The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History.

The beauty which we admire in contemporary Mediterranean landscapes, J.R. McNeill reminds us at the beginning of this learned but gloomy environmental history of the region, is that of a barren and depopulated countryside of relatively recent origins. The extreme deforestation, soil erosion, and decline of an agro-pastoral way of life has left a landscape of "skeletal mountains" and "shell villages" which the author describes in five distinct mountain ranges--the Taurus in southern Turkey, the northern Pindus in Greece, the southern Apennines in Italy, the Sierra Nevada in southern Spain, and the Rif in Morocco. Using these sample regions, McNeill examines the dual source of degradation and decline: ecological overshoot and economic underdevelopment. The first was the result of excessive population pressure on the limited resources of a fragile mountain environment; the second was the experience of "market integration" during the last two hundred years. This is a somber book, filled with a sense of the "death sentence" imposed on the mountains of the Mediteranean, where the constraints of a fragile ecosystem reached its maximum carrying capacity before 1800, and have inexorably declined ever since.

A brief and useful introduction summarizes these themes and concerns. The second chapter introduces the reader to the mountain environment and the five sample mountain ranges. Each of the remaining five chapters treats a set of thematic concerns which, in an inordinately redundant fashion, are repeated for each of the five cases. Chapter Three provides the "deep history" of Mediterranean landscapes, arguing that the mountain environment remained marginal during the prehistoric and ancient periods of settlement and civilization in the Mediterranean. Indeed, according to McNeill, it was only the "slow renaissance of the mountains" beginning around the year 1000 and culminating around the beginning of the eighteenth century which witnessed the formation of a "classical" mountain ecosystem. At its height, this system combined agriculture and stock-raising--forest, field, and pasture--with a range of auxiliary activities, from mining to temporary outmigration. The system was culturally and ecologically adaptive, and assured a delicate stability which lasted the span of several generations. Chapter Four purports to describe the "material life" of this classical system, but in fact comes closer to an historical ethnography of traditional mountain peasant economy and society, using descriptive accounts of travellers and reports generated by the state. Chapter Five relies heavily on (often dubious) quantitative data from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in carefully assessing population levels and searching for the sources of internal transformation within this classical system. Chapter Six examines the "political economy" of the mountain landscape, focusing on the external "forces" of the market and the state in the degradation of the landscape, while a final substantive chapter summarizes the causes and consequences of deforestation, erosion, and other forms of landscape degradation.

As McNeill is quick to point out, the historical chronology of the development and decline of the Mediterranean mountain landscape differs in each of his five case studies. He does not help the reader assess the commonalities and differences of these cases by adopting such distinctions as that between a "Christian," an "African," and a "Muslem" Mediterranean. Indeed, the operative distinctions among the case studies are neither cultural nor religious but chronological and developmental: Turkey and Morocco apparently follow the same path as Spain and Italy, a century or more behind. The book is an environmental history strangely disconnected from historical and cultural contexts.

Yet McNeill's book, in one sense, is more than environmental history, although he is not always explicit about the kinds of problems he addresses. The book has aspirations toward human or cultural geography, of recovering not just the material practices but the attitudes, beliefs, values, and feelings of the mountain peasantries as they experience the degradation of their landscape. Here the author admits that he is on not very solid ground, and his own nostalgia for a bucolic, ecologically-adapted peasant community is sometimes transferred onto the emigrant peasants. And beyond geography, this book attempts to locate its study of environmental degradation in the world of politics, both by pointing out the impact of state-building on mountain peasant communities, and by suggesting how forms of resistance and revolt may be related to the "crisis" experienced by mountain environments beginning in the nineteenth century. But because the author has no developed or coherent model of either state-building, nation-formation, or forms of political resistance, the hypotheses are suggestive at best, and haphazard or trite at worst.

McNeill prefaces this book with a quotation from Fernand Braudel about Braudel's passionate love the Mediterranean, which the author evidently shares, just as he shares generally the latter's geographical determinism. Yet he never pursues some of Braudel's most brilliant and suggestive insights into the mountains of the Mediterranean, such as the idea of "mountain liberty," developed in the first few pages of Braudel's opus.(1) But McNeill's book has other virtues, and will be of interest to historians and geographers of the Mediterranean world.

Peter Sahlins University of California, Berkeley 

ENDNOTE 

1. F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. S. Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York, 1966), 1: 36-41.