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Mon 17 March: Greece and Revisionist Environmental History
Yu Wang
The seminar with Professor Oliver Rackham as well as the assigned article dealt with the ecology and pseudo-ecology of ancient Greece:the example of Ancient Greece is very interesting topic. Professor Oliver Rackham mentioned in his book that the Ancient culture was unsustainable, and Greece has gone to the bad. He believed in that Ancient Greece was not all that different from Greece Yesterday.But have to notice that the climate change imposed from outside had an real effect on it. Olive Rackham also reminder us to notice a clearly differernt danger in Greek is, What an Ancient Greek would miss from Greece today is not forests but wetlands. Most of the fens and many of the lakes were thoroughly destroyed in the 19th and 20th centruies.Degradation has at last caught up with Greece. I agree with him that, we used to make some mistakes when we do the deep discussion. We used to too much rely on written documents and also too much only focus on trees diseases, neglected some other plants, animals which is also parts of Environment. For example the problem for Greek today is not lost trees but wetlands. And I also agree on another point he mentions on his paper that, expect the history of the landscape to be simple, over-generalize, gathering different phrase, information, fragments from different countries different time period, create a kind of ecology history in our mind. For example,we students are all come from different places in the world, studying in Sweden doesn’t mean we should also take Swedish ecology condition as only right dissicussion background.
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