Deforestation

As I noted on July 25, the Enlightenment thinker Giambattista Vico considered irony to be the death of civilization, that is to say, cities. After the cities fell, the benighted forests would return. The final irony, says Robert Pogue Harrison in Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, is that we were not to be that lucky.

Vico believed that nature and history followed two fundamentally different laws. Civilizations rise according to the “ideal eternal history” of institutional evolution. They eventually fall by virtue of a law of entropy which brings about disorder in the system as a whole. Once the cities fall, the forests return and reclaim the ground on which they were founded. For Vico nature was a closed and stable system of self-regeneration. He never suspected that civilization’s law of entropy could contaminate or compromise the domain of nature as a whole, nor was he in a position, historically speaking, to suspect such a thing.

Some two-and-a-half centuries later, we now know that what Vico says about the reforestation of the civic clearing is not only inaccurate but also ironic. While forests did indeed reclaim part of Rome’s civic space during the early Middle Ages, the same is by no means true for most of the illustrious ancient cities that had their origins in the once densely forested environment of the Mediterranean. It suffices to travel around Asia Minor today and visit such cities — Ephesus, Miletus, Aphrodisias, Priene, Pergamum, Side, Kaunos, Halikarnasos, etc. — to see how nakedly they lie under the open sky. There is little in the vicinity to hide the celestial auspices now. The lucus* long ago lost its limits, and from its wide-open eye one can see today not only the ruins of a great ancient city but also those of an even more ancient forest. One face, one race. So many deserts. [pp. 57-58]

Meanwhile, a correspondent has sent me a link to this story at CNN: Study: Global warming sparked by ancient farming methods. It seems relevant, somehow, to Harrison’s point:

(CNN) — Ancient man may have started global warming through massive deforestation and burning that could have permanently altered the Earth’s climate, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

The study, published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews and reported on the University of Virginia’s Web site, says over thousands of years, farmers burned down so many forests on such a large scale that huge amounts of carbon dioxide were pumped into the atmosphere. That possibly caused the Earth to warm up and forever changed the climate.

It is perhaps another small irony that the battle that finally wrested the lands of Ohio and Kentucky from the indigenous nations was called the Battle of Fallen Timbers. (Though the timbers were felled by some species of natural disaster.) Today is the anniversary of that battle.

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*The lucus was a clearing, an “eye,” in the forest, which was “the original site of our theologies and cosmoloties, our physics and metaphysics . . .” [Harrison, p. 11].