodern human skull was recovered in Belgium in 1829; a second was excavated in Gibraltar in 1848. Before Origin these finds were anomalies, objects without a context. After Darwin, as King quickly showed, they became key bits of evidence. Albert Einstein once declared to fellow physicist Werner Heisenberg that “theory determines the boundaries of what we can observe.” The science of prehistory, which was born and rapidly came to full flower in the second half of the nineteenth century, exemplified this absolutely. Without Darwin’s theory and the intense debate about human origins that it sparked, there would have been no way to classify hominid remains and no motive to seek them out. For a discussion of the influence of Darwin on nineteenth-century cosmological and social thought, see Chapter 13.
4. The original mitochondrial DNA examination was carried out by Svante Pääbo of the University of Munich and others on a small sample from the arm bone of the Neanderthal described by King. This is the so-called type skeleton of Neanderthal man. Subsequent research on a “38,000 year old Neanderthal fossil” was reported in Green et al., “Analysis of Neanderthal DNA.” The final word on Neanderthal and anatomically modern human genetic history will probably not be written for some time.
5. New research shows that hominids, presumably Neanderthals, reached the island of Crete 130,000 years ago. This precocious seafaring raises the possibility of unanticipated points of entry into the European continent. Strasser et al., “Stone Age Seafaring in the Mediterranean.”
6. The periodic expansion and contraction of polar ice in Europe and its effect on species distribution is discussed in Hewitt, “Genetic Legacy of the Quaternary Ice Ages.” The periodic massing of the populations in small and long-isolated refuges reduced genetic variation and accelerated the development of distinctive Neanderthal features—like the shelving brow—that have no obvious value as adaptations.
7. Wreschner et al., “Red Ochre and Human Evolution.” The evidence for Neanderthal use of ochre consists of the “sprinkling of a human body at Le Moustier, the deposition of bones, jasper and ochre around the head of a male at La Chapelle aux Saints, two skeletons in whose vicinity red ochre abounds at Qafza.” Solecki, “Shanidar iv.”
8. As one report sums up: “The prehistory of human fire has undergone major rethinking in recent years. It now seems that none of the ‘classic’ examples of early fire-use, … hold up under modern scrutiny, either because the source of burning is equivocal … or because the general site integrity can be questioned…. However, more recent discoveries, excavated with modern methods, do indicate that fire was used by hominids during the Middle Palaeolithic … and perhaps earlier.” Rigaud et al., “Mousterian Fires from Grotte XVI.”
9. Foreman, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, 56.
10. The Cro-Magnon, a looming shelter rock in the Dordogne region of southwest France, was the scene of their first discovery in 1868, five years after the publication of King’s Neanderthal identification. The pair discovered the skeletons of five hominids of great antiquity but of nearly modern physiognomy. The current scholarly preference is “anatomically modern human” (AMH) rather than “Cro-Magnon” for these peoples. Though “Cro-Magnon” is now out of favor with prehistorians, it remains in common use.
11. The details were first published by Edouard Lartet and Henri Christy in Reliquiae Acquitanicae.
12. The overlapping of the cultures of anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals is exhaustively described in Bar-Yosef and Pilbeam, Geography of Neanderthals and Modern Humans.
13. Altamira Cave in Spain, the scene of this discovery, had first been explored some five years earlier. Explorers uncovered ancient artifacts, but the paintings went unnoticed. A visit to the Paris Exhibition of 1878, where objects used by premodern humans were prominently displayed, led Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola to revisit the cave. As he searched for remains like those he had seen on display in Paris, his nine-year-old daughter wandered deeper into the cave. She returned to tell her father that further inside she had seen pictures of oxen painted on the walls. Her father recognized that the animals were in fact bison, which had been extinct in Europe for thousands of years. In 1880 he published his discoveries in a book entitled Breves apuntes sobre algunos objetos prehistóricos de la Provincia de Santander. Sautuola’s assertions that these paintings were the work of people who had shared the region with the long-vanished bison were fiercely contested, especially by French scholars. Twenty years after the first publication of the paintings, though, the leading French antagonist admitted his error and acknowledged the antiquity and importance of the Spanish finds. Cartailhac, “Les cavernes ornées de dessins.” Long a favorite of visitors, the cave suffered damage that led to its closure in 1977. Modern visitors must content themselves with a full-size replica of one portion of the cave.
14. He lists Altamira and five French caves, Lascaux, Niaux, Les Trois-Frères, Font-de-Gaume, and Les Combarelles. Breuil, Four Hundred Years of Cave Art.
15. Two authoritative books on the cave and its extraordinary riches have already appeared: Chauvet et al., Dawn of Art; and Clottes et al., Chauvet Cave.
16. The German director Werner Herzog was granted unprecedented access to the cave. Paintings can be seen in his quasi-documentary film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, released in 2011.
17. Lewis-Williams and Clottes, “Mind in the Cave.” In this book one of the principal investigators at the Chauvet Cave, Jean Clottes, drawing on the work with contemporary hunter-gatherers by anthropologist David Lewis-Williams, suggests a reading of the paintings that draws on the psychic transformation of shamans: “During the Upper Paleolithic, we argue, the limestone caves of Western Europe were regarded as topographical equivalents to the psychic experience of the vortex and a nether world. The caves were the entrails of the underworld, and their surfaces—walls, ceilings and floors—were but a thin membrane between those who ventured in and the beings and spirit-animals of the underworld. This is the context of west European cave art, a context created by interaction between universal neuropsychological experiences and topographically situated caves. When people of the Upper Paleolithic embellished these caves with paintings and engravings of animals, signs and, less commonly, apparently human figures, they were at times exploiting certain defined altered states to construct, in each cave, a particular socially and historically situated underworld.”
18. Dissanayake, “What Art Is and What Art Does.”
19. Dissanayake, “Aesthetic Incunabula,” 343, 335.
20. Dissanayake, “Aesthetic Incunabula,” 343.
21. Dissanayake, “Aesthetic Experience and Human Evolution,” 148.
22. Nelson, Make Prayers to the Raven, 15.
1. The old view is well represented in Childe, Man Makes Himself.
2. Jared Diamond is one of the ecologically based critics who relies on the traditional critique in his linking of domestication history, social elites, and state-sponsored violence. See Chapter 5. The same historical misconception underlies the critique of contemporary political economists like Guillermo Algaze (The Uruk World System) who portray Mesopotamia as a founding example of imperialism.
3. The valley was unusual in several ways: “Distinctive climate and environmental diversity at a plate boundary explains the unusual spatial context within which farming began. A similarly unusual context in time is provided by the events accompanying the termination of the last glaciation: increasing warmth and moisture in an interval before postglacial conditions had stabilized.” That is, it was “an unusual time in an unusual place, when the elements were shaken up and reconfigured in the presence of behaviourally modern human populations.” Sherratt, “Diverse Origins,” 3.
4. Sherratt, “Diverse Origins,” 8.
5. “It was the unique characteristics of that intimate intermixture of the desert, the steppe and the sown which made the area between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf into such a powerhouse of innovations.” Sherratt, Economy and Society, 157.
6. Moore, “Abu Hureyra Project,” 69.
7. “Some thirty-five different foreign minerals have been identified, including rock for axes, grinding stones, pigments and beads as well as several varieties of flint and very large quantities of obsidian.” The obsidian came from two kilometers (one and a fifth miles) away. Sherratt, Economy and Society, 254.
8. Cities like Çatalhöyük that were at key points on trade routes into the mountains of Turkey and Iran, “where traffic-flows of resources such as obsidian were concentrated, had nodal positions and an enhanced incentive to sedentism.” Sherratt, “Diverse Origins,” 14.
9. The finds of the first expedition to the site are presented in Mellaart, Catal Huyuk. The site was reopened thirty years after the initial dig. Annual reports during the fifteen years of ongoing excavations directed by Ian Hodder can be read online at www.catalhoyuk.com. Mellaart called the city Catal Huyuk; Çatalhöyük is the spelling preferred by the current excavators.
10. See also Hodder, Domestication of Europe, 8–10.
11. In the original publication about the site, Mellaart expressed surprise that no such quarter was found. Social differentiation was so fundamental a part of theory at the time of the excavation that he assumed that the dig had failed to uncover it, not that it did not exist. Although only a fraction of the site has been excavated, the buildings are remarkably uniform; there is no differentiation of large elite or public buildings. Sherratt, Economy and Society, 254.
12. Mellaart, Catal Huyuk, 106.
13. See Hodder, Domestication of Europe, 7–8.
14. The walls of another shrine in level VII (VII.1) are painted in patterns very like those found on contemporary Turkish kilims: diamond patterns with multiple parallel edges and grids with diamonds inside them. In level VI.B. 44, two jaguars butt heads between buttresses decorated with kilim-like diamond patterns. In level VII.8 there is a painting of a bull on one wall with what appears to be a horned altar on a platform in front of it. In shrine VII.45 there is an image of a human with outspread arms and legs pressed against the buttresses in the center of the wall. The figure has been interpreted as a woman giving birth. In shrine VII.31 the images of bulls’ heads and birthing mothers are combined.
15. Recent excavations of such sites reveal, among other things, an art that “depicts in three dimensions … the kinds of subjects otherwise encountered in rock art.” Hodder, Domestication of Europe, 7–8. The animal art of Çatalhöyük lends support to Sherratt’s notion that the rise of the city had close connections with those scattered locations where trade and other advantages allowed foragers to become sedentary.
16. Since the eighteenth century, scholars and agronomists have put a great deal of theoretical and ideological emphasis on grain production. They see it as more significant and more advanced than herding in terms of the development of human society. V. Gordon Childe and many other more traditional scholars associated large-scale grain production with the rise of elites, the creation of social differentiation and social hierarchy, widespread trade, and the rise of the state form of political organization. Sherratt’s research has reversed chronologies and disabled many of these connections, showing, for example, that trade was an early feature of domestication.
17. Sherratt sums up the remarkable achievements at the north end of the valley. “All this is literally fantastic, but gave rise not only to rectangular houses of increasing constructional skill and perhaps to experiments in animal-keeping which provide the background to the first domestication of ovicaprids.” The flowering of extraordinary social forms at the northern end of the rift “was only one part of the Neolithic revolution … ; it was its dialectical conjunction with developments taking place in other parts of the network—with which it was increasingly combined, from 8000 BC onwards—which gave rise to the classic combination of cereal cultivation, domestic livestock and village life that was to spread with such speed in subsequent millennia and to provide the basis for subsequent developments within the Fertile Crescent.” As Sherratt argues later in the same article, “It is the diversity of lifeways that came together, not the size of their calorific base, which explains their complexity.” Sherratt, “Diverse Origins,” 5–6, 14.
18. Mazoyer and Roudart, History of World Agriculture, 93–94.
19. Roughly speaking, there were three primary Neolithic events: in the Mediterranean, in south China, and in northern South America. Each of these Neolithic events combined and redistributed the domesticates of multiple smaller centers; and some scholars rate the independence of these smaller centers more highly than others, leading to the notion that there were as many as six Neolithic event centers.
20. Davidson, Oxford Companion to Food, 845.
21. See Steven Diamant, review of The Emergence of Civilization: The Cyclades and the Aegean in the Third Millennium BC by Colin Renfrew, American Journal of Archaeology 77 (1973): 346–49.
22. Arroyo-Garcia et al., “Multiple Origins of Cultivated Grapevine.”
23. The literature on Franchthi Cave is extensive. Among the most notable works are van Andel and Sutton, Landscape and People of the Franchthi Region; Perlès, “Long-Term Perspectives”; Jacobsen, “Franchthi Cave”; Hansen, Palaeoethnobotany of Franchthi Cave; and Farrand, Depositional History of Franchthi Cave.
24. The rapid transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic at Franchthi contrasts with the much slower pace of transition at Jericho and Abu Hereyra. This suggests that a Neolithic package already developed elsewhere was imported to Franchthi.
25. The classic description of transhumance is in Braudel, The Mediterranean, vol. 1.
26. West and Zhou, “Did Chickens Go North?”
27. Larson et al., “Worldwide Phylogeography of Wild Boar.”
28. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 13.
29. The pioneering work expressing this view is Paul Shepard’s The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game. A curious manifestation of the sentimental rediscovery of the Paleolithic is the wildlife park in Holland devoted to reconstructed pre-Neolithic fauna. There are others scattered around Europe where scientists are attempting to reintroduce genetically engineered Pleistocene megafauna. The Rewilding Movement, which underlies these projects, is based on both scientific and romantic ideals. See Kolbert, “Recall of the Wild.”
30. Cordain et al., “Origins and Evolution of the Western Diet.”
31. Papathanasiou, “Health Status.” A substantial percentage of that research, however, concerns New World sites and the transition from foraging to agriculture in a region that is culturally analogous but where particular changes of diet do not match up. The agricultural transition in the New World was based on foods that were not cultivated in the Old World.
32. Papathanasiou, “Health Status,” 381.
33. Papathanasiou, “Health Status,” 384.
34. Papathanasiou, “Health Status,” 388.
35. Caldwell and Caldwell, “Was There a Neolithic Mortality Crisis?” 159.
1. The movement of farming technology through the Mediterranean region is illustrated in the endpaper map in Anthony, Lost World of Old Europe.
2. Engels, Origin of the Family (1884); Graves, White Goddess (1948).
3. Gimbutas’s words are quoted in Stanton and Stewart, Feminisms in the Academy, 206. Then comes a discussion of the whole Goddess movement: “The ‘facts’ about past societies that the Goddess movement cites are based on the existence of artifacts (such as female statuettes) and interpretations of certain decorative motifs (e.g. spirals) as female. Certain architectural features … are then viewed as sacred or religious, as are their associated female characteristics or attributes…. In many versions all the diverse goddesses from various circum-Mediterranean locales and varying time periods … are brought together and coalesced into one…. All too often the values or attributes of the coalesced goddesses are subsumed under some form of ‘fertility’ or other biological function, perpetuating an equation of women with nature.” Though admitting variations, the Goddess proponents’ account of life in Old Europe, with its direct continuities from the Paleolithic, suggests overall a society that is “matri-focal, sedentary, peaceful, art-loving, earth-and-sea bound.” Stanton and Stewart, Feminisms in the Academy, 207, 210.
4. Milne, “Ecocriticism.” The ecofeminist Ynestra King “teases out some of the inherent feminist critiques and contradictions of ecofeminism by locating it along a feminist continuum between rational feminism, which would reject any link between woman and nature as a dangerous acknowledgment of biological determinism, and radical feminism, which would argue that women are more natural than men.” Milne, “Ecocriticism.”
5. Douglass W. Bailey, “The Figurines of Old Europe,” in Anthony, Lost World of Old Europe, 113. My account of Old Europe rests on material in David Anthony’s anthology.
6. Douglass Bailey, a contemporary commentator on the figurines, imagines the objects being handled in a variety of different contexts. Rather than tangible expressions of a goddess cult, the female figurines are, in Bailey’s view, representations of a communal ideal. What that ideal might be he leaves to the imagination. Bailey argues that the power of the figurines “rested not in any specific reference to the divine, but rather in their condition as miniature objects, and the ways that miniature objects open up the minds of the people who hold and see them, facilitating deep-seated understandings of what is appropriate in terms of body appearance membership within a group.” Psychological studies, he says, “have shown that something very odd happens to the human mind when one handles or plays with miniature objects. Most simply put, when we focus our attention on miniature objects, we enter another world, one in which our perception of time is altered and in which our abilities of concentration are affected.” Bailey, “Figurines of Old Europe,” 125, 122.
7. For example, at Golyamo Delchevo in Bulgaria, “there were not identifiably male figurines in the houses of the excavated town; all of the figurines that could be assigned a gender were female. Yet all of the high-prestige graves in the nearby cemetery, marked by exotic trade goods and metal, belonged to men.” Anthony, Old Europe, 45.
8. Anthony, Old Europe, 45.
9. Anthony, Old Europe, 45, 48.
10. From the fifteenth century onward, Indo-European languages spread far beyond their earlier geographical limits and are now spoken over much of the globe.
11. In language as in many other things, the Levant is an extension of Africa into Asia. Its primary languages, Arabic and Hebrew, are linked to the indigenous languages of Ethiopia, Egypt, and North Africa. Turkish, which originated in the steppes of East Asia, is not an Indo-European language. Within the broadly contiguous swath of ethnicities that join Europe to East and South Asia, there are patches where remnant languages hold out. The Basques of Spain, the Finns and the Hungarians, and the Georgians of the Black Sea coast all speak languages that do not belong to the Indo-European family.
12. “V. Gordon Childe assumed that large-scale migrations would have been associated with the prehistoric diffusion of Indo-European languages and … therefore searched the archaeological record for a material culture horizon that was distributed widely enough to qualify as the archaeological manifestation of that diffusion. Linguistic evidence suggested that any such horizon should be located in the temperate zone, should represent a culture familiar with copper/bronze and wheels, and should predate the 2d millennium BCE…. He saw [such a] complex as originating in the Ukrainian North Pontic steppes, a region favored by some linguists as a probable homeland for Proto-Indo-European languages.” Anthony, “Kurgan Culture,” 291.
13. Anthony, “Kurgan Culture,” 291.
14. Cavalli-Sforza’s work is thoroughly described in Sykes, Seven Daughters of Eve.
15. Renfrew, Archaeology and Language.
16. However plausible the model may be, its ability to convince rests on shifting ground. The current picture of mitochondrial DNA distribution in Europe and the current thinking about the pace of genetic mutation are fundamental to it. New research will probably modify these factors in unpredictable ways. The long and involved history of post-Neolithic population movements in Europe is a complicating factor of the greatest importance. So far genetic research has been comfortably allied with an ideal of deep history. In time we may find that the genetic echo of events that unfolded thousands of years ago is fainter and more ambiguous than we now are prone to think.
17. “Though these societies were late to join the movement, they preceded the Mesopotamian flowering of agriculture by centuries. In the case of monumental construction and the elaboration of fixed material culture, it helps us to understand why the most spectacular monuments of Neolithic culture, in the form of megalithic tombs and ceremonial monuments, lay in the west and north of Europe, not in the Balkans—in areas where the ‘Mesolithic’ inheritance was the strongest, not in the areas where cereal production was most effective.” Sherratt, “Diverse Origins,” 14. Some prehistorians put these late converts in the Mesolithic period, a transitional phase between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic.
18. He goes on to say that the image of the house is not casual but associated with “male-female relationships, which are themselves linked to competition between lineages for control of labour.” Such structures are “ways of coping with and involving material culture in similar social strategies.” Hodder, “Burials, Houses, Women and Men,” 53.
19. “Aggregated communities were not possible,” says Sherratt. “This interpretation of the social basis of the megalith-building groups … does not imply that such groups were essentially egalitarian—in the sense that there was no conflict of interests between different status- and kinship-groups—for it is basic to the idea of such ritual-centered organizations that that competition took place between (probably exogamous) local units, and that certain sections of the population (notably senior men) exercised authority within them. But authority was localized, and there was no hierarchy in the sense of successive tiers of authority: rather, dominant groups promoted a common ideology which supported their own interests within the unit.” Sherratt, Economy and Society, 145. Though Sherratt’s description applies specifically to northern European groups, it can reasonably be extended throughout the megalithic zone.
20. Until recently no early villages had been discovered among the islands, and no early cemeteries. In the 1990s, foundations of modest rough-built houses of loose stone and mud brick were uncovered. These small scattered settlements are dwarfed by the several megalithic complexes that survive.
21. J. D. Evans’s The Prehistoric Antiquities of the Maltese Islands is the most complete survey of all the archaeological sites described here.
22. Hodder argues that the “elaboration of the entrance area, the facades and forecourts, the closing of the [monuments] and the difference in ritual and artifacts inside and outside … all indicate the same concerns with an inner/outer dichotomy, with control and seclusion. No more eloquent testimony of the latter principles could be provided than the false portals.” Hodder, “Burial, Houses, Women, and Men,” 63.
23. “In Atlantic Europe in both early and later phases the position of women is emphasized in the context of communal ritual, outside the domestic sphere. Here women are depicted and the domestic ‘house’ context is elaborated. Women as reproducers, as the source and focus of the lineage, are here celebrated…. Women as reproducers and their position in the domestic context are, in the context of ritual, appropriated for the lineage, as a whole. Their services are for the lineage alone and this control is legitimated by the ancestors and by higher authorities.” Hodder, “Burial, Houses, Women, and Men,” 64.
1. Shortly after 3500 BCE, traders, explorers, and warriors from Uruk began to impinge on their neighbors. This aggression has typically been seen as resource-driven, but see note 4 below.
2. Lawler, “Archaeology: North Versus South.” On Uruk in general, see especially the essays in Rothmann, Uruk Mesopotamia and Its Neighbors; Collins, Uruk Phenomenon.
3. Many of the most valuable of these tablets passed into the hands of private collectors and did not become available for scholarly study until the late 1980s. Representatives are now in the British Museum, the Louvre, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The bulk of the collection is held by the University of Berlin. In 1990 the tablets were exhibited and a catalogue prepared. Portions of that catalogue have been published in English, and the text, by Hans J. Nissen and others, remains the most authoritative work on early cuneiform. The title of the publication, Archaic Bookkeeping, Early Writing, and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East, is revealing.
4. I am summarizing the argument in Rothman, Uruk Mesopotamia and Its Neighbors, 27–84. Uruk’s trade has been characterized as imperialistic. According to Guillermo Algaze, in Uruk World System, Uruk functioned as a high-volume agricultural producer and manufacturing center while villages and lesser states in its periphery produced raw materials. This notion is based on a number of assumptions. The first is that Uruk was resource poor and that its foreign policy was driven by the need to obtain the wood and stone that it lacked. The second unstated assumption of this critique is that both trade and manufacturing are late stages in economic and social development and that they are dependent on the production of an agricultural surplus. Grain was not a commodity that peripheral centers lacked, and there is little reason to believe that they would have needed to trade for it with Uruk rather than grow it themselves. Detailed records of trade do not indicate asymmetry of the kind that Algaze assumes. Finished goods and raw materials flowed in both directions to and from Uruk. See also Stein and Wattenmaker, “On the Uruk Expansion,” 66–69.
5. My discussion draws on Shaw, Oxford History of Ancient Egypt.
6. On Badarian culture in Egypt, see Stan Hendrickx and Pierre Vermeersch, “Prehistory,” in Shaw, Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, 40–43.
7. After the Aswan High Dam was completed in 1970, as Scott Nixon points out, “Egypt switched from the system of irrigation used since the time of the Pharaohs to agriculture based on essentially constant irrigation…. Two important consequences of this change were the need to expand and improve an already extensive system of drainage canals in order to halt or reduce salinization of the soils and the need to increase the application of synthetic fertilizer to replace the nutrient-rich sediment formerly delivered with the flood.” Nixon, “Replacing the Nile.”
8. This important theme is explored fully in Chapter 13.
9. Ehrlich and Ehrlich, One with Nineveh, 4.
10. Ehrlich and Ehrlich, One with Nineveh, 4, 5. This book is clearly meant as an indictment of the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. Nineveh is just a convenient stalking horse. Hubris was the charge leveled by Greek historians and dramatists against the Asian kings who attacked them. Failure in resource management is the key concept that Jared Diamond has also pointed to in a series of op-ed pieces and in his book Collapse.
11. Roberts, The Holocene, 130–31.
12. Diamond, Collapse, 174; Diamond, “Infertile Crescent.”
13. Diamond summarizes the focus of his book Guns, Germs, and Steel as “how some people came to dominate other people” (7).
1. Black et al., Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature [ETCSL], t4.08.30 33.
2. Black et al., ETCSL t.4.08.30 47–60.
3. Black et al., ETCSL t.4.08.16 seg. C, 12–27.
4. On wilderness in modern culture and ecology, see Chapter 13.
5. Black et al., ETCSL t.4.07.3 18–28 passim.
6. Black et al., ETCSL t.4.07.3 29–38.
7. “Baal advanced, [his penis] tumescent; Divine Hadd [his] pha[llus] erect. Moist was the nethermouth of Virgin Anat.” Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 158–59: Baal Cycle, 1.10 iii 5–10 passim.
8. KTU 1.101: “A Hymn to Baal Enthroned,” in Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 388–90 passim.
9. Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 89: Baal Cycle, 1.3 iv 10–20 passim.
10. Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 120–21: Baal Cycle, 1.5 ii 1–8 passim.
11. Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 135: Baal Cycle, 1.6 11 30–35 passim.
12. Wyatt, Religious Texts from Ugarit, 160: Baal Cycle, 1.10 iii 35.
13. M. Smith, Ugaritic Baal Cycle, xxv.
14. Hoffner, Hittite Myths, 15.
15. M. Smith, Ugaritic Baal Cycle, 122–23.
16. As logical as this beginning point might seem, it is not the one that was typically chosen by other West Asian cosmologies. These cosmologies reflected a world that had come under the control of a supreme god through a struggle that often endured through multiple generations. See Hall, “Does Creation Equal Nature?”
17. The week in Genesis is also the beginning of historical time, which in the Torah stands as the record of God’s interaction with his chosen people.
18. White, “Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” 1205.
19. “The religion of the Yahwist’s epic was thus a religion of the earth, more precisely a religion of the agrarian highlands of Biblical Israel…. By consequence, the earth, which defined the character and contours of human life, assumed ultimate value in Yahwistic thought. No philosophical or theological dualism is present by which the world can be conceived in terms of two distinct ontological orders—human and world, history and nature, spirit and body, mind and matter—which may then be weighed against one another to determine their relative value…. Only with the rise of apocalyptic thought, late in Israelite history, is this unified conception of reality and its absolute valuation of earthly existence modified.” Hiebert, Yahwist’s Landscape, 153.
20. In one verse (Exod. 20:18) that describes the reaction of the people to the manifestations on Mount Sinai, the text stops referring to fire and smoke and describes what the “people saw” and heard as “the thunderings, and the lightnings.”
1. Materials from the Uluburun shipwreck were displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition entitled Beyond Babylon, November 18, 2008–March 15, 2009. The catalog of the exhibit, with the same title, edited by Joan Aruz and others, offers a wealth of information not only on the wreck but on Mediterranean trade in the era.
2. Paul Krugman, in Geography and Trade, emphasizes this dynamic in modern markets, where economic activity gradually overcomes the effects of geography.
3. “Many elements in the course of history have colonized the [Mediterranean] Basin thanks to the number of geographic and climate events that periodically occurred in this part of the world…. The region’s physical environment and climate have changed radically since the Mesozoic, with the result that biological composition of the different regions of the Basin and migration routes of invading species have changed repeatedly. Opportunities for invasion and secondary speciation have been continually renewed. As a result, one can find species originating from such different biogeographical realms as Siberia, South Africa, and even some relics of the Antarctic continent…. The Mediterranean thus must be considered as a huge ‘tension zone’ … lying amid the temperate, arid and tropical biogeographical regions which surround it, a zone where intricate interpenetration and speciation has been particularly favored and fostered as compared to the more homogeneous regions to the north and south.” Blondel and Aronson, Biology and Wildlife in the Mediterranean Region, 31.
4. Jared Diamond once postulated that the success of the Levantine Neolithic as compared with that of Africa and the New World depended in part on the shape of the Eurasian continent. The Eurasian continent runs roughly east to west, the Americas stretch from north to south, and Africa stretches south from the equator. From his point of view, the west Eurasian advantage lay in climate homogeneity. Eurasia was more of a piece than either of the other two land masses, so innovations could more easily spread. Innovations in either of the other continental masses needed to spread along a north-south axis, where differences in heat and cold meant very different climates, each of which might be inhospitable to the domesticates of the neighboring climate zone. This view assumes that the spread of cultivation rested on climate homogeneity, but the Mediterranean challenges that notion. Diversity and the ability to successfully absorb new species are its major characteristics as a biological region. Its ability to accept, adapt, and spread the Neolithic discoveries of West Asia rested on its openness rather than on insularity.
5. The standard text on Mediterranean ship history is Casson, Ships and Seamanship. On Bronze Age shipping, see Wachsmann, Seagoing Ships and Seamanship, 69.
6. Clutton-Brock, Horse Power.
7. The best known and most important site with evidence of extensive use of horses is assocated with a people called the Sredni Stog. Their principal site, Dereivka, is located on the Dnieper River north of the Black Sea and just beyond the limits of Old Europe. The remains of more than fifty horses have been excavated at the site. What use the culture made of these horses is clear only to a degree. One key point of disagreement among archaeologists who study the history of horse domestication is the date at which horses were first ridden. The generally accepted date is the first millennium BCE, but individual researchers point to evidence that suggests that riding occurred much earlier. At Dereivka, for example, excavators have found worked bits of deer antler pierced with holes that could be bridle parts. Abnormal wear on the teeth of some horses excavated at the site lends support to the notion that they had worn bridles with bits.
8. “By the beginning of the Iron Age, wild horse populations had declined, and today, only one putative wild population, the Przewalski’s horse, remains. Therefore, a scenario consistent with the archaeological record and genetic results posits that, initially, wild horses were captured over a large geographic area and used for nutrition and transport. As wild populations dwindled because of exploitation or environmental changes, increased emphasis was placed on captive breeding.” Vilà, “Widespread Origins of Domestic Horse Lineages,” 474.
9. Vilà, “Widespread Origins of Domestic Horse Lineages,” 474.
10. Clutton-Brock, Horse Power, 68–69.
11. Kalenka, Horse in Human History, 65.
12. Hyland, Horse in the Ancient World, 26.
1. The ancient Greeks’ debt to the great civilizations of West Asia has only recently been recognized and acknowledged. Because of their antagonism to the Persian Empire, the fifth-century Greeks downplayed that connection and repeatedly asserted that their culture was self-made and free of Asian influence. Groundbreaking studies—Walter Burkert’s The Orientalizing Revolution and M. L. West’s The East Face of Helicon—have shown that Hellenic claims of cultural independence were more wishful thinking than fact. Like the West Asian people with whom they shared technologies and ideas, the Greeks understood the order of the world in terms of landscape.
2. Homer, Iliad 18, 535–40, trans. A. S. Kline, Poetry in Translation, http://poetryintranslation.com/.
3. Homer, Iliad 18, 540–60.
4. Homer, Iliad 18, 575–90; the quotation is continued in a following paragraph. The lion attacking a bull is one of the most common images in the art of West Asia. It appears in monumental sculpture, on pottery, and in hundreds of copies on cylinder seals.
5. The “means of life” was fire:
But Zeus in the anger of his heart hid
it, because cunning Prometheus deceived him.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But afterwards Zeus who gathers the
clouds said to him in anger:
“Son of Iapetus, surpassing all in cunning, you are
glad that you have outwitted me and stolen fire.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But I will give men as
the price for fire an evil thing which will gladden
their heart as they embrace their own destruction.”
So said the father of men and gods, and laughed.
Hesiod, Works and Days, 44–60 passim.
6. In Hesiod’s words:
And he told famous Hephaestus to make haste and mix earth
with water and to put in it the voice and strength of a human,
and mold a sweet, lovely maiden-shape, with a face like the immortal
goddesses; … golden Aphrodite would give her
beauty that inspires cruel longing….
And he charged Hermes the guide, the Slayer of Argus, to put into
her a shameless mind and a deceitful nature.
Hesiod, Works and Days, 60–70.
7. “A twofold tale I shall tell: at one time they [i.e. the roots] grew to be one alone out of many, at another again they grew apart to be many out of one. Double is the birth of mortal things and double their failing; for the one is brought to birth and destroyed by the coming together of all things, the other is nurtured and flies apart as they grow apart again. And these things never cease their continual interchange, now through Love all coming together into one, now again each carried apart by the hatred of Strife. So insofar as they have learned to grow one from many, and again as the one grown apart grows many, thus far do they come into being and have no stable life; but insofar as they never cease their continual interchange, thus far they exist always changeless in the cycle.” Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers, 287.
8. Since the concept of the four elements was fundamentally wrong, every effort to break down substances into these constituent parts failed. For Empedocles, however, the issue was not the chemical composition of materials but the theory’s ability to mediate between seemingly irreconcilable states. Like the cosmological poets of West Asia, Empedocles was trying to account for the difference between the ideal and the real. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers, 238.
9. On Parmenides, see Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers, 239–63. See also Osborne, Presocratic Philosophy, 1–79.
10. “There are just these [elements], but running through one another, they become different things at different times and yet ever and always the same.” Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers, 290, frag. 349.
11. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers, 289–90, frag. 349.
12. “Friends who live in the great city of the yellow Acragas, up on the heights of the citadel, caring for good deeds, I give you greetings. An immortal god, mortal no more, I go about honored by all, as is fitting, crowned with ribbons and fresh garlands; and by all whom I come upon as I enter their prospering towns, by men and women, I am revered. They follow me in their thousands, asking where lies the road to profit, some desiring prophecies, while others, long transfixed by harsh pains, ask to hear the word of healing for every kind of illness.” Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers, 313, frag. 399. I rearranged the last line.
13. Herodotus described the teaching of one such philosophical school founded by a follower of Pythagoras: “He built a hall in which he received and entertained the leading citizens, and taught them that neither he nor his guests nor any of their descendants would die, but that they would go to a place where they would survive for ever and possess every good thing.” Herodotus, 4:95, in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers, 218.
14. “There is an oracle of Necessity, ancient decree of the gods, eternal, sealed with broad oaths: when anyone sins and pollutes his own limbs with bloodshed, who by his error makes false the oath he swore—spirits whose portion is long life—for thrice ten thousand years he wanders apart from the blessed, being born throughout that time in all manner of forms of mortal things, exchanging one hard path of life for another…. Of these, I too am one, an exile from the gods and a wanderer, having put my trust in raving Strife.” Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers, 315, frag. 401.
15. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Presocratic Philosophers, 315, frag. 401.
16. This is not a popular dialogue today, though historically it has been among the philosopher’s most influential. During the Middle Ages, when the rest of Plato’s dialogues were unknown in Europe, the Timaeus was widely read. Its concepts were extremely influential in the Renaissance. Since that time, however, it has been considerably less studied and less valued.
17. Like all Plato’s works, the Timaeus is a dialogue with multiple speakers and multiple points of view. The point of view in the Timaeus is supplemented and to a degree contradicted in other dialogues. Given its unique status as a cosmological argument from one of the most authoritative of Greek philosophers, however, the Timaeus cosmology as it is outlined here was widely accepted as Plato’s own view on these issues.
18. Though the language and logic of this passage is specifically Platonic, the narrative pattern is familiar. Essentially, Timaeus offers an explanation of how the work of the wholly good, rational, and divine craftsman could encompass imperfection, irrationality, and ethical failure. In the biblical creation story, Adam’s disobedience to God’s command caused the Fall, which blighted human life. In Timaeus, it was the recalcitrance of the original material from which the earth and everything on it was formed that accounted for imperfection.
19. Plato, Critias 111 a–d, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, in Plato, vol. 9, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929).
20. “Everything that Nature makes is means to an end. For just as human creations are the products of [craft], so living objects are manifestly the products of an analogous cause or principle, not external but internal.” Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, I.i (641b).
21. “And that the heaven, if it had an origin, was evolved and is maintained by such a cause, there is therefore even more reason to believe than that mortal animals so originated. For order and definiteness are much more plainly manifest in the celestial bodies than in our own frame; while change and chance are characteristic of the perishable things of earth.” Aristotle, On the Parts of Animals, I.ii (641b).
22. Aristotle, Politics, 1.2.
23. Aristotle, Politics, 1.1.
24. Pomeroy, Oeconomicus, 45–46.
25. Pomeroy, Oeconomicus, 52.
26. Pomeroy, Oeconomicus, 52.
27. Household production has effectively masked the degree to which women contributed to the wealth of the family and of the polis. By the same token, economists have underestimated the cumulative economic impact of small-scale agriculture. Things too dispersed for easy theoretical summing up tend to be lost in the mix not just in the eyes of Greek philosophers but in the eyes of modern analysts as well.
28. Carter, Discovering the Greek Countryside, esp. chaps. 1 and 5.
29. All quotations are from Torrance, Encompassing Nature, 421–22.
30. See “Epicureanism,” in Sedley, Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy.
31. Torrance, Encompassing Nature, 403.
32. Lucretius, De rerum natura 1, 250–63. Translation mine.
33. It is highly unlikely that Lucretius had any direct knowledge of the hymns to Dumuzi and Inana. The resemblances between the two result from their choice of a common subject and their approach to that subject.
1. Pliny, Natural History XVIII.285; Varro, On Agriculture I.1.6; and Varro, On the Latin Language VI.16.
2. Livy, Ab urbe condita 3, 26–29.
3. Dyson, Roman Countryside, 13–35.
4. This description is based on Barker et al., Mediterranean Valley.
5. My summary of agriculture in Roman Libya is based on Barker, Farming the Desert.
6. Barker, Farming the Desert, 346.
7. Barker, Farming the Desert, 347.
8. Hughes and Thirgood, “Deforestation, Erosion, and Forest Management,” 60.
9. Erdkamp, Grain Market in the Roman Empire, 225–305.
10. On the Delta and agriculture, see Qadri, “Delta after the Pharoahs”; David Peacock, “The Roman Period,” in Shaw, Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, 422–45.
11. Casson, Ships and Seamanship, 297–300.
1. “Several writers cite this breakdown of law and order as a cause of the decline of agricultural investments in the Mediterranean basin, particularly in the Middle East. Thirgood ascribes the contraction of settled agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean largely to political instability and economic decline in the disintegrating Roman Empire and to the invasion of nomadic tribes. He notes that the landscape was transformed from agriculture to pastoralism, and that failure to maintain terracing on the hills hastened soil erosion.” Deacon, “Deforestation and Ownership,” 347.
2. Carter, Discovering the Greek Countryside, 39, 43.
3. Deacon, “Deforestation and Ownership,” 343. Donald Hughes and J. V. Thirgood, in “Deforestation, Erosion, and Forest Management,” argue that the forests were devastated by mining, cooking, and warfare. They also note the conservation efforts of both individuals and the state and the apparent awareness among ancient writers of the link between forest cover and erosion.
4. Reale and Dirmeyer, “Modeling the Effects of Vegetation,” 165.
5. Meiggs, Trees and Timber, 377.
6. “In a … recent book, concerned with the history of forests, it is claimed that by the end of the Empire the destruction of readily accessible forests in Italy caused the import of wood from North Africa, Spain, and other Mediterranean areas. This is a popular view, but it is not firmly based on evidence.” Meiggs, Trees and Timber, 382.
7. Whether private or public, invocations of the gods satisfied the Romans in a number of ways. As one author notes, “Piety meant honoring the gods as they deserved. Religious festivals yielded a twofold pleasure: besides enjoying oneself, one did one’s duty. The pagans never asked the faithful how they ‘really’ felt; hence we have no way of knowing. Paying homage to the gods was a solemn way of enjoying yourself. Fortunate were those who, more than others, felt the presence of divinity and whose souls were moved.” Veyne, “Roman Empire,” 194.
8. Christianity engaged the Roman Empire in two different ways. In the West religious and secular authority were divided. In the East they were united. In both regions, however, a division of responsibility arose between secular and religious authority.
9. “In antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated.” White, “Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” 1205.
10. But see Hiebert, Yahwist’s Landscape; and the discussion of Genesis in Chapter 5.
11. White, “Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” 1205. “Christianity inherited from Judaism not only a concept of time as nonrepetitive and linear but also a striking story of creation. By gradual stages a loving and all-powerful God had created light and darkness, the heavenly bodies, the earth and all its plants, animals, birds, and fishes. Finally, God had created Adam and, as an afterthought, Eve to keep man from being lonely. Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes. And, although man’s body is made of clay, he is not simply part of nature: he is made in God’s image.” White, “Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” 1205.
12. Augustine, Confessions, book 9, chap. 10, par. 25.
13. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum (Johannes Koelhoff, 1453), book 12, chap. 30: “De volatilibus.” Translation mine. Another example is Isidore’s description of the pelican in Etymologies, book XII, chap 7, secs. 27 and 32.
14. Dubos, “Franciscan Conservation versus Benedictine Stewardship,” 57.
15. University of Leicester, Carolingian Polyptyques: St-Germain-des-Prés: Neuillay, trans. P. Dutton, http://www.le.ac.uk/hi/polyptyques/index.html.
16. About this time, the Cistercians, an offshoot of the Benedictines, began recruiting lay brothers who worked directly in agriculture and carried out the Rule of Saint Benedict to the letter, which the monks themselves were no longer willing or able to do.
17. Dubos, “Franciscan Conservation versus Benedictine Stewardship,” 59.
18. “Lynn White’s book The Transformation of the Roman World generated a change in our overall view of history. Its title signaled the final overthrow of the ‘catastrophe theories’ as promoted, for example, in Edward Gibbon’s classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Since then, two important theses have been advanced. The first is that the initial stage of the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages is to be sought in various changes that took place within the Roman world. The second thesis is that the so-called ‘barbarians’ made use of classical institutions in the course of their invasions and their subsequent ethnogenesis, the process in which a group of people becomes a tribe.” Karl Brunner, “Continuity and Discontinuity of Roman Agricultural Knowledge in the Early Middle Ages,” in Sweeney, Agriculture in the Middle Ages, 21.
19. Analogous arguments were made by French colonial administrators in the nineteenth century to challenge the legitimacy of Arab cultivators in North Africa. See Chapter 13.
1. The Qur’an challenged the polytheism of the pagan Arabs by referring to nature as an assembly of orderly, meaningful, and purposive phenomena and inviting them to study its order so that they could deduce from it the existence of God, who reveals and manifests his power and mercy through the universe. According to the Qur’an, nature, “having a firm and well-knit structure with no gaps, no ruptures, and no dislocations, is one of the grand handiworks of the Almighty.” Like a mirror, it reflects the power, beauty, wisdom, and mercy of its creator. Ozdemir, “Toward an Understanding of Environmental Ethics,” 8.
2. This and the following passages are quoted in Ozdemir, “Toward an Understanding of Environmental Ethics,” 25–26.
3. “The Qur’an and the sunna, stipulating that water is the basic need of life, place a number of obligations and responsibilities upon Muslims: the conservation of existing water supplies in the best possible way; the prevention of any activity that might lead to the pollution of water resources or spoil the purity and characteristics of the water; and never adopting an extravagant or irresponsible attitude in the consumption of water.” Ozdemir, “Toward an Understanding of Environmental Ethics,” 15.
4. Ozdemir, “Toward an Understanding of Environmental Ethics,” 14, 33 n. 33.
5. Ozdemir, “Toward an Understanding of Environmental Ethics,” 26.
6. Ozdemir, “Toward an Understanding of Environmental Ethics,” 23.
7. Significantly the contract recognized the rights of the substantial Jewish community in Yathrib in both secular and religious terms. Jewish monotheism and the history of God’s revelations to the Jewish community were accepted not as equivalent to but as compatible with the undertakings and obligations of Islam. As members of the community so defined, the Jews shared the obligation for its active defense.
8. When Persia and Armenia fell at about the same time as Spain, the Muslim empire reached its medieval limits. Despite repeated and costly attempts to conquer Anatolia, the heartland of the Byzantine Empire, Muslim armies were unsuccessful. From that time on, the Islamic realm and its neighbors remained in essential stalemate without major permanent gains of territory on either side until the fifteenth century, when the monarchs of Aragon and Castile drove the last Muslims from Spain, and Ottoman Turks conquered Greece, the Balkans, and Hungary. In 1453, they finally conquered Byzantium.
9. Lapidus, History of Islamic Societies, 36.
10. Lapidus, History of Islamic Societies, 51.
11. Vikor, Between God and the Sultan, 21–30.
12. “Probably some of the crops moved into the Sasanian Empire in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries. They may include sugar cane, sorghum, eggplants, spinach, bananas, plantains and rice, the last of which (along with cotton, which was not grown in the Sasanian empire) was also grown by the sixth century in the Jordan valley, where the extremely warm climate and the availability of irrigation favoured its introduction. Since the sources which throw light on late Sasanian agriculture are few, uninformative and difficult of interpretation, we cannot be sure that even this limited diffusion from India into the Sasanian empire occurred in pre-Islamic times … but as much else was transmitted from India into the syncretic civilization of the Sasanians, it does not seem improbable that at least a few of our crops were also diffused.” Watson, Agricultural Innovation, 78.
13. Watson, Agricultural Innovation, 91–92.
14. Barbier, Scarcity and Frontiers, 182–83.
15. For an unusually positive view of the Mongol invasions, see Jack Weather-ford, Genghis Khan and the Modern World.
16. See Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture; and Lyons, House of Wisdom.
17. Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples, 85.
18. Lapidus, History of Islamic Societies, 226–47.
1. Lavery, Ship, 70.
2. “At this time the very unimaginative system of management did not allow the treasure to be employed usefully in Spain or the colonies, and this vast capital benefice, a windfall equivalent to five or ten years’ national income, was largely lost through ignorance and the rigid habits of a monarchy in theory absolute, in fact limited in ability. This affected the whole of Europe, not least Portugal, which was a dependency of Spain from 1580 onward. By 1640, when Spain relinquished her dominion over the country, Portugal had lost forever her premier position as an Atlantic trader, settler, and merchant. Portugal was overtaken by the Dutch, and the Dutch by the English and French, in the sugar trade, in the colonies, and in the slave trade itself.” Hobhouse, Seeds of Change, 55.
3. “Though it was rich in grains and vegetables, the New World Neolithic included only turkeys as a domestic animal. This characteristic not only ruled out an independent discovery of the traction complex, but it also left the continental diet deficient in protein. Lifestyles in the New World evolved to link cultivation with hunting.” Sherratt, Economy and Society, 189.
4. The heavy clay-rich soils of the Po Valley required the deep heavy plows commonly confined to the soils of northern Europe. The marshy environment meant that malaria was rampant. Before rice and corn were cultivated in the valley, the most common use was for winter pasture.
5. Maria-Louise Von Wartburg, “Design and Technology of the Medieval Refineries of the Sugar Cane in Cyprus” in Malpica Cuello, Paisajes del Azúcar, 81–116.
6. “Wherever records are complete enough, or where representative last wills have been studied, we find the rich and middling families of urban society characteristically possessed of farms or scattered pieces of productive land. Their town houses were stocked with corn, cheeses, wine, oil, meats, fruits in season, or whatever other produce came from their own lands. According to the best advice, these stocks were meant ideally to suffice for periods of up to two years…. The farms of citizens usually lay within a twenty-mile radius of the city.” Martines, Power and Imagination, 164.
7. Appreciation of the productive landscape, however, did not include appreciation of the primary producers. Like the Romans before them, the men and women of the Italian Renaissance saw no connection between their urbanity and sophistication and the character of country people. In fact, “The urban record public and private, prosaic and literary, is rich in the virulent prejudice of a landowning patriciate which exhibited derision and distrust for the neighboring peasantry and for those who worked the farms.” Martines, Power and Imagination, 164.
8. Newton, Design on the Land, 59.
9. “Thus from a symbolically wild site the water progresses down the slope through several transitional stages to reach its most sophisticated form in the Lower Garden. So too with the vegetation of the villa. The high southern end is virtually embedded in the woods of the hillside; the Fountain of the Dolphins is an area relatively shaded by a mixed stand of native trees. From there on down the slope the cover thins until on the terrace of the Fountain of Light as at the main-floor level of the casini, the sunlight filters down through the translucent leaves of the old plane trees to cast a pattern of dappled sun and shadow on the ground, the last hint of shade before the sunny expanse of the colorful Lower Garden.
“For most observers what makes the Villa Lante such a compelling experience is probably the handling of spaces in a wonderfully comfortable rhythmic sequence from level to level.” Newton, Design on the Land, 105–6.
1. On villa culture, see Chapter 11.
2. Reconceiving the universe as heliocentric did not change the fact that all observations of planetary motion were still made from earth and so continued to reflect the motion of celestial bodies relative to an observer who was himself in motion.
3. For an authoritative and readable account of this development, see Einstein and Infeld, Evolution of Physics, 3–55.
4. Gravity also attracts planets to each other, which causes slight changes in their orbits.
5. On Plato’s Timaeus, see Chapter 7.
6. On Christian nature symbolism, see Chapter 9.
7. On landscape-based cosmology, see Chapter 5.
8. “There persists … throughout the whole period the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such matter is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’ Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived.” Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 25–26.
9. “The dominance of the idea of functionality in the abstract sphere of mathematics found itself reflected in the order of nature under the guise of mathematically expressed laws of nature. Apart from this progress of mathematics, the seventeenth-century developments of science would have been impossible. Mathematics supplied the background of imaginative thought with which the men of science approached the observation of nature. Galileo produced formulae, Descartes produced formulae, Huyghens produced formulae, Newton produced formulae.” Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 46.
10. Paley, Natural Theology (1802), quoted in Ratzsch, “Teleological Arguments for God’s Existence.”
11. In the eighteenth century, chemistry began to supply those answers, and it, too, was a mathematical science depending on abstract relationships among material substances.
12. Bowler, Norton History of the Environmental Sciences, 93.
13. See Meek, Precursors of Adam Smith.
14. On Quesnay and the economic debate in eighteenth-century France, the classic treatment is Weulersse, Le mouvement physiocratique en France. See also Larrère, L’invention de l’économie.
15. The physiocrat’s analogy implies that land is like a trust fund, and agriculture is like a variable annuity paid out by the land through the application of labor. The physiocrats summarized their doctrines in a celebrated diagram, well described in McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism, 110–21.
16. Given that agriculture dwarfed every other enterprise of the era, including manufacturing, theirs was not a foolish attempt, though it was ultimately a failure both politically and theoretically. The attention to land among the physiocrats is also significant. They appreciated land as a primary value. They understood its value not only in productive terms but in social terms as well. What had long secured the wealth and prominence of families even in post-feudal Europe was land ownership. Lands and titles were the foundations of wealth and prestige. Such lands were seldom if ever sold, so their monetary value was anyone’s guess, yet their productivity and social power were indisputable.
17. This issue was clouded in the eighteenth century by the widespread attribution of intrinsic value to precious metals.
18. See especially Hutchison, Before Adam Smith, 27–87, 185–227.
19. “‘But I do not think that this necessity of stealing arises only from hence; there is another cause of it, more peculiar to England.’ ‘What is that?’ said the Cardinal: ‘The increase of pasture,’ said I, ‘by which your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns; for wherever it is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer wool than ordinary, there the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men, the abbots, not contented with the old rents which their farms yielded, nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good. They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them.” Saint Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson (Rockville, MD: Tark, 2007), 20. On Quesnay and the British example underlying the reform of French agriculture and economy, see McNally, Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism, 85–121.
20. “Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society which he has in view. But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to society…. He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention.” A. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, 477.
21. Public provision of bread had a long and venerable history. The Romans provided bread to a portion of the citizens of Rome. After the collapse of the empire, the early church carried on with the distribution, often from the very same buildings the Roman administrators had used. In the city of Venice, to take only one subsequent example, the availability of bread flour was an important public concern. The city built large and prominent granaries at key points along the Grand Canal to highlight their care for public nourishment. Their prudence is represented allegorically in the porch of the Basilica of Saint Mark’s, where mosaics describe in great detail the provisions that Joseph made to protect the Egyptians against famine.
22. Abert, W. A. Mozart, 152.
23. Goethe, Italian Journey, quoted in Shoumatoff and Shoumatoff, The Alps, 213.
24. Cardinal de Bernis, “Sur l’amour de la patrie.” The source of all poems in French is Poésie française, “Les grands classiques”: poesie.webnet.fr/lesgrandsclassiques/index.html. All translations mine.
25. André Chenier, “A la France.”
26. Antoine-Marin Lemierre, “Les jardins.”
27. On early Italian rice cultivation and its dismal effects on land and labor, see Chapter 11.
28. Giuseppe Parini, “La salubrità dell’aria,” in Petronio, Civiltà nelle lettere, 862–67. Translation mine.
29. Parini, “La salubrità dell’aria.”
30. Quoted in Reymond, L’Alpe romantique, 9.
31. Reymond, L’Alpe romantique, 10.
32. Reymond, L’Alpe romantique, 10.
33. Sertoli, “Burke, Edmund.”
34. “It is undoubtedly upon this foundation that Kant erects his theory, in which fear, corresponding to Burke’s ‘passions relating to self-preservation, which turn mostly on pain or danger,’ suggests a principal case of sublimity.” Bosanquet, History of Aesthetic, 275.
35. Bosanquet, History of Aesthetic, 277.
36. “In opposition to Burke, Kant would come back to the ‘noble passions,’ thus humanistically reproposing the idea of Art as the expression of full and sovereign Subjectivity (humans as rational and moral beings), not the expression of a dissipated subjectivity that only longs to lose itself into Otherness.” Sertoli, “Burke, Edmond.”
37. Bosanquet, History of Aesthetic, 278.
1. Cotton was one of the first agricultural products to fill the holds of larger ships. By 1625, the English alone were importing more than two hundred thousand bolts of Indian cotton. Total imports in Dutch and French ships may have been as great. Anquetil, Les routes du coton, 48.
2. Sugar refining took place in multiple small-scale operations near where the crop was harvested, and did not become a metropolitan industry.
3. For a novel and revealing comparison of the North-South dynamic in the United States and Italy, see Doyle, Nations Divided.
4. Morocco, the westernmost North African state, never came under Ottoman control and remained an independent Muslim principality.
5. By defeating the combined forces of Cleopatra and Marc Antony, Octavian secured control over the Roman Empire and made himself Caesar Augustus. The most venerated of French kings, the sainted Louis IX, led an army of Crusaders to Egypt in 1248. Napoléon may have planned to associate himself with the first Roman emperor and the most venerated French monarch by adding the conquest of Egypt to his résumé. The national purpose in supporting the invasion is more complicated. The project had a long history among European and French intellectuals. In a 1670 paper, the German philosopher and political theorist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz discussed the advantages of turning intra-European aggression outward and directing it toward non-Christian peoples. Two years later, he wrote directly to Louis XIV and pointed out the advantages of French control of Egypt. The main benefit, he suggested, was control of the shortest route between the east and the west. Leibniz: Political Writings, 34. This idea lurked in the minds of generations of French royal counselors, but once the British captured French New World colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, the project gained new vitality. Why not replace lost American colonies with others nearer to hand? Egypt offered productive land, and its ruling class could provide a market for luxury goods in a land that was an easy sail across the Mediterranean rather than an ocean away. Napoléon’s expedition was also anchored in the geopolitics of Europe in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. During the course of the French Revolution, the English navy had shown repeatedly that it could advance well into the Mediterranean.
6. While French troops and experts roamed the countryside with no fear of local resistance, English forces were landing. They marched against the French army—abandoned now by Napoléon, who had returned to France, where he was appointed First Consul—and defeated it. As Bernard Lewis notes, the Muslim world was forced to learn another sobering lesson. Not only was a European power free to invade a Muslim country at will, but only a second European power could dislodge that invader. In a hundred years the Ottoman military had slipped so far that it was forced to stand on the sidelines while European powers settled the issue of who would rule its territories. The experience in Egypt confirmed what the Ottoman navy had learned in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century. European technology, firepower, and coordinated military operations could overwhelm the bravest and most determined opposition from traditional troops.
The French occupation of Egypt provoked a strong Islamic reaction. Muhammad Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab founded a Muslim sect that is often called Wahhabism. Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab urged a return to the original and authentic form of Islam and a rejection of innovations that had transformed the religion during is millennial history. As successive governments of Egypt became increasingly dependent on European powers—primarily England, which maintained significant influence over the country well into the twentieth century—and increasingly influenced by European ideals, the Wahhabi advocated a return to the pure hadith and sharia of the Prophet and of the first four caliphs. For these reformers, the fall of Egypt to Christian invaders was not a sign that Europe had grown in power and influence but an indication that Islam had lost its way. Lewis, What Went Wrong?, 31.
The worldwide influence that the teachings of Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab now enjoy is a result of a pact between the religious reformer and a minor Arab leader of the eighteenth century named Muhammad Ibn Saud. In the nineteenth century, through a series of alliances and local wars, not unlike those that Muhammad himself had organized in the same terrain during the seventh century, Ibn Saud’s descendants established their control over much of the Arabian Peninsula. Though their success was mixed, in the aftermath of the First World War, the Saudi dynasty displaced the traditional rulers of Mecca, members of the Hashemite family, who claimed multiple genealogical connections with the family of Muhammad. With the blessing of the British protectors of the region, the Saudis assumed control of the sacred cities. The Hashemite dynasty was removed to what is now Jordan, where they continue to rule.
The Saudi dynasty continues to promulgate doctrines of the eighteenth-century reformer that are often criticized as xenophobic, misogynistic, and intolerant of religious diversity. The ideology of the movement has been widely disseminated throughout the Muslim community in religious schools sponsored and paid for by the oil wealth of Saudi Arabia. Hostile and aggressively repressive movements like the Taliban, the Egyptian Brotherhood, and Al Qaeda have been linked to Wahhabi fundamentalism, though many dispute the connection. The Wahhabi movement, whatever its current role in the world, gained strength in an era when the power of Islam was under European attack in its core territory.
7. Lapidus, History of Islamic Societies, 572.
8. Post-Napoléonic France was a web of contradictory political impulses. The republican ideals of the revolution lived on in the minds of many. The European powers that had decided the nation’s fate at the Congress of Vienna, however, made it clear that restoring the monarchy was their choice for conquered France, and many French citizens agreed. Though Louis XVIII assumed power as a constitutional monarch, he conspired to control elections and undermine the power of the representative assemblies. At his death in 1824, his younger brother, an embittered ultra- royalist, ascended the throne as Charles X. Within a few years, his government was in crisis. In the same year an insult to the French ambassador offered a pretext for a naval blockade of the North African city of Algiers.
9. Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples, 269–71. The rationale for invasion was even more tenuous than the diplomatic pretext for the blockade. The French could point to a time-honored motive for war in the western Mediterranean: pirates. Pirates were active on the Barbary Coast in the nineteenth century as they had been for centuries. The port city of Algiers was one of their most important bases, and though European fleets had been sent against them again and again, the menace continued.
10. Originally geared to the Ottoman model of ruling through local leaders, the French changed their approach after 1843. A combined military and civil administration centered on regional Bureaux Arabes assumed direct control of the country.
11. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome, 27.
12. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome, 23.
13. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome, 23.
14. Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome, 38. The brackets are in the original.
15. The lies that the French and other European colonial administrators told about the countries they wished to claim for themselves came true for the most part under their administration. Within a few decades of French conquest and colonization, the Algerian environment became every bit as abused and degraded as French apologists claimed it had been before colonization. The people who portrayed themselves as the revivers of Roman abundance themselves caused the greatest harm to the land they had seized: “In western Algeria (Oranie), the nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed large-scale forest clearance and massive soil erosion. French colonial settlement after 1850 drove Arabs and Berbers into the higher reaches of the Tell, where their cultivation quickly led to ecological disasters. Shortly after clearing fields they found yields in decline and abandoned their land to try again elsewhere. Here, as in southern Italy and all of Spain, political forces promoted sudden shifts in land use patterns, with devastating consequences. Algeria, far more than Morocco or Tunisia, felt the environmental consequences of colonial power.” Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome, 38.
16. Knight, Bible Plants and Animals, 1.
17. For a summary of the Algerian situation, see McNeill, Mountains of the Mediterranean World, 355.
18. The Berlin Conference of 1885 established formal guidelines for occupying coastal countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The principles became a blueprint for European dominance of the African continent, a process that occurred with a minimum of conflict among the colonial powers, though with extraordinary loss of life and liberty among Africans.
19. They also created problems for some anatomists who believed, like Cuvier, that past species had become extinct but that evolution did not account for the distinct character of any species.
20. In France, for example, their acceptance was hampered by a prevailing positivism, which demanded far more physical evidence and much less speculation than Darwin offered.
21. “Darwin abandoned the Newtonian model of dynamical explanations in important respects and came to a novel conceptualization of dynamics for biological systems…. Living systems were infinitely more complicated than Newton’s planetary system. Biological ‘elements’ had characteristics that were changing in time: they had a history. All the interactions of organisms whether with one another or with the environment were non- additive, non-instantaneous, and exhibited memory. It was the ahistorical nature of the objects with which physics dealt that gave the Newtonian scheme the possibility of a simple, mathematical description. It was precisely the historical character of living objects which gave biological phenomena their unique and complex features.” Schweber, “Wider British context,” 48–49.
22. Spenser’s phrase first appeared in the fifth edition of Origin of Species, published in 1869. It far outpaced the use of “natural selection,” and especially, “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life,” which was Darwin’s own subtitle for Origin. If Darwin did not have mathematical simplicity on his side, he had at least a slogan-like statement of his essential principle. In broader terms, Darwin outlined grounds for a rapprochement between materialistic science and biological description. This was a resolution that botanists and biologists had been working to achieve since the late eighteenth century.
23. That there were two sides to the picture that Darwin painted—not just competition but cooperation as well—was neglected by theorists whose version of social Darwinism was aggressive. In France, where the political spectrum was broader, there was more of a debate about the implications of Darwin’s theory for social policy and economics than in England, where “survival of the fittest” was the watchword. On Darwinism in France, see Glick, Comparative Reception of Darwinism, 117–67.
24. Keynes, “End of Laissez-Faire.”
25. Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 123. On Germany, see also Glick, Comparative Reception of Darwinism, 81–116.
26. Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 123.
27. Quoted in Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 124–25.
28. Darwin wrote about the “descent of man,” but most nineteenth-century enthusiasts of his theories were believers in human “ascent” from primitive beginnings. For progress-minded thinkers, evolution could easily be equated with the continual improvement of the human race that idealist philosophers had theorized and popular thinkers took as gospel. Influential writers soon identified “survival of the fittest” as the key principle on which human progress had depended. For them, to deny it pride of place in social planning was unimaginable.
29. Quoted in Hawkins, Social Darwinism, 125.
30. Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., cantos 54–56 passim.
31. In the twelfth edition, printed in Edinburgh in 1884, long after Darwin’s Origin and Descent of Man, Robert Chambers, the author, finally acknowledged his work.
32. Bill McKibben efficiently summarizes this view of Greek thinking in The End of Nature, 64–66.
1. United Nations, Yearbook, 1946–1947, 75. Among the Recommendations to the General Assembly was “the furnishing of maximum assistance, including technical assistance, to promote the expeditious re-establishment of agricultural production.” See also the report of the Economic and Social Council on pp. 478–96.
2. In France “the winter of 1946–47 was very cold and very dry…. In February there were twenty-seven days of below freezing temperatures. Sparse snow covered the ground for only two days in December, eleven in January, and nineteen days in February. The soil remained frozen from January 6 to January 11 to a depth of 20 centimeters, from January 23 to January 30 to a depth of between 20 and 30 centimeters, [throughout] February to a depth exceeding 30 centimeters, and in March to a depth approaching 30 centimeters.” “Observations phenologique à UCCLE (I.R.M.) pour l’anée 1947,” Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System. Translation mine.
3. Broder, Histoire économique de la France, 114, 125
4. “Il gelido inverno, 1946–1947,” meteolive.leonardo.it.
5. Visser, “Le climat change-t-il?” 1–3.
6. Broder, Histoire économique de la France, 125. Translation mine.
7. Marshall, “Marshall Plan Speech.”
8. Marshall, “Marshall Plan Speech.”
9. The situation came to a crisis on Friday, February 21, 1947, not because of any new Soviet moves but through an epochal action by the British government. On that date the British ambassador delivered a simple diplomatic note to the Americans. The note contained a dire assessment of the economic and security needs of both Greece and Turkey. After acknowledging the severity of the situation, the British government candidly but officially declared that it “could no longer be of substantial help in either. His Majesty’s Government devoutly hoped that we [the United States] could assume the burden in both Greece and Turkey.” Acheson, Present at the Creation, 217.
10. Looking back over the war, Stalin characterized it in two ways. It was a war for survival, a war to the death between fascist and democratic nations. This characterization was one that his British and American allies could happily accept. More menacingly, Stalin characterized the war as “the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism. Marxists have more than once stated that the capitalist system of world economy contains the elements of a general crisis and military conflicts, that, in view of that, the development of world capitalism in our times does not proceed smoothly and evenly, but through crises and catastrophic wars. The point is that the uneven development of capitalist countries usually leads, in the course of time, to a sharp disturbance of the equilibrium within the world system of capitalism, and that group of capitalist countries that regards itself as being less securely provided with raw materials and markets usually attempts to change the situation and to redistribute ‘spheres of influence’ in its own favor—by employing armed force. As a result of this, the capitalist world is split into two hostile camps, and war breaks out between them.” Stalin, “Speech Delivered by J. V. Stalin.”
11. “Basically this is only the steady advance of uneasy Russian nationalism, a centuries old movement in which conceptions of offense and defense are inextricably confused. But in [the] new guise of international Marxism, with its honeyed promises to a desperate and war torn outside world, it is more dangerous and insidious than ever before.” Kennan to Byrnes, [“Long Telegram”].
12. Oren, Power, Faith and Fantasy, 481.
13. To maintain the range of British shipping, the government created depots throughout the world where supplies of coal were stored. Not all the coal came from Britain; Bermuda, a major Atlantic station, got most of its coal from the United States, and coal from Australia supplied the Pacific stations. At the peak of the operation, around 1910, there were British coaling stations in the Mediterranean, at Gibraltar and Malta. Stations in Hong Kong, north Borneo, Fiji, and New Guinea supplemented the more secure depots in New Zealand and Australia.
14. On coal and the British navy, see Thomas Brassey, The British Navy (London: Longmans, Green, 1883), vol. 4, 318.
15. By the terms of the treaty, the Saudis gained control over the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula. The Hashemites, descendants of the Prophet and traditional rulers of Mecca, were moved to Jordan. Palestine was created, and the Jews were promised a homeland.
16. This is Diamond’s argument, and it is appropriate in this context, but his insistence on promoting this modern example into a pattern in history and applying it to eras when conflict was carried out in entirely different ways is mistaken.
17. Both societies advocated crop improvement through experimentation and the development of hybrids, though their approaches in this area were guided by markedly different principles. For decades Soviet agronomists officially embraced the genetic theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Under the leadership of biologist Trofim Lysenko, and with Stalin’s blessing, they repudiated Darwin and embraced Larmarck’s signature thesis: that characteristics an organism acquired in one generation could be passed on through genetic means to future generations. With this theory as their guide, Russian agronomists tried to improve grain stocks. Many believe that adherence to this pseudo-science caused the repeated Soviet crop failures before and after World War II.
18. The agricultural programs that the United States and the USSR favored were also fostered by the United Nations. The UN organization responsible for disseminating these practices was and remains the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Its charge is to improve agricultural production worldwide. In the first decades of its existence, FAO programs reflected the ideals of industrialized agriculture; the fit with traditional farming was poor. The FAO emphasized the cultivation of high-yield grain crops to produce a marketable surplus. Unlike the United States and Soviet Union, whose agricultural policies were seldom called into question, the FAO faced severe criticism from many different directions. The organization, which is headquartered in Rome, has been repeatedly portrayed as an inefficient, self-serving bureaucracy with a bloated staff of functionaries and relatively few agricultural specialists. In response to these charges, the FAO dispersed its staff into the field and redirected research toward traditional agricultural practices that are better suited to particular soils and cultures. Making small improvements in traditional practices rather than advocating sweeping change is the organization’s current goal.
19. The US Department of Agriculture urged increased meat consumption in developing nations. Meat eating was celebrated as a sign of development, but in reality it was intended to expand the market for American grain. Increased meat consumption drove up the local cost of grain and introduced health problems seldom seen before in the region.
20. Gonzale, “Méditerannée.”
21. The most viable fishery at the moment is off the Egyptian coast. For many years after the completion of the Aswan High Dam, which ended annual flooding on the Nile, the number of fish shrank. Nutrients in the flood-waters had supported the fish population, and when the floods ended, the river stopped making its annual deposits in the sea. Fishing has recently become profitable, thanks to the nitrogen-rich pollutants entering the Nile from Cairo sewage and from Delta agricultural runoff.
1. Freud, in “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis,” amplified: “It consists simply in not directing one’s notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same ‘evenly-suspended attention’ (as I have called it) in the face of all that one hears.”
2. The taste for terror in landscape was closely tied to a budding interest in horror, which the romantic poets discovered and mined for similar effects. The modern horror movie, the amusement park thrill ride, and the taste for a wilderness experience all have common roots in the literature of the early nineteenth century.
3. Salzman, Anthropology of Real Life, 53. This controversy is the focus of Heatherington, Wild Sardinia.
4. Salzman, Anthropology of Real Life, 53.
5. McKibben, End of Nature, 47–94.
6. Krugman, “Building a Green Economy.”
7. Muller, Mendelsohn, and Nordhaus, “Environmental Accounting.”
8. “Environmental accounting is a system for indexing, organising, managing and delivering data and information on the environment via physical or monetary indicators. It constitutes an indispensable tool for applying the sustainable development concept and now commands acceptance as a means of ensuring the preservation of the environment in Europe. Conventional instruments of economic analysis do not in fact enable political decision-makers to measure reliably the effectiveness of the environmental policies implemented or the impact of economic policies on the environment. It is therefore necessary to adopt suitable environmental monitoring and information systems which can serve as a basis for political decisions. By taking this step, political decision-makers would be able to report the environmental outcomes of their actions to the communities under their authority, relying on dependable data and constantly updated information on the state of the environment, to incorporate the variable ‘environment’ into the official decision-making process at every tier of government and to make the environmental effects of policies more transparent.” Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Environmental Accounting, summary.
9. Some of the cost of combating obesity is already being met by governments. Ironically, those governments both subsidize the agribusiness that creates obesity and spend funds to combat it.
10. As early as 1987, Diamond was blaming the ills of the modern world on the Neolithic invention of farming. “Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions.” Diamond, “Worst Mistake.”
11. Anson Mills in Columbia, South Carolina, has for almost two decades had as its goals “to grow, harvest and mill near-extinct varieties of heir-loom corn, rice, and wheat organically, and re-create ingredients that were in the Southern larder before the Civil War. Grits, cornmeal, Carolina Gold rice, graham and biscuit flour, milled fresh for the table daily, had helped create a celebrated regional cuisine—America’s first cuisine, the Carolina Rice Kitchen.” http://www.ansonmills.com/about-us-page.htm. Rice cultivation and research is the focus of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, carolinagoldricefoundation.org.
12. Rachel Donadio, “With Work Scarce in Athens, Greeks Go Back to the Land,” New York Times, January 9, 2012.
13. Leopold, “Wildlife in American Culture” and “Wilderness,” both reprinted in his Sand County Almanac.