Reply To: Mon 17 March: Greece and Revisionist Environmental History

Nik Petek
Reply to Fu Yaqi

I also think that the idea that ‘yesterday was better than today’ is still very much present in the general population and particularly in environmental studies. While many conservation, environmental and ecological studies are done because they are needed to understand the environmental systematics, some unnecessarily promote the return of an ecosystem to its past appearance, as if yesterday’s ecosystem is consistently better than today’s. This type of thinking also implies we can cut out an ecosystem from the landscape and treat it as devoid of relationships with the rest of the world.
It is of utmost importance to study ecosystems and their past, to better understand loss of biodiversity and how it works and used to work. But many people falsely think that ‘yesterday’ people were more capable of looking after the environment and were living in peace with it, and therefore we should bring back the past, which is impossible. It has been this kind of thinking that caused many ecological projects to fail, because they were based on pseudo-ecology.