This book describes and analyses the environmental history of the mountain areas of the Mediterranean world, focusing on Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Morocco. The author examines the land and its people and concludes that great changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created the often barren and depopulated countrysides of today. These changes, he suggests, lie behind much of the social and political turbulence of modern times as mountain people came to terms with worsening conditions. Written in a lively style, the book is the first environmental history of the Mediterranean area. 1 - The Argument: Ecology, Economy, Shells, and Skeletons:Population and Ecology: Overshoot, Market Integration ; 2 - Mediterranean Mountain Environments:The Mediterranean Zone; Five Mountain Rangers; A Few Villages ; 3 - The Deep History of Mediterranean Landscapes: Prehistoric Landscapes; Ancient Landscape Change; After the Ancients; The Slow Renaissance of the Mountains, 1000-1700; Five Mountain Landscapes, 500-1700; 4 - Material Life in the Mountain Environment, 1700–1900: The Land an the Seasons; Vulnerabilities of Mountain Life, Auxiliary Activities; BAsic Necessities, Season of LIfe, The Village and the Wider World; 5 - Population, Settlement, and Landscapes:The Quality of Data, The Taurus; The Pindus, The Lucanian Apennines; The Alpujarra, The Rif; 6 - Political Economy and Mountain Landscapes:The Loss of Auxiliary Activities; Economic Change and Environmental Decay, Politics and War. 7 - The Changing Landscape since 1800: Economy and Landscapes; Evidence of Landscape Change, Deforestation, Erosion; Consequences of Landscape Change. Mittelmeerraum ; Gebirge ; Ökologie; Mittelmeerraum ; Entwaldung; Mittelmeerraum ; Bodenerosion; Nature ; Effect of human beings on ; Mediterranean Region; Deforestation ; Mediterranean Region; Soil erosion ; Mediterranean Region; Landscape changes ; Mediterranean Region; Mountain ecology ; Mediterranean Region; Mediterranean Region ; Social conditions. This work describes and analyzes the environmental history of the mountain areas of the Mediterranean world. It focuses on five sample areas, one in each of Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain and Marocco. Examining the peasant and pastoral economies, and the soils, forests, fields, and pastures on which they depended, it voncludes that great changes in mountain landscapes accurred in the nineteeenth and twentieth centuries, creating the often barren and depopulated countryside of today. It suggests that the social and political turbulance of modern times derives some of its impetus from the desperation of mountain folk whose forests and soils thinned with each passing generation.
