30 paolo squatriti
not just a matter of outsiders looking in. Within “meridionalist” debates over the
economic and cultural distance between north and south segments of the
Mediterranean, Mediterranean natives have also adopted it with enthusiasm. In all
such evaluations, the observers’ starting assumptions in assessing proper tree cover is
decisive (Bevilacqua, 1992: 7–30). Lately, the choral condemnation of denuded, or
degraded, Mediterranean hillsides and of endemic deforestation has tapered off, and
the ability of Mediterranean woodlands to survive, often for very long times, the suc-
cession of fires, cuttings, pests, grazing, and weather fluctuations that fall under the
capacious rubric of ecological disturbance is now better appreciated. The novelty of
the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century wood-cutting activities associated with
industrialization is likewise better understood.
Behind this reorientation lies a reassessment of Frederic Clements’ 1916 theory of
plant succession. From the 1960s on, questions arose about the empirical bases of
Clements’ notion that plant communities follow a linear progress until woods grow
up, and of his idea that natural vegetation tends toward stability in the absence of
exogenous factors (tellingly called disturbances). In this recalibration of ecological
theory, nature emerged looking much less predictable and less equilibrium-prone
than it looked to Clements: observers found disturbance normal (Botkin, 2012;
Burrows, 1990: 466–469). The implications for understanding Mediterranean forests
and de-forests are considerable. Whereas Braudel and many others thought the
Mediterranean once was and really still should be shrouded in thick deciduous forest
of the sort he saw in a few relict stands here and there, it is possible to see actual
Mediterranean vegetation as “natural,” not an inferior form of the proper big-trunked,
high-canopied trees. The maquis is no longer a degeneration caused by human greed.
Indeed, palaeobotanical studies indicate that maquis and garrigue covered numer-
ous Mediterranean slopes long before people got to them and very long before
Neolithic farming took hold in the region (Blondel et al., 2010: 118–119). Botanists
further observe that the Mediterranean may not be all that suitable for trees to begin
with: in a place where access to moisture more than to sunlight controls plant growth,
shrubs, bushes, and grasses compete quite effectively with taller plants (Allen, 2009:
223). Woods may be the best-adapted, or “climax” vegetation in gloomier parts of
the world, but are far less obviously so in the Mediterranean.
Some Mediterranean woodlands vanished for good in premodern times. Elite
Romans’ lust for its grainy wood removed Barbary thuja stands from Cyrenaica, just
as Hellenistic people’s thirst for silphium juice led to that plant’s extinction there
(Blondel et al., 2010). Strong Roman demand for construction- and heating-wood
around large cities and near mines, especially in the centuries around the year 0,
reduced desirable and accessible species, chiefly resinous ones (Harris, 2011).
Byzantine saints’ lives describe athletic holy men around 1000 clearing giant trees
from the wooded “deserts” of Calabria’s Aspromonte and Pollino forests, and across
the sea in the Middle Atlas at around the same time farmers hacked at cedar, pine, and
oak woods to create farmland (Rugolo, 1995; Noyé, 2001; Lamb et al., 1991: 530).
The “great clearances” of the high Middle Ages may not have fashioned treeless
steppes in the Mediterranean, but they certainly affected tree cover (Durand, 1998:
396–402; Martin, 1990: 317–26). Renaissance crossbowmen’s demand for boxwood
made that noble plant rare (Blondel et al., 2010: 251). Thus, episodes of clear- cutting,
some followed by cultivation of former woodland, shaped the vegetation history of