the vegetative mediterranean 29
of the Inner Sea that have the greatest species richness are among the most
topographically fractured. Yet geography is not enough to explain why so many types
of plants like to live in the Mediterranean area, and to comprehend this exceptional
biodiversity we must consider people’s actions too. Several millennia of human exploi-
tation have both trained plants to adjust, thus rendering them more capable, and
contributed to stability by forming more various habitats and thereby more species
richness (Allen, 2009: 216–220). In practice, there is almost always a local
Mediterranean plant better adapted than any outside plant to take advantage of what-
ever disturbance may occur, natural or man-made. Thus southwest and south
Australia’s vegetation, living in a comparable climate with more-than-Mediterranean
botanical richness, has neither resisted biological invasion nor exported itself as well
as have Mediterranean plants: lack of relief, combined with the only quite recent
(colonial) human interventions, may explain this (Dallman, 1998: 162).
The deforested seaBraudel wrote his magnum opus in the 1940s, a difficult time for the Parco Nazionale
d’Abruzzo where, in the uppermost reaches of the Sangro river, under the peak of the
Monte Marsicano, he saw pristine Mediterranean forests (1972–3: 42). Braudel
assumed that any woods less monumental than the Apennine beech forests were
“debased” forms of the sea’s original vegetation. He considered the Val di Corte
beeches one of several Mediterranean “forest ruins” overlooked by lumbermen, and
explained the discrepancy between the “thin” formations more normal throughout
the basin and Abruzzese beeches by the fact that “ordinary” woods could not grow
back after cuttings in the Mediterranean’s arid conditions (1972–3: 42 n. 84;
239–240). Deforestation, in other words, was typically Mediterranean.
Deforestation is a culturally-loaded term in contemporary discourse, tainted with
capitalist rapacity and tragedies of the commons. Therefore it is an awkward word for
historians. Among Africanists, until quite recently it was the expected outcome of
colonial encounters, often with the counterbalancing Eden to precede the arrival of
European loggers (Fairhead and Leach, 1996). In colonial French circles, strangely
similar deforestation narratives justified ambitions in North Africa, whose vegetation
actually has been relatively stable for the past 3000 years and neither “desertified” by
Arab settlement nor in need of European rehabilitation (Davis, 2007). In Mediterranean
history, the morally-charged valence of forests has meant that traces of reduction in
wooded cover are easily associated with decline and fall, whether of Athenian democ-
racy because of the Laureion silver mines’ overconsumption of Attic wood or of the
Roman empire, whose multiple ecological crimes the barbarians avenged (Hughes,
2005; Thirgood, 1981). This is an old set of considerations, and the ancient inhabit-
ants of the Mediterranean felt all the ambivalence of their civilizations’ effects on the
natural plant cover (Fedeli, 1990: 45–55, 72–80). So did early modern Venetian
bureaucrats, though their motives were pragmatic: a deforested Adriatic basin seemed
to spell disaster for the Most Serene Republic’s maritime enterprise (Appuhn, 2009).
In fact, many modern European writers have perceived Mediterranean environ-
ments, in particular Mediterranean vegetation, as inadequate because they are alien
and unlike their familiar better-watered and -wooded homelands (Horden and Purcell,
2000: 28–29; Foxhall, 2006: 276). This almost-orientalist trope of deforestation is