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

The garden was the cultural foundation of the early Mediterranean peoples; they acknowledged their reliance on and kinship to 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 major religions.

In this important melding of cultural and ecological histories, James H. S. McGregor suggests that the environmental crisis the world faces today is a result of Wester...