Mon 17 March: Greece and Revisionist Environmental History

Response to Ellen

The question of scientific platitudes in interdisciplinary studies is interesting, as is the issue of trust. However in an interdisciplinary study could it not be that it is harder for factoids to pass as the landscape, as in this case, is studied using different scientific ”lenses” and methods, perhaps within different scientific traditions, making it harder to let ”old truths” hold without discussion?

I totally agree on your point that no good comes out of romanticizing about past,  what is the point of throwing more blame on our sorry selves for destroying Eden? From Rackhams perspective, from what I understand it, this is not the issue however. Rackham is interested in revisionist history writing not from a sense of environmental consciousness but in the name of science and truth. This, I find, is an interesting twist in environmental history as the underlying scientific intent can vary a whole deal in the field which houses historians, archaeologist, ecologists, economic historians, ecofeminists, philosophers, and so on.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 8 months ago by Mirabel Joshi.

Response to Kristina’s post
Thank you Kristina for your thoughtful post. I agree with you that it is nothing new for us as students of environmental history that we should be extremely careful about the information we get when we live in a world of endless overflow of information. Indeed, in our first semester we had the chance to take a course extremely useful with Benjamin Martin “Theory and methods in thesis work” where the importance of being critical towards every historical source has been highlighted. Rackham himself stated that we should multiply the sources of evidence before drawing conclusions. In historical ecology, we should keep in mind that what may be true for a place does not necessarily apply somewhere else. For example it is often accepted that trees protect the soil from erosion but this is not completely true in the case of Greece.
As students of environmental history, if we lack understanding of ecological systems, we should be extremely careful when reading about past scientific data. We might be tempted to oversimplify the facts in order to make sense of them, just as you pointed out.
I tend to regret that I do not have much knowledge in the natural sciences field and thus am subject to overgeneralize historical ecology and not being accurate enough in my interpretations of the past. Hence, I wish to learn more in the natural sciences field so that I can avoid to get stuck in the “pseudo-ecology” Rackham writes about.
To conclude, I agree with you that it would have been interesting to get Rackham’s opinion on present day Greece’s ecology but it seemed that he is more interested in studying the past without necessarily making a connection with the present or even the future. This is quite different from other historical ecologists such as Carole Crumley who work for finding solutions towards a sustainable future.

Responose to Joshi Mirabel’s reflection, Yaqi Fu

Thanks very much for your thoughtful reflection.

I saw in your reflection you are thinking about how to combine historical perspective with environmental issues. This is also an important issue for me. Improper ideas and misconceptions of the environment, which will mislead our solutions to environmental problems, however, are quite common in today’s scholarship. I agree with you that Rackham’s concept of pseudo-ecology is a good tool in explaining the formation of worldviews in macro scope where different understandings and narratives coexisted. In micro scope, the concept of pseudo-ecology will also help us find and solve specific problems. We need to be cautious not to make a pseudo-ecology by putting our subjectivity too much in our research. You mentioned a phenomenon pointed by Rackham that “most often the history of the landscape is not sprung from ‘reading’ the landscape but from reading a book”. In this sense I totally agree with you that this is not enough. We need to combine literature with the practical reading of landscape. I think it’s a big challenge for our environmental history.

I am interested in the question you pointed: “in what sense”, when doing historical research. I agree with you on that this is an important issue we need to pay special attention to and keep clear in our mind; otherwise we may unconsciously go beyond our sense, our scale, and even join in the troop of making pseudo-ecology. From my understanding, “in what sense”, moreover, is a higher standard because it requires us to be honest to what we know and what we do not, and know where we need to stop.

Reply to Kristina Berglund:
Hi Kristina, thank you for you focus on some of the main theories about the ecology of ancient Greece and discussed how some of these theories might be described as pseudo-ecology that was presented on Monday. You really remind me to notice some parts when you mentioned the topic of ‘traditional history writing’, you said we looked at the limited sources and efforts historians could formerly use to write, and how it has changed today. I think I totally agree with you from my study experence in China. I haven’t attend that course you mentioned yet, so I have no idea about the concept”traditional history writing”, what I thought is, “traditional history writing” means so called formalized academica history writing? Am I right?

Nik Petek, Relfection on Oliver Rackham
Complimentary task for Current Themes and Debates in Global Environmental History

Unfortunately, I missed Rackham’s seminar and am putting down only my reflections on the article on the ecology and pseudo-ecology of Greece.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this chapter because of its witty academic politeness when discussing the conclusions of other researchers and the style it was written in. Rackham is clearly a person with much experience in debunking bad ecology and writes with the same vigour as a person who has had enough of it. The comment on p. 34 on Zangger’s work is particularly revealing why he wants better ecological work.

The impression I have about the work of others is that they based it on very scant data – at least that is how Rackham presents it. While I suspect that each author provided more evidence (or factoids), since otherwise it would never get published, it does show how quickly an individual can debunk a badly assembled argument on ecology and socio-ecological relationships. The particular danger, which comes out from Rackham’s paper, is that people are dealing with material (historical scripts in this case) with which they don’t know how to handle. Already as an archaeology and anthropology undergraduate I was told not to take historical references at face-value, but to be critical of them and to analyse and contextualise each historical source. However, we were never taught how you can be critical and how you can contextualise and strengthen any argument using historical sources. Throughout my undergraduate and master’s degree, I continued to use historical sources and was trying not to take them at face-value, but it was not until recently that I was taught how to work with historical sources.

During a workshop on the use of archival resources, Prof David Anderson brought forward the notion of ‘triangulation’. By triangulation he meant that a researcher uses more than one historical source of evidence (not just archives, but also public media, oral history) and uses data from other disciplines. (Unfortunately, this brings us again to the criticism that some people will not know how to deal with and interpret the data from other disciplines). Through triangulation an argument will gain more weight and become more coherent.

Not knowing how to work with the data and be critical of it is not the only problem that Rackham encounters in the ecology of ancient Greece. Many of the issues Rackham talks about also appear simplified and are not dealt with in sufficient detail. Part of the reason for this problem stems from the lack of written evidence from Ancient Greece, be it either that the Greek writers were ignorant of ecological issues or that they did not survive to the present day. Another problem is that researchers think of former lands/regions as a single ecological area and sometimes in terms of the modern state that occupies that area. As Rackham himself states already, even an island like Crete cannot be subject to a single ecological discussion due to the various environs present on the island. But researchers (admittedly the articles he writes about are from the 1980s) deal with the whole Classic Greek world as a single ecological entity. The third issue Rackham exposes is the lack of thought given to various possibilities that could have happened or to the multiplicity of truths. The thought process he criticises is usually binary: if it is not a, it has to be b; and if it is not b, it has to be a.

To explain this problem I would like to refer the area that I am working in: Baringo, Kenya. Baringo is now suffering from heavy erosion. Before the research done by David Anderson, it was popularly believed that it was the extremely large herds of cattle and goat that ate all of the undergrowth, thus causing erosion. David Anderson, however, showed that it was the British colonialists who created native reserves, immobilizing pastoralists, who caused the overgrazing of the area. Less than a decade ago Kiage reported that erosion has been happening for the past 400 years – that is for the whole period that lake sediment records were available. Kiage again brought the idea to the forefront that it was the local inhabitants of the area that could be the major cause of erosion. Neither Anderson nor Kiage took into account the geology of the area and how it operates with the local climate. Baringo is characterised by unconsolidated, very fine silts and clays which are easily transported by wind (which is constant) and by water (which comes in sporadic downpours during two rainy seasons). Although I am still to investigate this and substantiate my claim, it seems reasonable to assume that both the geology and the local climate are the major actors in this erosion and might even be the root cause of it.
Anderson’s argument was it was not the locals, it was the colonials. Kiage’s argument was that erosion has been happening for too long to be the colonials’ fault; it has to be the locals. But neither of them is right, since their conclusion is very binary and does not take into account the whole picture. The discussion is very similar to that of Madagascar, where people have again been accused of causing erosion. However, with time the argument has grown more complex and it is now believed that it is natural.

One thing that Rackham shows, between the lines, is that no matter our agenda, as researchers we should aim to be as precise as we can, even if that precision means that we can’t say anything conclusive. We should not try and build an ecological and environmental argument, just for the sake of having one. Every researcher needs to be aware of the deficiencies of his/her data and acknowledge that.

Nik Petek
Reply to Kristina Berglund

I have to admit, not knowing much about Greek ecology, that I thought that the factoid on Classical Greek deforestation was a fact. I heard it enough times that I thought it was true, since my undergraduate degree. Also, as I stated in my reply to Nick Hirschstein, it is generally thought that a lot of deforestation happened during the Antique – I admit this is not the same period as the Classical Greek period. But what I am trying to say is that I had the idea that the whole Greco-Roman period experienced widespread deforestation and ecological degradation.

But I have to acknowledge that the chapter is almost 20 years old, and a lot of new data would have been retrieved since then. So what I now think of as a factoid – the deforestation of Greece – has actually been substantiated by new archaeological and environmental research. So, while Rackham’s chapter is not outdated in terms of the research deficiencies that it points out, it is outdated in terms of what it is saying about the ecology of Classical Greece.

It is easy to succumb to factoids, especially if you are not a specialist in it, and people that do not understand the topic generalise to have a better grip on the topic itself.

Nik Petek
Reply to Archie Davies

While I agree with your statement, we still need to keep in mind that those writings and articles that Rackham criticises are used by academics from other disciplines. Furthermore, if those writings are not based on either a fact or a factoid, they themselves might promote factoids and unsubstantiated believes. But from Ramsey’s reflection I gather that badly substantiated claims used to be part of ‘traditional historical writing’. The articles Rackham refers to are from the 80s, when a different academia to today’s was in place, and while that might have been good academia then, it was certainly not good enough to survive the 90s.