1-30-2025 5:01am

California and Ancient Greece Share Troubled Consequences

Lesley Misko Editor

by Craig Bennett*

As I write this, the news is full of the California wildfires presently devouring, among other things, the edges of Los Angeles, including the high-rent neighborhoods where many movie stars and other celebrities are watching their veryexpensive homes go up in flames. This is the late 2024-early 2025 spate of such fires. There have been others in recent years, and there are sure to be more in the future. These fires—so frequent, so extensive, so fast-moving, and so extremely destructive—are without precedent. So, what’s causing them? That depends on whom you listen to. For my part, I generally pay more attention to the people who have been warning us about this sort of thing for at least the past few decades.

Despite the record heat waves all around the globe, the storms of unusual severity, the floods, the droughts, and the weather extremes of all sorts that are becoming increasingly common year-by-year, there still seems to be a substantial body of opinion that we should go right on pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, clear-cutting hundreds of acres at a time of the trees that absorb much of their carbon content, belching the smoke of industry into the air that will provide the basis for acid rain to form somewhere downwind that will then kill thousands upon thousands of trees, denuding them of their leaves… and so-on down the line, in graphic demonstration of John Muir’s observation, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

“But it’s natural,” say the skeptics. “The Earth goes through warm periods and cold periods and always has. Human activity has nothing to do with it.” But it’s not the fact that there has been a cycle of the Earth’s warming and cooling for eons; it’s that the rate of the cycle’s progression appears, from all indications, to have suddenly increased rather drastically since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—just at the time when the Industrial Revolution was expanding rapidly, and the western world began burning coal instead of wood to produce steam power in the factories, heat the homes, power the locomotives, and fuel the engines of civilization. But the same voices assure us that this is mere coincidence.

Such denial inevitably brings to mind the account of what happened to the Greek peninsula given by Ernle Bradford in his book The Mediterranean: Portrait of a Sea. The Greece that flourished during the Age of Pericles was not the dry, sun-baked country we know today. It was a lush, green, natural paradise with an abundance of plant growth, animal life, and flowing water. It was this abundance that provided food, water, fuel, and building material for the Greeks in the infancy of their highly sophisticated civilization. And the greater number of trees that were used for building material were used for building ships.

Wooden ships did not last long in the waters around Greece. High salinity, wood-boring ship worms, and other conditions reduced the useful life of a wooden vessel to only a few years, and ships had to be replaced constantly. This, along with an increasing demand for wood fuel as the population of the country grew, soon meant that trees were being cut down and used up faster than then were growing to maturity. Gradually, large areas surrounding population centers—especially those close to the sea, where shipbuilding was a major industry—were completely stripped of the heavy forests that had originally supported the area’s growth.

This allowed the land to be taken over by a variety of thick, sedge-like plants that were further exploited for resin, oils, and fuel. When they, too, were gone, there was little left except bare earth. No longer suitable for cattle or the wild game that used to inhabit the forests, the land could support little other than goats—which browse on saplings and young plants, thereby preventing anything like natural reforestation from occurring. This, in turn, changed the local patterns of heat reflection and absorption when the sun shone down on bare earth that had once been covered by dense foliage. Heat that would have been absorbed by a dark green canopy of leaves was now reflected back into the air above it. As a result, clouds that once would have lingered over cooler, densely wooded areas to lose some of their moisture as rain simply moved on. The absence of trees also would have created a localized, mini-greenhouse effect, as the build-up of carbon dioxide from daily fires in kitchens, forges, public baths, and other facilities was converted into oxygen much more slowly than before (trees “breathe” just the opposite of animals: they take in carbon dioxide and give out oxygen). Little by little, these localized conditions spread until the climate of the entire peninsula had been transformed to its present arid state.

Although the scale of environmentally damaging activity in ancient Greece was far less than that of the same sort of activities in modern times, the nature of those activities is hardly any different. Can “mere” human economic activity actually have a deleterious effect on the climate of a region as large as Greece? If such activity occurred long-term over an area much larger, could it still produce the same effect?

Think about it.

*Craig H. Bennett, author of Nights on the Mountain and More Things in Heaven and Earth, available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and most bookstores