Did ancient peoples live in a Golden Age of stewardship of our planet? From forest clearances to catastrophic soil erosion, it’s clear that past civilizations had the same conflicted relationship with their environment as we do. But when it comes to how they dealt with those crises, is it fair to regard them as technologically backward?

Enter the elegant piece of land management technology called the terrace.

Terraces are a remarkably efficient way of dealing with the problems of erosion and water retention. A bare slope is too steep to hold roots or hold rainfall? Then chop it up into a series of flat surfaces. Terracing keeps soil on hillsides, helps rainwater sink into that soil and ultimately eat at the underlying bedrock (which is how soil is made), and allows roots to take hold. And best of all? All it requires is  a lot of hard work and, ideally, a good supply of stone to bolster the sides. As inventions go, it’s a rock-bottom bargain – and so it’s accessible to everyone, whatever their budget.

It’s also possible to see them as a social empowerment tool, by the poor, for the poor. In places where level terrain is scarce, who gets the flat land? The people with the most money – leaving the peasantry to make do with barren hills and slopes. Since well-maintained terraces can gradually improve the fertility of soil, terracing could be a form of investment for less wealthy farmers hunting for a way to build some capital and status…

Terracing has existed for thousands of years and in many parts of the world it’s still going strong today – even as a source of tourism revenue, as with the incredible Banaue Rice Terraces of the Philippines. They’re environmental management on a sometimes colossal scale…and anyone can have a go (if they’re prepared to sweat for it). Backward? Not if you’re one of the 99%.

Images: Indrik myneur, TheFutureIsUnwritten and bigberto.

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Island life is a fragile thing.

Deciding to live on a remote island is to enter into a complex balancing-act with the local environment. Your arrival puts an unusual drain on the carrying capacity of the land – something you need to offset if you want to survive. You gamble that the climate will help rather than hinder you. You trust that bouts of extreme weather will be fleeting. However hard you work to establish a toe-hold, you could be knocked off your feet by any number of factors – including sheer bad luck.

Such is the case with the remote Scottish archipelago of St. Kilda.

Head forty miles west of the Outer Hebrides, deep into the Atlantic Ocean, and you’ll find a cluster of fang-like islands forming the archipelago of St. Kilda, one of the most savage-weathered parts of Britain (waves up to 5 meters high; recorded windspeeds as high as 130 mph). Its forbidding cliffs, often inaccessible from the sea, include the sheerest drop to sea level in the whole of the UK. This is not a place you linger.

Tell that to its previous inhabitants. There have been people on St Kilda for 2,000 years. Or rather, there were, until 1930. Thanks to a tragic combination of crop failure, accidental contamination of the land and an unsustainably low population (70 people in 1920; 37 in 1928), the delicate ecological balance that had sustained a hundred generations of human inhabitants was broken. The St Kildans were a dying community – even with their dwindled numbers, the land couldn’t support them. They were too far from the mainland to rely on food deliveries until the soil recovered. They had no choice. On August 29th 1930, the remaining inhabitants were evacuated off the low-lying main island (Hirta) and back to mainland Scotland.

Since that day, the island has had no permanent population. It’s now a World Heritage Site and an important seabird breeding station, a place of scientific interest…and a poignant reminder of our relationship with the land we stand on.

Images: CaptainOates.

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Everything is not as ecologically sound as it looks.

How in tune were our ancestors with being good stewards of the planet? Things were better in the old days. People were more in tune with the natural world, the air was cleaner, the land less harassed by our demands upon it. The world was, in short, greener. We’ve all heard it before – but is it true? Of course it is – except when you start looking at the details. Don’t go putting our ancestors up on a pedestal of eco-friendly excellence before you know a little more history.

So we’ve looked at prehistoric forest clearances, Roman smog, Greek soil erosion and Byzantine plague.  Not a glowing picture – but it’s not universally bad. Consider the words of this man in the 5th Century BC:

Whoever wishes to investigate medicine properly, should proceed thus: in the first place to consider the seasons of the year, and what effects each of them produces for they are not at all alike, but differ much from themselves in regard to their changes. Then the winds, the hot and the cold, especially such as are common to all countries, and then such as are peculiar to each locality. We must also consider the qualities of the waters, for as they differ from one another in taste and weight, so also do they differ much in their qualities. In the same manner, when one comes into a city to which he is a stranger, he ought to consider its situation, how it lies as to the winds and the rising of the sun; for its influence is not the same whether it lies to the north or the south, to the rising or to the setting sun.

From these things he must proceed to investigate everything else. For if one knows all these things well, or at least the greater part of them, he cannot miss knowing, when he comes into a strange city, either the diseases peculiar to the place, or the particular nature of common diseases, so that he will not be in doubt as to the treatment of the diseases, or commit mistakes, as is likely to be the case provided one had not previously considered these matters. And in particular, as the season and the year advances, he can tell what epidemic diseases will attack the city, either in summer or in winter, and what each individual will be in danger of experiencing from the change of regimen. For knowing the changes of the seasons, the risings and settings of the stars, how each of them takes place, he will be able to know beforehand what sort of a year is going to ensue.

 – Airs, Waters and Places, Hippocrates

Hippocrates of Kos, known today as the “father of Western medicine” and from whom we get the famous Hippocratic Oath, was a man with an eye for the big picture. For him, everything was interconnected – and human beings were as deeply plugged into their environment as the crops and the animals the ancient Greeks relied upon to survive.

Is it a stretch to consider him the first ecologist? It’s true that Greek philosophers of the time had what we would now deem outlandish ideas – personal health being considered a matter of the balance of these 4 “humors” – but Hippocrates was well ahead of his time in considering the climate a vast, interconnected system of causes and effects, paving the way for the development of biological science.

Further reading:

On Airs, Waters And Places – provided by the Internet Classics Archive.

Image: a.drian

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How in tune were our ancestors with being good stewards of the planet? Things were better in the old days. People were more in tune with the natural world, the air was cleaner, the land less harassed by our demands upon it. The world was, in short, greener. We’ve all heard it before – but is it true? Of course it is – except when you start looking at the details. Don’t go putting our ancestors up on a pedestal of eco-friendly excellence before you know a little more history.

In 540 AD, the Eastern Roman Empire (better known as Byzantium) was set to conquer the known world, led by its dynamic Emperor of 13 years, Justinian I. Within two years that Empire would be in retreat, sending the course of European history in a very different direction – and the reason was Black Death.

Bubonic plague is Europe’s most destructive disease. The 14th Century incarnation reduced its population by anything from 30-60% (we can’t be sure because of the sheer scale of mortality at this time) – but Europe still emerged with 350 million survivors. What would have happened if it had hit a thousand years earlier? The answer is…it did. It’s now known as the Plague of Justinian, perhaps with good reason, because while he didn’t create the variation of Yersinia pestis that would prove so devastating to human life, he may have created the pandemic.

How? Overambition. Justinian wanted his Empire to return to its former imperial glory, and to do that, he needed expansion and a massive consolidation of resources, most notably grain. The capital, Constantinople, expanded rapidly to a point where it’s believed it could barely feed itself, and this put pressure on the existing trade routes of grain and cloth from Africa. A colder, wetter climatic period mid 6th Century fostered crop failures and famine, adding more impetus to trade and the maintenance of huge granaries to buffer the population’s food supply. In short – perfect conditions for the spread of plague-carrying rodents, believed to have originated in Ethiopia.

Thanks to Justinian’s far-reaching trade network, the plague was a worldwide pandemic, killing anything from 25 to 100 million people when the world population was probably less than 300 million. Constantinople would ultimately lose 40% of its population to the plague (an alleged 5,000 lives a day at its height) and the Eastern Mediterranean would lose a quarter of its people. Justinian’s Empire went into a decline it would not recover from until the 9th Century – and the world reeled under its first taste of the Black Death.

Image: Jane Rahman.

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The good old days?

How in tune were our ancestors with being good stewards of the planet? Things were better in the old days. People were more in tune with the natural world, the air was cleaner, the land less harassed by our demands upon it. The world was, in short, greener. We’ve all heard it before – but is it true? Of course it is – except when you start looking at the details. Don’t go putting our ancestors up on a pedestal of eco-friendly excellence before you know a little more history.

Greece is a land burdened by expectations. Not only do its current inhabitants have to deal with an economy so tattered it may even spark power cuts, it simultaneous has to carry the mantle of being the cradle of civilization for the Western World (further hammered home by the upcoming London Olympics). The ideas of the Greek philosophers guided the development of medieval scientific thought – particularly Aristotle – through the European Renaissance, before the physical sciences gathered momentum under the ideas of luminaries like Galileo and Newton. The Romantic period further reinforced Greece’s golden status – the term Arcadia, taken from the name of an administrative area in Greece, came to represent a perfect balanced relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. Ancient Greece, it is implied, was where people got it right for a change.

You know what’s coming, don’t you? Classical Greece had an enormous problem, and it was this: it was a dreadful place to grow things. Greece is largely a land of barren, rocky hillsides thinly covered by nutritionally depleted soils. This agriculturally fragile state of affairs meant the land couldn’t support large, evenly spaced populations, and that led to the development of the famous polis city states of Greece – Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Mycenae and others. When these cities reached the land’s carrying capacity, its people had to expand, fueling colonial conquests and arguably all sorts of innovations to make the most of scarce resources.

It’s a stretch, but you could argue that democracy came about because Greece is a crummy place to be a farmer.

So the Greeks were simply unlucky to live on soil that couldn’t support them? Not so. As happened elsewhere in Europe, the prehistoric peoples of Greece chopped down a lot of trees – in such quantities that the soil simply couldn’t recover. Pollen evidence recovered from the bottom of a lake in the Argive plain told a story: the existence of deciduous oak trees until the 4th Century BC, at which point they were replaced with hornbeam, pine, scrub oak and heather – vegetation associated with cleared or disturbed land. If some colossal climatic catastrophe was at fault, all of Greece would have been similarly affected. But it wasn’t. These changes were localized.

Furthermore, archaeological evidence from settlement patterns across Greece show broken occupation, periods of settlement and abandonment – and these can be tied with environmental indicators of local soil erosion patterns. In other words, ancient Greek farmers appear to have cleared the land for crops or animals, and when the soil eroded away as a result, they abandoned it – and that was the environmental legacy facing Classical Greece, a largely barren land that had never recovered from early efforts to farm it.

So much for Arcadia.

Images: dominiqs, byrdiegyrl and Serendigity.

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How in tune were our ancestors with being good stewards of the planet?

Things were better in the old days. People were more in tune with the natural world, the air was cleaner, the land less harassed by our demands upon it. The world was, in short, greener. We’ve all heard it before – but is it true? Of course it is – except when you start looking at the details. Don’t go putting our ancestors up on a pedestal of eco-friendly excellence before you know a little more history.

This week, we go back to Ancient Rome, take a deep breath – and splutter.

Get enough people in one place and air quality is going to take a dive. Get them living in one place and your real problems start. While it’s true that cities of 2,000 years ago lacked the intense urbanization that today crams people together and on top of each other in ways inconceivable to the ancient world, they also lacked our relatively cleaner energy-producing ways. Such was the case with Rome, a city housing not only wood-burning domestic buildings (including an estimated 800+ heated bath-houses) but many craft working industries. Statesman Seneca, the tutor of Emperor Nero, wrote of “the stink, soot and heavy air” hanging over the city, popularly known as gravioris caeli (“heavy heaven”). With air quality came the smells – the stink of garbage, of unrestricted industry (including leather tanning, a process often involving urine) and of poorly treated sewage.

How much have we ecologically evolved over the years?

How did the Romans tackle the problem? Like they tackled most of their other problems – with legislation and construction projects. The sewage designs first laid down by the pre-Roman Etruscan people in 500BC were expanded. The Empire’s Justinian Code laid down the first riparian rights – the legal process of allocation and access to water supplies – and defined both water and air as finite public property to be maintained for the benefit of all. New industrial laws pushed certain crafts to areas where they couldn’t pollute domestic air supplies (including, in one law, the cheesemakers – not so blessed in Roman times, it seems). To take the pressure off the sewage-fouled Tiber, the Romans built extensive aqueduct systems to bring freshwater into the capital.

It’s not known how well this alleviated problems in Rome, but it seems indoor pollution remained an issue right across Italy: the inside of the average Roman building became blackened with soot as time went on, as noted by poet Horatius, and recent analysis of skeletons of people buried by the eruption of Vesuvius show signs of anthracosis. Whether you stayed indoors or outdoors to get your 20,000 liters of air a day, life as an ancient Roman appears to have been hard on the lungs.

Images: kevinpoh and Rilind Hoxha.

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Everything is not as ecologically sound as it looks.

Things were better in the old days. People were more in tune with the natural world, the air was cleaner, the land less harassed by our demands upon it. The world was, in short, greener. We’ve all heard it before – but is it true? Of course it is – except when you start looking at the details. Don’t go putting our ancestors up on a pedestal of eco-friendly excellence…

Today we start a new series looking back into human history for traces of our enduringly complicated relationship with our planet’s eco-system, good and bad.

First up? Let’s talk about trees.

Assumption

In recent decades, human beings have so lost touch with our need for healthy forests (the lungs of planet Earth) that they’ve started destroying them, squandering the long-term health of the biosphere for short-term economic gain. This didn’t happen in the old days. It’s a sign that historic and prehistoric people understood the natural world in a way modern people never could.

Reality

Since the birth of agriculture, humans have been razing forests for all sorts of reasons. It’s a great way to free up super-fertile soil for crop cultivation. It’s how land is opened up for hunting – both by encouraging fresh vegetation for game to snack on and by allowing hunters to easily get at that game. It’s a way of controlling pests. It’s ideal for creating “no-man’s land” for dividing political territory. And on and on. Think this only applies outside North America, thanks to the benign, nature-loving impact of ancient Native Americans? Think again. Large-scale landscape alterations didn’t just come with the Spanish explorers and missionaries. There is widespread environmental evidence for the use of fire as a land-management tool. It’s even been argued that the savannah or prairie was the natural state of the land with an established Native American population, and so the spread of European settlers led to the growth of forestry…

The Great American Forest may be more a product of settlement than a victim of it.

– References on the American Indian Use Of Fire in Ecosystems, Gerald W. Williams, USDA Forest Service

But if you want to really see a smoking gun for prehistoric forest clearances, go to England. The heaths and moors so beloved of Emily Brontë and Thomas Hardy are Britain’s most extensive form of natural vegetation, with soils too acidic to hold forest growth. They’re rugged and beautiful – and in most cases the work of prehistoric human beings, fire-clearing huge amounts of land for hunting or agriculture and moving on when the soil couldn’t support them. Today moors and heaths are spectacularly diverse eco-systems that are carefully maintained by organizations like The Moorland Association. They’re a national treasure – but they’re also the remnants of Britain’s first environmental disasters.

How many of our modern forests are set to end up this way?

Images: James Whitesmith and *Micky

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