Back to the Garden: Nature and the Mediterranean World from Prehistory to the Present

by James H.S. McGregor

The garden was the cultural foundation of the early Mediterranean peoples; they acknowledged their reliance on and kinship to the land, and they understood nature through the lens of their diversely cultivated landscape. Their image of the garden underwrote the biblical book of Genesis and the region’s three major religions.
 
In this important melding of cultural and ecological histories, James H. S. McGregor suggests that the environmental crisis the world faces today is a result of Western society’s abandonment of the “First Nature” principle--of the harmonious interrelationship of human communities and the natural world. The author demonstrates how this relationship, which persisted for millennia, effectively came to an end in the late eighteenth century, when “nature” came to be equated with untamed landscape devoid of human intervention. McGregor’s essential work offers a new understanding of environmental accountability while proposing that recovering the original vision of ourselves, not as antagonists of nature but as cultivators of a biological world to which we innately belong, is possible through proven techniques of the past.

Genres: Ecology

383 pages, Hardcover

First published January 13, 2015

About the author

When I was ten I borrowed my Dad’s Smith-Corona portable typewriter and started a novel about pirates. I didn’t get very far. A few years later the Smith-Corona went to college then grad school with me. Its completion rate increased, but the work it was called on to turn out—term papers in sociology, political science, Russian history and the like—was less exciting if more meaningful than my first attempt. After working my way through a number of undergraduate majors, I stumbled into Comparative Literature and the typing grew more focused, more earnest and more fun.
Comparative Literature turned into a career. The Smith-Corona morphed into a series of ever cheaper, ever smaller and more efficient computers. I wrote professional articles and books on Giovanni Boccaccio and other figures in medieval Italian literary history. Near the end of my academic career, I started writing books about cities. It turned out that all those term papers on social science and history had been waiting for a chance to get into conversation with the art and literature I had been teaching. The first book, called Rome from the Ground Up, described a city where I had spent two important, eye opening years.
That book was under contract with a small press in lower Manhattan when the World Trade Center was hit. The editor there believed that the market for books about foreign cities had collapsed with the second tower and decided not to publish. I sold Rome to Yale University Press about a year later. When my editor at Yale left, enthusiasm for publishing the book went with him. Fortunately I’d gotten a good reading of the book from an expert Yale had consulted, and with that in hand, I approached the literature editor at Harvard UP. He was persuaded, and I was offered a contract. On the strength of the contract, I was able to sign on with a wonderful literary agent.
Four books later, HUP and I parted ways. Yale, under dynamic new leadership, is the publisher of my latest book, which is a new direction for me but also a complement to my city books. Four of those books--Paris, Rome, Venice and Athens--focus on places either in the Mediterranean or deeply engaged with it. The new book, Back to the Garden, looks at that part of the world and the societies it has influenced from a rural rather than an urban viewpoint. It traces the history of regional reliance on and understanding of the natural environment.
For the last year I’ve been writing a follow up book that focuses on American environmental issues, especially our muddled thinking about two critical and confusing topics: wilderness on the one hand, wild (and domestic) animals on the other.
Now retired from academics, I live in Cambridge with my wife (we met in Rome!). And though it pains me to confess it, I still have nothing meaningful to say about pirates.

Reviews

[Alexander Van Leadam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Powerful and compelling text, presenting a multifaceted argument for a hypothesis (the unfortunately named "first nature"). It's not easy reading; it requires perseverance, as each facet is presented and connected to the hypothesis. Sometimes it the text can be unnecessarily long and even fuzzy (e.g. as when images are described textually only). It requires considerable effort from the reader to follow the argumentation, especially in terms of coherence. The reward is not only an extensive overview but also the debunking of quite a few assumptions we tend to accept uncritically because we have grown accustomed to their apparent truth. Whether one accepts the author's conclusions or not, the book is certainly worth reading for the critical attitude it stimulates.

[Cengiz Aytun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Akdeniz ve Levant bölgesinde çevresel bozulmanın tarım devrimi ile değil endüstrileşme ile başladığını iddia ediyor. Jared Diamond’a önemli eleştirilerde bulunmuş ama bu iddiaları bence fazla destekleyememiş. Örneğin ilk mezopotamya şehir devletlerinin çoküş nedenlernden birisi olarak çevre tahribatını görmüyor. Halbuki aşırı sulama nedeniyle toprağın tuzlanması pek çok antik metinde bile yer alıyor. Bu fikirlerini iyi temellendiremediğini düşünüyorum. Ayrıca kitabın sonunda okuduklarıma dair genel bir değerlendirme beklerdim. Yine de kütüphanemde bulunsun bakalım dediklerimden.

[Caroline Petruzzi McHale · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that was way ahead of its time. Not only are the historical illustrations relevant to understanding our current world, but also key to understanding life in the Mediterranean community. Despite the transformation, abandonment and neglect of the region in the last hundred years (including devastating, unprecedented heatwaves in 2021), the agricultural landscape still survives, remaining both beautiful and bountiful.

I particularly enjoyed the book's conclusions on cultural recalibration and the importance of listening to emerging economists. Citing Krugman's Building a Green Economy, McGregor discusses the importance of new methods of accounting that take into account the full spectrum of costs association with economic decisions. Also enjoyed the discussion of wheat flour, which today is chosen for extensive cultivation because it suits global supply chains: planting, harvesting shipping and storage.

"To uncover the secrets of the consensus and the harmony that First Nature created between the human community and the biological community, we need to reactivate the landscape ."

[Akakiy · Rating 4 out of 5]

enviromental history ile ilgilenen arkadaşlar okusun