Back to the Garden: Nature and the Mediterranean World from Prehistory to the Present

A cultural and ecological history of the Mediterranean region and humankind’s broken covenant with nature

The garden was the cultural foundation of the early Mediterranean peoples; they acknowledged their reliance on and kinship with the land, and they understood nature through the lens of their diversely cultivated landscape. Their image of the garden underwrote the biblical book of Genesis and the region’s three religions. For millennia, there was no sharp divide between humankind and the...