So apparently the disparate forces of democracy have come together at the Paris Climate Change Conference and saved us all from our own damn smog-filled mess. Or maybe not. But here’s the question: “Why did we even need the conference?” I’m sure you understand the science of what’s going on, but how did we let it come to this? We can’t really ignore the fact that we’re stuck on this planet, so treating it like a tip makes little logical sense. And we can’t claim we didn’t know this was coming, the hypothesis and the science have been around for a long time now.

Of course, Paris is just the most recent iteration of a theme that has run alongside the human race forever and a day. It’s obvious that many ancient cultures have had strong relationships with their surroundings. Indigenous Australians are often cited as an example. You always have to be a little wary of such claims (strangely enough, cultures do change over the course of 40,000 years), but they do make a fair point in that early “environmentalism” was extremely spiritual; perhaps not so surprising when you think of the hippie movement. Though perhaps being an environmentalist was easier when you could only have a fairly limited impact on the environment. Although academic debate around the extinction of nearly all the megafauna in Australia does show that you don’t need petrochemicals to ruin your backyard.

But if they’re so important, then how did we become so detached from our surroundings? In his book, An Environmental History of the World, Johnson Hughes sets out to show off all the cool things he’s done, from a hot air balloon ride over the Massai Mara National Reserve in Kenya to watching wildlife off the river Napo in Peru. In passing, he also offers a fairly solid history of how humanity has interacted with the environment. Hughes traces our modern attitudes towards the environment back to ancient times, locating the distant origins of our destructive tendencies mostly in two key developments: cities and empires.

The argument behind the first is pretty straight forward. As we began to live in cities, we slowly became divorced from the natural environment which sustained us. People stopped feeling a part of their surroundings and instead felt they needed to impose their will on a hostile environment. This sounds a little “hippie” to my ear, but Hughes does make a fairly convincing argument, particularly in his analysis of the mythologies of ancient Mesopotamia. He notes how culture and civilisation became all that was good and nature and the wild became that which was evil and feared and needing to be controlled.

He also describes how this “struggle between nature and culture” (p. 35) was also highly gendered and related to the increasing separation of labour between men and women, because if writing an insightful history of the interaction between humans and their environment is too easy, why not tackle the origins of the modern patriarchy?

Either way, what you’re left with is a view of the environment that is entirely instrumental. It exists to serve people and little more. Not a particularly nice sentiment, but it becomes a real problem when combined with empire. With empire, you’re suddenly organising people on a never before seen scale. So what do you do with all that manpower? If you’re an ancient Sumerian, you attempt to overcome the erratic forces of nature and cut channels for irrigation in excess of 300km in length.

Of course, this plays havoc with the water table and creates salinisation so terrible that parts of ancient Mesopotamia still haven’t recovered. In essence, cities increased our willingness to destroy the local environment, and empires gave us the ability to do it properly (keep in mind I’m using a fairly broad definition of “empire” here, pretty much any large-scale organisation of people will do).

What’s really difficult to understand is that it’s not like the ancients didn’t know what they were doing. Rome’s deforestation was so intense that the subsequent soil erosion moves an entire town miles inland. And because nothing is ever new, the Romans continued to do this in full knowledge of the fact what they were doing was screwing over their own empire. Seriously, you have all the great thinkers of the age complaining about how deforestation was leading to all these problems, including poorer water supplies, soil erosion, silting of rivers and the degradation of farmland… And an (almost) utter failure to do anything about it.

Hmm… All talk on the environment, but no action… Now why does that sound familiar?

Academic Sources

Hughes, J D 2004 An environmental history of the world: humankind’s changing role in the community of life, 2nd ed., Taylor and Francis, London.

Hughes, J D & Thirgood, J V 1982, “Deforestation, erosion and forest management in Ancient Greece and Rome”, Journal of Forest History, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 60-75.

Jacobsen, T & Adams, R M 1958, “Salt and silt in ancient Mesopotamian agriculture”, Science, vol. 128, no. 3334, pp. 1251-1258.

Montgomery, D R 2012, Dirt: the erosion of civilisations, 2nd ed., University of California Press, Berkeley.