Book Details
Orange Code:93023
Paperback:381 pages
Publications:
Categories:
Sections:
1. The Paleolithic Landscape2. Neolithic Revolutions3. The Spread of Farming Culture4. Uruk and Egypt, the Great Powers5. The Primacy of Landscape in West Asia6. Mediterranean Trade and Regional Cooperation7. The Greek Link between Landscape and Cosmology8. Roman Agriculture: Three Case Studies9. Medieval Christian Ecological Understanding10. Muslim Ecological Understanding11. Renaissance Landscape and Food12. The Modern Mediterranean
Description:
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.
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