People and nature

Nancy E. Langston

When you look at the mountains of the Mediterranean today, [...] you see beautiful landscapes, with bare limestone ridges between which lie picturesque villages. Both the villages and the limestone ridges are lovely, but both are dying. The villages are now empty shells where few but the very old live; the others have gone off to cities to find jobs. Over thousands of years, people have struggled to make a living in these hills, grazing goats, logging trees, planting wheat, fighting battles, hunting wildlife, writing poetry, founding empires, creating much of the philosophy that forms the basis of western culture. In the process, people stripped the hillsides of their trees (hence the lovely views), their soil, and their ability to support much life, human or otherwise. People built empires from the resources extracted from these ecosystems, but in extracting without limit, the empires eventually destroyed themselves from within. To understand why, one needs to understand two interconnected factors usually seen as separate: ecology and economics.

From: Langston, N. E. 1998. In: Dodson, S. I. & mais 7. Ecology. NY, Oxford UP.