February 13, 2025 • 38 mins
In this episode of Talking Environment, host Gevorg Ghazaryan sits down with Cam Grey, an environmental and social historian and Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, to explore the historical connections between environmental activism, climate change, and sustainability in the Roman Empire.
Professor Grey shares insights into how ancient societies navigated environmental challenges, the impact of climate variability on civilizations, and the early forms of environmental legislation and advocacy in the Roman world. This conversation uncovers valuable lessons from history that can inform modern climate activism and policy-making.
Tune in toTalking Environment to gain a deeper understanding of how environmental history shapes today’s sustainability efforts and what we can learn from past civilizations in addressing contemporary environmental crises.
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Episode Transcript
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Hello everyone and welcome back to Talking Environment. I'm your host Gevorg Ghazaryan
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and today we are delving into the fascinating world of environmental history and exploring how
the fight for environmental rights and climate action has evolved throughout history. So joining
us today is Cam Grey, an esteemed environmental and social historian and professor of classical
studies at the University of Pennsylvania whose research evolves around the environmental
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dynamics of the Roman Empire with a focus on how ancient communities navigated environmental
challenges, Cam's work offers valuable insights into the evaluation of environmental activism
and resilience throughout history. So welcome to the show. Great, thank you for having me. I'm
really glad to be here. Awesome. So to start with, could you please give us a bit of an introduction
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of your work and what do you do? Sure, so I started my life as a social historian and I was
especially interested in the ways that small communities worked. I was interested in
trying to encounter the sort of grand narratives of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire
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at the scale of small scale communities and what I was really excited to do was to think about
the patterns of reciprocity, exchange, mutual support, but also conflict management that
small communities had. So it was always, and I think my scholarship is always sort of a strike
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for the little person rather than sort of just talking about the big grand narrative. So at the
same time as that, that is my scholarly work. I'm also as an educator here at Penn, I'm residential
faculty in the college house system and so I'm actually also interested in how small communities
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work, right? I'm interested in building and maintaining communities and so always I think,
you know, my intellectual life and my sort of my teaching life and my domestic life, they all kind
of interact with one another. About 10 or 12 years ago I got involved in directing an archaeological
project in Tuscany and as part of that I started up a bunch of conversations with a geologist
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about the landscape and the people that lived in this landscape and it became clear after about
two weeks of talking that we had lots of interesting things to say but we didn't have a common language
and so I tried to figure out how to find a language with her and so I went and did a degree in
environmental studies here at Penn and in doing that degree I encountered this apparatus of
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scholarship that I knew nothing about and I sort of I tried to figure out how to make that language
speak to the language that I was familiar with. Concurrently, of course, I moved into what is now
Lorda College House on Hill Field and Lorda College House is a building that has a whole bunch of
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environmental and sustainability features kind of built into it and so that became a part of my
thinking about my education and my pedagogy and my community building and so once again, you know,
my scholarly life and my pedagogical and my domestic life are kind of all intermeshed with
one another. Fast forward to this year, I just finished a book on experiences of living with
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risk in the late Roman world and the sort of the final push of that book happened through COVID
when we were all living with risk, right, and so there's that kind of third step in sort of everything
all being intermeshed so as a scholar, as an activist, as a kind of a citizen in the world,
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I feel like it's hard for me to disentangle all of those strands but I think mostly uncomfortable
with that. That's great, that's a great story and so to start with, I just wanted so most of us
most of us think of the environmental challenges and fighting for the environmental issues,
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most of us think of it as just the last let's say 20, 30 years, 40 years. Could you give us a bit of
an intro into how these issues were maybe perceived in the Roman age and in the ancient Rome?
If people were thinking as these issues are real issues, that will be a great problem for the
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future or what it looks like? So it's a really interesting question and in a sense, and you know
I can't give you a narrative from all the way back to my past, you know sort of all the way
into our present, but it has always felt to me like our modern societal and scholarly
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preoccupation with environmental issues is predicated on I think one, a sense that we are
separate from nature and so we have either a responsibility to it or we need to advocate
for it or we've kind of sundered ourselves from it, which you know maybe and this isn't the time
for a lengthy disquisition on you know capitalism and industrialisation and stuff but you know
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maybe it's got something to do with capitalism and industrialisation. We kind of we live in
a world where it's very easy for us not to feel like we're part of nature and so we either like
completely you know withdraw into our cities or we feel like we've got to make some kind of a
constructed step back to nature and I mean you know again another aside would be for example
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the construction of the national park system here in the United States by Teddy Roosevelt
right in the early 20th century which was very much a back to nature kind of a moment.
In antiquity there's no back to nature because they are in and of nature right they don't perceive
a dualism between society and the environment that they're in but what that also means I think
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is that their whole rhetorics of their lived experiences are about living with
and about maintaining equilibrium with and what's really interesting for me in that is that there's
a modern scholarly discourse among human geographers which regards weather, climate,
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not as kind of you know temperatures and means and rainfall quotients and stuff but rather as a
bio-social and physical system where you know for example we go out in the morning and we feel a
little bit cold and we look up at the sky and we're like oh you know it looks like it's going to be
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cool today but you and I might go out on the same day and feel slightly differently about it
right so we're experiencing the weather a little bit differently. This is how it is in antiquity
with the addition I think of the metaphysical and so the world is people, communities, the natural
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world, the metaphysical world they're all intermeshed and intermingled and so at the same time
that you're you know you're worrying about ensuring that there's going to be
rains so that you can grow your crops you're also thinking well how do we protect our crops what
kinds of things can we do to ensure the health of our crops some of those things are you know
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manuring and crop management and stuff some of them are metaphysical some of them are actually
you know prayers and rituals and remedies that are sort of a little bit more you know metaphysical
and mystical and magical and all those things are happening concurrently and so there are all these
I think multi-dimensional management strategies that are about maintenance about remediation
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in the moment and they're happening at a really granular level at the level of individuals and
families and communities acting all of the time you know there's no sense that the state has to
do it you're not agitating to the state to do it you're taking the responsibility yourself.
Yeah so about the dualism that you mentioned that people back then didn't use to perceive the nature
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as a different part or try to say they were actually a part of the nature they were considering
that do you think that is the case now or do you think people try to say that they are not a part
of the nature or do you think it's the same now that people think the same way or do you think
it's the same now that people think the same way or there's a dualism that exists now?
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I mean again I don't want to come across as a curmudgeon or a you know a sort of
an out of touch sort of ancient thinker but of course my sense is that
whether we
whether we're comfortable separate from nature or whether we're trying to get back to nature the
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predicate there is that there's us and there's nature do you know what I mean? Yeah and I mean
again I'm not a philosopher I can't trace the intellectual paradigms back to you know to
Descartes or anything like that but what I can say I think is that our notion
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that there's a natural world and there's a sort of a human world or a human society
that's very modern and it's very western it's very western a lot of recent scholarship in
environmental studies in environmental history has emphasised the fact that when we cleave solely
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to a modern western discourse that is to say when we assume that the way that we think about these
things in America and in Europe that there's humans who live in cities and communities and
communities and then there's nature that we kind of manage and engage with or try to help.
We're leaving out all kinds of other value systems all kinds of other systems of knowing
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and encountering the world you know indigenous systems here on the American continent
in South America in Africa Japan China those systems of thinking and knowing about
place in the world are quite radically different from what you know what sort of weak leave do in
a modern western context. Yeah yeah so you gave us you mentioned a few examples of what people
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used to do towards the environmental issues but would you say back then there were some similar
practices that people used to follow such as and how the how the state perceived this problem did
they support the people towards working these issues or how did how did that look like. So it's
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a really good question it's absolutely the case and I'm speaking I'm going to speak mostly about
the Roman world because that's the world that I know best there is a certain amount of evidence
and it's evidence from ice cores from Greenland there's a certain amount of evidence to suggest
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that in the first second century of the common era there was a massive upsurge in smelting
burning and the manipulation of of of fuel and of metals there's all kinds of particulate matter
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that's been trapped in these ice cores which means it's all gone up into the environment and
then kind of disseminated. Now that I think is an indication of what we might really cautiously call
proto-industrialization maybe right that is to say there's a high considered as a comparatively
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high level of industrial activity under the sort of at the so-called height of the of the of the
economies of the economy of the Roman Empire. Now we need to be cautious because I don't think it's
ever reaching a point of sort of being beyond sustainability being beyond what in a modern world
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you know because we sort of call it you know a safe state but it is noticeable environmentally
it's absolutely the case that we can see evidence for the degradation of forests for the clearing of
forests in order you know to provide fuel to to to burn to produce pottery and to produce other
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other kinds of things and so there is a high degree of natural exploitation going on but it's also the
case that the population dynamics and the population densities tend to be unevenly dispersed
and in the aggregate small enough that the most simple solution is to sort of exploit somewhere
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else and you know to leave that behind to to regenerate. So cautiously I would say absolutely
there is environmental impact absolutely there is industrialization and we can see that.
What I don't think we necessarily catch is much of a discourse about that being a bad thing.
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As far as the state is concerned again the ancient state was a hundred percent a state
like there's all these arguments that say you know the ancient state is very different from
the modern state it is but it was a state yeah but it was a state that didn't look like a modern
state and we have to remember that there's no comparable articulation of mutual responsibility
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like social contract in an ancient context and so the ancient state is not either taking upon
itself or being expected by its citizens to sort of exercise a regulatory power or to even to provide
things like social services to its citizens. None of that exists and so you know when you look at
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the Sendai framework right they sort of you know this modern sort of collective agreement
among states for how they should engage with environmental issues you know the Sendai framework
assumes that the state is a corporate body that has a set of obligations to its citizens and to
the world to manage environmental issues that would be completely foreign to any person living
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in antiquity they wouldn't expect their state to do that and you know they wouldn't identify
their status as sort of having those characteristics. I see yeah yeah which is cool it is it is but it
also means that you know some of our assumptions sort of need to be sort of turned a little bit
sideways to make them fit into an ancient context. Definitely that's interesting to hear how back
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back then the state and the people are reacting to the actions of the state and yeah so that's
that's really interesting and for me too that it's kind of for me the first time also diving into the
how the in ancient times people were perceiving these issues. But here's where it gets interesting
because there are absolutely people who claim that they sit on the boundary between us and the sort
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of physical metaphysical world they're the power brokers they're the ones that hold the keys they're
the ones that understand how to manage the natural environment. Let me give you a story
this is actually one of my favorite stories okay so let me give you a little bit of a little bit
of kind of lead up to the story. The tradition of agricultural writing is something that is
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really deeply embedded in ancient societies for obvious reasons right. Agriculture is
really important it's sort of the economic bedrock of all of these societies and so
knowing about agriculture is kind of a big deal and agricultural writers agronomists
are writing texts well back into the greek world and in fact even earlier.
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So there's a long tradition of agricultural writing and obviously the later you get the more writing
there is and so the more that these later writers are sort of building on and responding to.
There's an agricultural writer named Palladius and Palladius is writing in the fifth century
he's writing in Roman Gaul which we call France and he writes this book it's a super cool book
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because it's in 13 books the first one is kind of a here are all the general rules of thumbs and
you know abstract concepts and then he goes through month by month all the things that you should do
in January you should be doing this with your legumes and this with your grains and here's
what you should be doing with your sheep and he thinks of it as a kind of a
winter climate you know when you're in a warmer climate it's now and you're in a cooler climate
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it's now so there's all these ways in which he's thinking really systematically about
micro-regional variation in his first book he sets out a bunch of remedies against threats
and one of the remedies that he comes up is remedies against hail, remedies against hail
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up is remedies against hail. Remedies against hail. You can cover a rock with a cloth. You
can stake out an owl on a fence post. You can sprinkle white briny, which is a medicinal
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plant. You can sprinkle white briny on your fields to protect them against hail. You can
grease the blades of your bill hooks with bare fat. And so when you cut your crops,
they're going to be protected from hail. But that only works if you don't tell the farm
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workers that you're doing it. As soon as the farm workers know that the blades have been
greased with bare fat, the remedy doesn't work. Somebody has secret knowledge here.
Somebody is saying, I know what you need to do. You need to use bare fat, but you can't
tell anybody else that you're using bare fat. And that person who's got the special knowledge,
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they're occupying a position of power in society. Now, if we're talking about stand-ins for
the state, stand-ins for the claims that the state makes to hegemony and to responsibility,
all those things in a modern context, it's these distributed, localized figures of power
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who are making claims to their capacity to better understand the world, to better manage
the world, to be the conduit between the threats and the hazards of the supernatural world
and the communities that they're living in. Super interesting.
That's really interesting. And yeah, I mean, agriculture back then was the main source
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of economy and the main source to keep people alive, let's say.
Right. Right.
To get food.
So it really matters.
It really matters. It's fascinating to hear that people used to have some tactics and
a way to protect the agricultural crops in a way that maybe in some other countries,
maybe they are not even now, they are not even putting that much of, let's say, thought
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into how to protect their agricultural lands.
It's fascinating to hear how thousands of years ago people used to do that. That's interesting
to hear. And also from the environmental perspective of how you can kind of adapt to the changes
in the climate and the overall weather. That's interesting. That's really interesting. And
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so I also wanted to maybe just quick note on the climate change back then. So I mean,
people back then, as you said, would go out, they would see a change in the climate of
how it was yesterday or how it is now. But would you say some people, maybe scientists
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used to track those records or maybe see some kind of, let's say, a difference between the
years or were they able to track some kind of climate change? Or would you say that it
was just they were thinking back then that it can be a great issue and it is just the
natural things for the climate change time to time?
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So there is a lot of tracking of variability and of change. Absolutely. And it happens
over a variety of scales and in a variety of different contexts. One of the ways that
I like to think about this is as analogous to a modern farmer's almanac, right? Where
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you have a collection of received memories that go into rules of thumb about what to
expect in certain circumstances. And those memories might be going back 10 years, they
might be going back a generation. There's wiggle. But people are really, really, really
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intimately familiar with the contours of their weather and how it varies over time. So yes.
There's also a certain amount of evidence and we don't know when this actually started,
although some folks, I think, probably rightly believe that this was happening in the Egyptian
Pharaonic period. The Nile River, as you probably know, is the sort of the lifeblood of Egypt
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and it has a very particular flooding regime. It floods once a year. It's called the inundation.
And the inundation is all tied up with monsoonal rains that are controlled by what's called
the intertropical convergence zone that is kind of running through equatorial Africa,
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right? And the inundation comes south to north all the way down the Nile and most of Egypt's
political and social economy is revolving around managing the inundation, managing the
flood and then storing the water and sort of moving the water out to places that it
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needs to be out on the outskirts. So there's always really elaborate sort of system of
that. And so you kind of want to know year to year how high the flood was. And so measuring
the inundation is a part of these sort of collective practices. We have good series
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of inundation measurements from the medieval period onwards, but I think it's a pretty
fair bet to say that we just don't have the evidence but that there was fairly clear measurement
of the inundation. Now to your question about consciousness of change, it seems that there
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was some degree of climatic fluctuation of greater variability in climate in the Mediterranean,
let's say from the third century, fourth century of the common era. And that's measurable in
part in variability and unpredictability in the Nile flood. There's all these other ways
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that we can measure the unpredictability. We can measure it using cave speleothems and
lake varves and all these kinds of scientific things. But I suspect that there was some
consciousness in Egypt of variability in the Nile inundation. Now what they did with that
information, well, that's interesting, because as it turns out, both really low and really
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high inundations are actually a problem. If there's too much, that's actually almost as
bad as too little because then you can't control it and nobody likes a flood. So again, I think
for me, this comes back to daily management at the small scale, intimate knowledge, intimate
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interactions. It's largely not the case that 20 years after the fact, they go, oh, we should
have been dealing with this. We've got to put all this legislation in place now to do
that. It's rather that there's always like a finger on the pulse. And then you see little
things like, okay, so you may or may not know this city of Rome, right, on the River Tiber.
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It's built on... conventionally, it's built on seven hills. Although there's actually
lots more hills depending on how you count it. But conventionally, it's built on seven
hills, but where you have hills, you also have lowlands, right? And so the campus Martius,
for example, which is where the army used to gather in ancient ancient Rome, it's basically
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a marsh. And so when the River Tiber floods, which it does regularly, the low lying areas
of the city of Rome are flooded. And so every now and again, we see things like, there's
a law that says you shouldn't be storing grain in grain houses by the river because they're
going to get overtaken with floods. So there are moments when we see the state's consciousness
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of environmental variability of environmental fluctuation. Generally, I think they would,
if they were asked to label it, in terms that would make sense to us, they would call it
weather rather than climate because climate tend to sort of be transacted at a much larger
scale, I think in our estimation at least. Yeah, I totally agree. And that's interesting
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to hear. I wasn't sure if there were some kind of tracking the whole thing or how the
tracking was done, but it's interesting really to hear. And they were tracking in different
like contexts, as you said, like how high was the flooding or what happened or like
the change in the temperature or how agriculture changed in the years. That's really interesting
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to hear. And you also, you mentioned about the legislation in a way that, let's say in
20 years, something changed and then we got to change the legislation and so on. Would
you say in ancient Rome, there was some kind of legislation or some regulations towards
solving these issues in a way that was the state trying to make some legal, let's say,
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obligations for the people to follow? I would say not a lot. And I think again, for a couple
of reasons. I think one, because that's not really how the state works. I think also it's
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because the state lacks any kind of resources to imagine being able to do that. However,
there are sometimes pieces of legislation that look like they might be doing that. And
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I think it's useful for us to wonder whether they are, and if we decide that they're not,
which I think they're not, what they are in fact doing. There's a law of Hadrian. So Hadrian
was the emperor in the first half of the second century CE. And by the second century CE,
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there's actually quite a lot of the land in the Mediterranean is owned by the emperor.
It's imperialist states and there are big imperialist states in Africa and there are
big imperial states in the East, in Syria and in various other places. And there's an
inscription, there's a piece of legislation which seems to be directing that only the
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emperor is allowed to cut down these particular trees in this particular estate. Now, by one
reading that's an exercise in sustainable cultivation of forest resources. But I suspect
that it's in fact much more straightforward than that. I think it's just, this is my land
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and I'm the only person that is allowed to cut stuff down here. What I think is a bigger
question and a little bit more difficult to answer is whether the maintenance of those
resources was conscious enough that they were replanting trees to the volume that they were
cutting. I don't know the answer to that question. My suspicion would be to say that they're
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not self-consciously doing that, but that it's not the case that they didn't realise
that when you cut down a tree, it takes 30 years to grow another one. You know what I
mean? So in a sense, I feel like a lot of our modern approach to this is kind of a reverse
engineering approach. Do you know what I mean? It's kind of like, oh, we have to go back
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to the place that we think we wanted to get to and then we need to build a mechanism to
get there. I think if you haven't stopped doing stuff, I think if at every scale from
the micro small scale of an individual farmer's plot where they're really conscious of the
fact that when you pull things up, you have to replant and they're really conscious of
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the fact that when you put grains down, the next thing you want to put down is legumes
because legumes are going to return nitrogen to the soil and then your grains can grow
well again the following year. They know this. They understand fallowing practices and crop
rotation and all that stuff at that level. If you sort of walk that out to larger and
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larger scales and if they're doing even some version of that at the larger scales, that
is basic replenishment, then they're not legislating it. It's just part of practice. Are they doing
enough? Again, don't know what does enough mean? I think the evidence probably points
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convincingly enough to me to indicate certain situations where there's been denudation of
soil, there's been exhaustion of soil. In certain circumstances, we see some of that
stuff in Syria, for example, where terraces have been denuded, there's been fluvial runoff
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and all this kind of stuff and it looks like it's probably because of over exploitation.
But it's not clear whether that's a generalized thing. I suspect it's more specific to certain
places. Yeah. I would say also when discussing these
things, I would say it's really important to also consider the level of environmental
education at a time and how people are aware. Absolutely.
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If you look with the resources and everything we have now, the education, all these research
that we have done over the years, over the hundreds of years, we are going to think that
back in time they weren't doing enough. But I think it is really important to consider
how much information they had and how they were using it.
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Absolutely. Absolutely. And of course, the analog to that, the addition to that is they
actually lacked almost all of the extractive technologies that we possess. They couldn't
actually do as much damage as we can do. Right? Because they didn't have the tools and the
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mechanisms and the equipment. Yeah.
That's interesting. And so kind of trying to draw parallels from the Roman time to now,
would you say there are some lessons we can learn from them in a sense that they were
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doing something right and now with all this information, we are still going the wrong
way, let's say. Do you think there are some lessons that we can still learn from them
and kind of try to practice this now? I really do. Yeah. As I was finishing up this
book that I've just finished writing, and the book took 20 years to write and so it
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changed its shape multiple times. But by the time I'd got to the place where I was happy
with how it looked, it really was a book about people doing stuff in places, people acting,
people being participants in their worlds and in their environments. And it became clear
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to me as I was putting the final edits on it and I had a reviewer who was not from the
ancient world and who was reading it as a modern scholar and kept asking me why I wasn't
giving them the kind of apparatus that they were familiar with. It occurred to me that
in a world where you can't assume that somebody else is going to do it for you, in a world
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where you can't assume that the state will take responsibility or you can't assume that
institutions or other sort of services are going to be there to do stuff, your default
is that you're going to do it yourself. And I suppose the best lesson that I took out
of writing that book was these folks, they knew they were going to die. They knew they
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were going to ultimately lose the battle against the world. They knew that they were vulnerable
and that ultimately they could break their leg and get gangrene and die. The margins
between being fine and not being fine were really narrow. But they kept on acting, they
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kept on doing, they kept on participating, they kept on being in their world, they kept
on self-identifying as agents, self-identifying as participants. And so to me, that's the
lesson, like act. Be in it. Don't expect that somebody else is going to do it for you.
I think that's a great thing that people should do now. I mean, as we discussed previously,
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some people try to, let's say, bring a dualist between nature and us and how we can be participants.
I mean, back in time, as you said, people used to be, didn't have to choose as they
want to be participants to fight these issues or what they want to do. And now also, if
you are, let's say, not into environmental studies or into these issues, you can always
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draw parallels into what you are passionate about and kind of try to connect it. I mean,
you are, let's say, a social historian for the Roman Empire and you decided to kind of
try to draw parallels within the environmental studies, environmental fight back in time.
And I think now people can act towards it and become totally participants of it. And
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that would definitely bring a change to the fight.
I hope so. And I think, I mean, that's the point, right? It's on us. Of course. It's
on us to act. Yeah. So we are coming to the end. And at the end, I just wanted to give
the floor to you maybe to share some final remarks or a call to action for our listeners
or whatever you would like to say at the end.
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There it is. That's, I mean, that's my call to arms, right? I mean, it's on us to act.
You know, we can't let anybody else do it for us. It's all very well to say the state
or the government or somebody else has the responsibility. It's all very well to agitate.
But there's a whole bunch of itty bitty little things that we can do day by day that in the
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aggregate will make a difference.
Yeah. And I think it's really important to also take some of the responsibility on us
and just do whatever you can do and try to, I mean, it is sometimes good to blame people
for that, but most of the time just take it to yourself and put the responsibility on
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yourself to do something. So, okay. So thank you so much for joining with us today and
for all these great remarks about the environmental fight in the Roman time. And it was really
great to know and for me too, it was really informative and I hope for our listeners
too. So thank you so much for coming to another episode of Talking Environment and stay engaged,
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try to take an action and take responsibility to yourself to fight for your rights. So thank
you so much and we'll see you next time.
Hello everyone and welcome back to Talking Environment. I'm your host Gevorg Ghazaryan
(00:05):
and today we are delving into the fascinating world of environmental history and exploring how
the fight for environmental rights and climate action has evolved throughout history. So joining
us today is Cam Grey, an esteemed environmental and social historian and professor of classical
studies at the University of Pennsylvania whose research evolves around the environmental
(00:28):
dynamics of the Roman Empire with a focus on how ancient communities navigated environmental
challenges, Cam's work offers valuable insights into the evaluation of environmental activism
and resilience throughout history. So welcome to the show. Great, thank you for having me. I'm
really glad to be here. Awesome. So to start with, could you please give us a bit of an introduction
(00:53):
of your work and what do you do? Sure, so I started my life as a social historian and I was
especially interested in the ways that small communities worked. I was interested in
trying to encounter the sort of grand narratives of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire
(01:16):
at the scale of small scale communities and what I was really excited to do was to think about
the patterns of reciprocity, exchange, mutual support, but also conflict management that
small communities had. So it was always, and I think my scholarship is always sort of a strike
(01:39):
for the little person rather than sort of just talking about the big grand narrative. So at the
same time as that, that is my scholarly work. I'm also as an educator here at Penn, I'm residential
faculty in the college house system and so I'm actually also interested in how small communities
(02:00):
work, right? I'm interested in building and maintaining communities and so always I think,
you know, my intellectual life and my sort of my teaching life and my domestic life, they all kind
of interact with one another. About 10 or 12 years ago I got involved in directing an archaeological
project in Tuscany and as part of that I started up a bunch of conversations with a geologist
(02:27):
about the landscape and the people that lived in this landscape and it became clear after about
two weeks of talking that we had lots of interesting things to say but we didn't have a common language
and so I tried to figure out how to find a language with her and so I went and did a degree in
environmental studies here at Penn and in doing that degree I encountered this apparatus of
(02:50):
scholarship that I knew nothing about and I sort of I tried to figure out how to make that language
speak to the language that I was familiar with. Concurrently, of course, I moved into what is now
Lorda College House on Hill Field and Lorda College House is a building that has a whole bunch of
(03:12):
environmental and sustainability features kind of built into it and so that became a part of my
thinking about my education and my pedagogy and my community building and so once again, you know,
my scholarly life and my pedagogical and my domestic life are kind of all intermeshed with
one another. Fast forward to this year, I just finished a book on experiences of living with
(03:35):
risk in the late Roman world and the sort of the final push of that book happened through COVID
when we were all living with risk, right, and so there's that kind of third step in sort of everything
all being intermeshed so as a scholar, as an activist, as a kind of a citizen in the world,
(04:00):
I feel like it's hard for me to disentangle all of those strands but I think mostly uncomfortable
with that. That's great, that's a great story and so to start with, I just wanted so most of us
most of us think of the environmental challenges and fighting for the environmental issues,
(04:20):
most of us think of it as just the last let's say 20, 30 years, 40 years. Could you give us a bit of
an intro into how these issues were maybe perceived in the Roman age and in the ancient Rome?
If people were thinking as these issues are real issues, that will be a great problem for the
(04:43):
future or what it looks like? So it's a really interesting question and in a sense, and you know
I can't give you a narrative from all the way back to my past, you know sort of all the way
into our present, but it has always felt to me like our modern societal and scholarly
(05:08):
preoccupation with environmental issues is predicated on I think one, a sense that we are
separate from nature and so we have either a responsibility to it or we need to advocate
for it or we've kind of sundered ourselves from it, which you know maybe and this isn't the time
for a lengthy disquisition on you know capitalism and industrialisation and stuff but you know
(05:32):
maybe it's got something to do with capitalism and industrialisation. We kind of we live in
a world where it's very easy for us not to feel like we're part of nature and so we either like
completely you know withdraw into our cities or we feel like we've got to make some kind of a
constructed step back to nature and I mean you know again another aside would be for example
(05:53):
the construction of the national park system here in the United States by Teddy Roosevelt
right in the early 20th century which was very much a back to nature kind of a moment.
In antiquity there's no back to nature because they are in and of nature right they don't perceive
a dualism between society and the environment that they're in but what that also means I think
(06:19):
is that their whole rhetorics of their lived experiences are about living with
and about maintaining equilibrium with and what's really interesting for me in that is that there's
a modern scholarly discourse among human geographers which regards weather, climate,
(06:42):
not as kind of you know temperatures and means and rainfall quotients and stuff but rather as a
bio-social and physical system where you know for example we go out in the morning and we feel a
little bit cold and we look up at the sky and we're like oh you know it looks like it's going to be
(07:03):
cool today but you and I might go out on the same day and feel slightly differently about it
right so we're experiencing the weather a little bit differently. This is how it is in antiquity
with the addition I think of the metaphysical and so the world is people, communities, the natural
(07:24):
world, the metaphysical world they're all intermeshed and intermingled and so at the same time
that you're you know you're worrying about ensuring that there's going to be
rains so that you can grow your crops you're also thinking well how do we protect our crops what
kinds of things can we do to ensure the health of our crops some of those things are you know
(07:45):
manuring and crop management and stuff some of them are metaphysical some of them are actually
you know prayers and rituals and remedies that are sort of a little bit more you know metaphysical
and mystical and magical and all those things are happening concurrently and so there are all these
I think multi-dimensional management strategies that are about maintenance about remediation
(08:10):
in the moment and they're happening at a really granular level at the level of individuals and
families and communities acting all of the time you know there's no sense that the state has to
do it you're not agitating to the state to do it you're taking the responsibility yourself.
Yeah so about the dualism that you mentioned that people back then didn't use to perceive the nature
(08:34):
as a different part or try to say they were actually a part of the nature they were considering
that do you think that is the case now or do you think people try to say that they are not a part
of the nature or do you think it's the same now that people think the same way or do you think
it's the same now that people think the same way or there's a dualism that exists now?
(08:59):
I mean again I don't want to come across as a curmudgeon or a you know a sort of
an out of touch sort of ancient thinker but of course my sense is that
whether we
whether we're comfortable separate from nature or whether we're trying to get back to nature the
(09:23):
predicate there is that there's us and there's nature do you know what I mean? Yeah and I mean
again I'm not a philosopher I can't trace the intellectual paradigms back to you know to
Descartes or anything like that but what I can say I think is that our notion
(09:43):
that there's a natural world and there's a sort of a human world or a human society
that's very modern and it's very western it's very western a lot of recent scholarship in
environmental studies in environmental history has emphasised the fact that when we cleave solely
(10:06):
to a modern western discourse that is to say when we assume that the way that we think about these
things in America and in Europe that there's humans who live in cities and communities and
communities and then there's nature that we kind of manage and engage with or try to help.
We're leaving out all kinds of other value systems all kinds of other systems of knowing
(10:29):
and encountering the world you know indigenous systems here on the American continent
in South America in Africa Japan China those systems of thinking and knowing about
place in the world are quite radically different from what you know what sort of weak leave do in
a modern western context. Yeah yeah so you gave us you mentioned a few examples of what people
(10:55):
used to do towards the environmental issues but would you say back then there were some similar
practices that people used to follow such as and how the how the state perceived this problem did
they support the people towards working these issues or how did how did that look like. So it's
(11:18):
a really good question it's absolutely the case and I'm speaking I'm going to speak mostly about
the Roman world because that's the world that I know best there is a certain amount of evidence
and it's evidence from ice cores from Greenland there's a certain amount of evidence to suggest
(11:40):
that in the first second century of the common era there was a massive upsurge in smelting
burning and the manipulation of of of fuel and of metals there's all kinds of particulate matter
(12:00):
that's been trapped in these ice cores which means it's all gone up into the environment and
then kind of disseminated. Now that I think is an indication of what we might really cautiously call
proto-industrialization maybe right that is to say there's a high considered as a comparatively
(12:21):
high level of industrial activity under the sort of at the so-called height of the of the of the
economies of the economy of the Roman Empire. Now we need to be cautious because I don't think it's
ever reaching a point of sort of being beyond sustainability being beyond what in a modern world
(12:44):
you know because we sort of call it you know a safe state but it is noticeable environmentally
it's absolutely the case that we can see evidence for the degradation of forests for the clearing of
forests in order you know to provide fuel to to to burn to produce pottery and to produce other
(13:05):
other kinds of things and so there is a high degree of natural exploitation going on but it's also the
case that the population dynamics and the population densities tend to be unevenly dispersed
and in the aggregate small enough that the most simple solution is to sort of exploit somewhere
(13:30):
else and you know to leave that behind to to regenerate. So cautiously I would say absolutely
there is environmental impact absolutely there is industrialization and we can see that.
What I don't think we necessarily catch is much of a discourse about that being a bad thing.
(13:57):
As far as the state is concerned again the ancient state was a hundred percent a state
like there's all these arguments that say you know the ancient state is very different from
the modern state it is but it was a state yeah but it was a state that didn't look like a modern
state and we have to remember that there's no comparable articulation of mutual responsibility
(14:25):
like social contract in an ancient context and so the ancient state is not either taking upon
itself or being expected by its citizens to sort of exercise a regulatory power or to even to provide
things like social services to its citizens. None of that exists and so you know when you look at
(14:46):
the Sendai framework right they sort of you know this modern sort of collective agreement
among states for how they should engage with environmental issues you know the Sendai framework
assumes that the state is a corporate body that has a set of obligations to its citizens and to
the world to manage environmental issues that would be completely foreign to any person living
(15:12):
in antiquity they wouldn't expect their state to do that and you know they wouldn't identify
their status as sort of having those characteristics. I see yeah yeah which is cool it is it is but it
also means that you know some of our assumptions sort of need to be sort of turned a little bit
sideways to make them fit into an ancient context. Definitely that's interesting to hear how back
(15:36):
back then the state and the people are reacting to the actions of the state and yeah so that's
that's really interesting and for me too that it's kind of for me the first time also diving into the
how the in ancient times people were perceiving these issues. But here's where it gets interesting
because there are absolutely people who claim that they sit on the boundary between us and the sort
(16:04):
of physical metaphysical world they're the power brokers they're the ones that hold the keys they're
the ones that understand how to manage the natural environment. Let me give you a story
this is actually one of my favorite stories okay so let me give you a little bit of a little bit
of kind of lead up to the story. The tradition of agricultural writing is something that is
(16:25):
really deeply embedded in ancient societies for obvious reasons right. Agriculture is
really important it's sort of the economic bedrock of all of these societies and so
knowing about agriculture is kind of a big deal and agricultural writers agronomists
are writing texts well back into the greek world and in fact even earlier.
(16:50):
So there's a long tradition of agricultural writing and obviously the later you get the more writing
there is and so the more that these later writers are sort of building on and responding to.
There's an agricultural writer named Palladius and Palladius is writing in the fifth century
he's writing in Roman Gaul which we call France and he writes this book it's a super cool book
(17:17):
because it's in 13 books the first one is kind of a here are all the general rules of thumbs and
you know abstract concepts and then he goes through month by month all the things that you should do
in January you should be doing this with your legumes and this with your grains and here's
what you should be doing with your sheep and he thinks of it as a kind of a
winter climate you know when you're in a warmer climate it's now and you're in a cooler climate
(17:39):
it's now so there's all these ways in which he's thinking really systematically about
micro-regional variation in his first book he sets out a bunch of remedies against threats
and one of the remedies that he comes up is remedies against hail, remedies against hail
(17:59):
up is remedies against hail. Remedies against hail. You can cover a rock with a cloth. You
can stake out an owl on a fence post. You can sprinkle white briny, which is a medicinal
(18:22):
plant. You can sprinkle white briny on your fields to protect them against hail. You can
grease the blades of your bill hooks with bare fat. And so when you cut your crops,
they're going to be protected from hail. But that only works if you don't tell the farm
(18:45):
workers that you're doing it. As soon as the farm workers know that the blades have been
greased with bare fat, the remedy doesn't work. Somebody has secret knowledge here.
Somebody is saying, I know what you need to do. You need to use bare fat, but you can't
tell anybody else that you're using bare fat. And that person who's got the special knowledge,
(19:07):
they're occupying a position of power in society. Now, if we're talking about stand-ins for
the state, stand-ins for the claims that the state makes to hegemony and to responsibility,
all those things in a modern context, it's these distributed, localized figures of power
(19:29):
who are making claims to their capacity to better understand the world, to better manage
the world, to be the conduit between the threats and the hazards of the supernatural world
and the communities that they're living in. Super interesting.
That's really interesting. And yeah, I mean, agriculture back then was the main source
(19:51):
of economy and the main source to keep people alive, let's say.
Right. Right.
To get food.
So it really matters.
It really matters. It's fascinating to hear that people used to have some tactics and
a way to protect the agricultural crops in a way that maybe in some other countries,
maybe they are not even now, they are not even putting that much of, let's say, thought
(20:16):
into how to protect their agricultural lands.
It's fascinating to hear how thousands of years ago people used to do that. That's interesting
to hear. And also from the environmental perspective of how you can kind of adapt to the changes
in the climate and the overall weather. That's interesting. That's really interesting. And
(20:36):
so I also wanted to maybe just quick note on the climate change back then. So I mean,
people back then, as you said, would go out, they would see a change in the climate of
how it was yesterday or how it is now. But would you say some people, maybe scientists
(21:02):
used to track those records or maybe see some kind of, let's say, a difference between the
years or were they able to track some kind of climate change? Or would you say that it
was just they were thinking back then that it can be a great issue and it is just the
natural things for the climate change time to time?
(21:25):
So there is a lot of tracking of variability and of change. Absolutely. And it happens
over a variety of scales and in a variety of different contexts. One of the ways that
I like to think about this is as analogous to a modern farmer's almanac, right? Where
(21:49):
you have a collection of received memories that go into rules of thumb about what to
expect in certain circumstances. And those memories might be going back 10 years, they
might be going back a generation. There's wiggle. But people are really, really, really
(22:13):
intimately familiar with the contours of their weather and how it varies over time. So yes.
There's also a certain amount of evidence and we don't know when this actually started,
although some folks, I think, probably rightly believe that this was happening in the Egyptian
Pharaonic period. The Nile River, as you probably know, is the sort of the lifeblood of Egypt
(22:43):
and it has a very particular flooding regime. It floods once a year. It's called the inundation.
And the inundation is all tied up with monsoonal rains that are controlled by what's called
the intertropical convergence zone that is kind of running through equatorial Africa,
(23:06):
right? And the inundation comes south to north all the way down the Nile and most of Egypt's
political and social economy is revolving around managing the inundation, managing the
flood and then storing the water and sort of moving the water out to places that it
(23:30):
needs to be out on the outskirts. So there's always really elaborate sort of system of
that. And so you kind of want to know year to year how high the flood was. And so measuring
the inundation is a part of these sort of collective practices. We have good series
(23:52):
of inundation measurements from the medieval period onwards, but I think it's a pretty
fair bet to say that we just don't have the evidence but that there was fairly clear measurement
of the inundation. Now to your question about consciousness of change, it seems that there
(24:14):
was some degree of climatic fluctuation of greater variability in climate in the Mediterranean,
let's say from the third century, fourth century of the common era. And that's measurable in
part in variability and unpredictability in the Nile flood. There's all these other ways
(24:36):
that we can measure the unpredictability. We can measure it using cave speleothems and
lake varves and all these kinds of scientific things. But I suspect that there was some
consciousness in Egypt of variability in the Nile inundation. Now what they did with that
information, well, that's interesting, because as it turns out, both really low and really
(25:02):
high inundations are actually a problem. If there's too much, that's actually almost as
bad as too little because then you can't control it and nobody likes a flood. So again, I think
for me, this comes back to daily management at the small scale, intimate knowledge, intimate
(25:25):
interactions. It's largely not the case that 20 years after the fact, they go, oh, we should
have been dealing with this. We've got to put all this legislation in place now to do
that. It's rather that there's always like a finger on the pulse. And then you see little
things like, okay, so you may or may not know this city of Rome, right, on the River Tiber.
(25:52):
It's built on... conventionally, it's built on seven hills. Although there's actually
lots more hills depending on how you count it. But conventionally, it's built on seven
hills, but where you have hills, you also have lowlands, right? And so the campus Martius,
for example, which is where the army used to gather in ancient ancient Rome, it's basically
(26:15):
a marsh. And so when the River Tiber floods, which it does regularly, the low lying areas
of the city of Rome are flooded. And so every now and again, we see things like, there's
a law that says you shouldn't be storing grain in grain houses by the river because they're
going to get overtaken with floods. So there are moments when we see the state's consciousness
(26:43):
of environmental variability of environmental fluctuation. Generally, I think they would,
if they were asked to label it, in terms that would make sense to us, they would call it
weather rather than climate because climate tend to sort of be transacted at a much larger
scale, I think in our estimation at least. Yeah, I totally agree. And that's interesting
(27:07):
to hear. I wasn't sure if there were some kind of tracking the whole thing or how the
tracking was done, but it's interesting really to hear. And they were tracking in different
like contexts, as you said, like how high was the flooding or what happened or like
the change in the temperature or how agriculture changed in the years. That's really interesting
(27:33):
to hear. And you also, you mentioned about the legislation in a way that, let's say in
20 years, something changed and then we got to change the legislation and so on. Would
you say in ancient Rome, there was some kind of legislation or some regulations towards
solving these issues in a way that was the state trying to make some legal, let's say,
(28:00):
obligations for the people to follow? I would say not a lot. And I think again, for a couple
of reasons. I think one, because that's not really how the state works. I think also it's
(28:20):
because the state lacks any kind of resources to imagine being able to do that. However,
there are sometimes pieces of legislation that look like they might be doing that. And
(28:41):
I think it's useful for us to wonder whether they are, and if we decide that they're not,
which I think they're not, what they are in fact doing. There's a law of Hadrian. So Hadrian
was the emperor in the first half of the second century CE. And by the second century CE,
(29:05):
there's actually quite a lot of the land in the Mediterranean is owned by the emperor.
It's imperialist states and there are big imperialist states in Africa and there are
big imperial states in the East, in Syria and in various other places. And there's an
inscription, there's a piece of legislation which seems to be directing that only the
(29:34):
emperor is allowed to cut down these particular trees in this particular estate. Now, by one
reading that's an exercise in sustainable cultivation of forest resources. But I suspect
that it's in fact much more straightforward than that. I think it's just, this is my land
(29:57):
and I'm the only person that is allowed to cut stuff down here. What I think is a bigger
question and a little bit more difficult to answer is whether the maintenance of those
resources was conscious enough that they were replanting trees to the volume that they were
cutting. I don't know the answer to that question. My suspicion would be to say that they're
(30:22):
not self-consciously doing that, but that it's not the case that they didn't realise
that when you cut down a tree, it takes 30 years to grow another one. You know what I
mean? So in a sense, I feel like a lot of our modern approach to this is kind of a reverse
engineering approach. Do you know what I mean? It's kind of like, oh, we have to go back
(30:47):
to the place that we think we wanted to get to and then we need to build a mechanism to
get there. I think if you haven't stopped doing stuff, I think if at every scale from
the micro small scale of an individual farmer's plot where they're really conscious of the
fact that when you pull things up, you have to replant and they're really conscious of
(31:09):
the fact that when you put grains down, the next thing you want to put down is legumes
because legumes are going to return nitrogen to the soil and then your grains can grow
well again the following year. They know this. They understand fallowing practices and crop
rotation and all that stuff at that level. If you sort of walk that out to larger and
(31:31):
larger scales and if they're doing even some version of that at the larger scales, that
is basic replenishment, then they're not legislating it. It's just part of practice. Are they doing
enough? Again, don't know what does enough mean? I think the evidence probably points
(31:52):
convincingly enough to me to indicate certain situations where there's been denudation of
soil, there's been exhaustion of soil. In certain circumstances, we see some of that
stuff in Syria, for example, where terraces have been denuded, there's been fluvial runoff
(32:15):
and all this kind of stuff and it looks like it's probably because of over exploitation.
But it's not clear whether that's a generalized thing. I suspect it's more specific to certain
places. Yeah. I would say also when discussing these
things, I would say it's really important to also consider the level of environmental
education at a time and how people are aware. Absolutely.
(32:39):
If you look with the resources and everything we have now, the education, all these research
that we have done over the years, over the hundreds of years, we are going to think that
back in time they weren't doing enough. But I think it is really important to consider
how much information they had and how they were using it.
(32:59):
Absolutely. Absolutely. And of course, the analog to that, the addition to that is they
actually lacked almost all of the extractive technologies that we possess. They couldn't
actually do as much damage as we can do. Right? Because they didn't have the tools and the
(33:24):
mechanisms and the equipment. Yeah.
That's interesting. And so kind of trying to draw parallels from the Roman time to now,
would you say there are some lessons we can learn from them in a sense that they were
(33:45):
doing something right and now with all this information, we are still going the wrong
way, let's say. Do you think there are some lessons that we can still learn from them
and kind of try to practice this now? I really do. Yeah. As I was finishing up this
book that I've just finished writing, and the book took 20 years to write and so it
(34:12):
changed its shape multiple times. But by the time I'd got to the place where I was happy
with how it looked, it really was a book about people doing stuff in places, people acting,
people being participants in their worlds and in their environments. And it became clear
(34:37):
to me as I was putting the final edits on it and I had a reviewer who was not from the
ancient world and who was reading it as a modern scholar and kept asking me why I wasn't
giving them the kind of apparatus that they were familiar with. It occurred to me that
in a world where you can't assume that somebody else is going to do it for you, in a world
(35:01):
where you can't assume that the state will take responsibility or you can't assume that
institutions or other sort of services are going to be there to do stuff, your default
is that you're going to do it yourself. And I suppose the best lesson that I took out
of writing that book was these folks, they knew they were going to die. They knew they
(35:26):
were going to ultimately lose the battle against the world. They knew that they were vulnerable
and that ultimately they could break their leg and get gangrene and die. The margins
between being fine and not being fine were really narrow. But they kept on acting, they
(35:47):
kept on doing, they kept on participating, they kept on being in their world, they kept
on self-identifying as agents, self-identifying as participants. And so to me, that's the
lesson, like act. Be in it. Don't expect that somebody else is going to do it for you.
I think that's a great thing that people should do now. I mean, as we discussed previously,
(36:11):
some people try to, let's say, bring a dualist between nature and us and how we can be participants.
I mean, back in time, as you said, people used to be, didn't have to choose as they
want to be participants to fight these issues or what they want to do. And now also, if
you are, let's say, not into environmental studies or into these issues, you can always
(36:36):
draw parallels into what you are passionate about and kind of try to connect it. I mean,
you are, let's say, a social historian for the Roman Empire and you decided to kind of
try to draw parallels within the environmental studies, environmental fight back in time.
And I think now people can act towards it and become totally participants of it. And
(36:58):
that would definitely bring a change to the fight.
I hope so. And I think, I mean, that's the point, right? It's on us. Of course. It's
on us to act. Yeah. So we are coming to the end. And at the end, I just wanted to give
the floor to you maybe to share some final remarks or a call to action for our listeners
or whatever you would like to say at the end.
(37:20):
There it is. That's, I mean, that's my call to arms, right? I mean, it's on us to act.
You know, we can't let anybody else do it for us. It's all very well to say the state
or the government or somebody else has the responsibility. It's all very well to agitate.
But there's a whole bunch of itty bitty little things that we can do day by day that in the
(37:43):
aggregate will make a difference.
Yeah. And I think it's really important to also take some of the responsibility on us
and just do whatever you can do and try to, I mean, it is sometimes good to blame people
for that, but most of the time just take it to yourself and put the responsibility on
(38:05):
yourself to do something. So, okay. So thank you so much for joining with us today and
for all these great remarks about the environmental fight in the Roman time. And it was really
great to know and for me too, it was really informative and I hope for our listeners
too. So thank you so much for coming to another episode of Talking Environment and stay engaged,
(38:30):
try to take an action and take responsibility to yourself to fight for your rights. So thank
you so much and we'll see you next time.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Intentionally Disturbing
Join me on this podcast as I navigate the murky waters of human behavior, current events, and personal anecdotes through in-depth interviews with incredible people—all served with a generous helping of sarcasm and satire. After years as a forensic and clinical psychologist, I offer a unique interview style and a low tolerance for bullshit, quickly steering conversations toward depth and darkness. I honor the seriousness while also appreciating wit. I’m your guide through the twisted labyrinth of the human psyche, armed with dark humor and biting wit.