The Greeks inherited a land covered by rich stands of oaks, pines, and other trees with thick, drought‐resistant leaves called a “sclerophyllous” forest, in the jargon of [modern] plant ecologists. But, as the Greek population expanded, it progressively destroyed the forests for firewood, charcoal (needed in firing pottery and other industrial processes), and lumber. The great trees were often burned by accident, too, or as part of a military operation, or simply to create more open pastureland. Soil erosion on the slopes of the rugged Greek hills helped prevent reforestation as did grazing and browsing animals, which killed the seedlings before they could establish themselves. Especially prominent in the latter role were goats … Our overall impression was that the once rich area is now a badly deteriorated land inhabited by relatively impoverished peoples who, today, are partly dependent for their survival on the influx of tourists coming to see the physical monuments of past civilizations.
The Lyceum, for example, was excavated and opened for public viewing in 2014. Tourist websites encourage a visit to the free site, to stroll peaceful surroundings filled with fragrant plants (many species of which were planted there in Aristotle’s time) and view the remains unveiled by archeologists. Meanwhile, in places like Crete, less than an hour’s flight from Athens, sea level rise—due to the combined ecocrisis effects of climate change and extensive coastal construction—is beginning to challenge the sustainability of the beach‐based tourist industry (Centre for Climate Adaptation 2018).
2.2.2 Indigenous environmental knowledge
All societies through time and location must contend with the opportunities and challenges presented by their environments. This requires the development of environmental knowledge and sustaining social practices. Failure to overcome challenges can lead to social collapse, leading in turn to reversion to less complex social organizations that put fewer demands on environmental resources. Failure can also lead to obliteration and complete depopulation. A case of social collapse and simplification is seen in Classic Mayan society. The indicators of this collapse are found in the archeological record, most notably in the abandonment of Maya cities like Palenque, Copán, Tikal, and Calakmulin, located in the southern Maya lowlands of Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico, which were left to be swallowed up by the re‐expansion of surrounding forests between the 8th and 9th centuries. After the collapse, there was a significant decline in large‐scale architectural construction in the area, though Mayan communities continued to persist in the southern lowlands and Mayan people still inhabit the region today. There has been considerable debate among archeologists about the causes of the collapse of Classic Mayan society. Suggested reasons include a growth of population that could not be supported by the local environment given Mayan farming technology, epidemics that decimated the population, military conflict between competing city‐states, deforestation, loss of plant and animal biodiversity, and catastrophic environmental events, such as climate change and intense drought (Hodell et al. 1995; Webster et al. 2007). Some of these factors may have been connected. War, for example, can be driven by the demand for environmental resources, while deforestation can lead to a loss of biodiversity (Durham 1976; Giam 2017). It is likely that the knowledge and practices needed to meet the environmental challenges faced by the heavily populated city‐states of Classical Mayan society were inadequate, and that this played an important role in the collapse. This example underlines the importance of investigating a society’s environmental knowledge/beliefs and their practical utility and contribution to sustainability in the encounter with environment opportunities and threats and changing conditions.
Robert Paine (2005, p. 280), coiner of the ecosystem concept “keynote species,” proposed that:
ecology with its roots in “natural history,” whether that was stalking prey, keeping special mushroom (e.g., morel or truffle) sites secret, or the best spots to fish, was initially an individualistic endeavor. Deep knowledge of parts of the natural world was a requisite for survival.
However, precisely because it is a requisite for survival, deep knowledge of the natural world has always been social, not individual, as humans have survived as a species from our origin into the present because we live in interactive and mutually supportive groups.
Eriksen & Adams (2010, p. 1) note that various “terms have been used to describe the collective environmental knowledge and the shared cultural resource practices of indigenous peoples, including indigenous environmental knowledge, traditional ecological knowledge, and ethnoecology.” Hardesty (1977, p. 291) defines ethnoecology, for example, as “the systems of knowledge developed by a given culture to classify the objects, activities, and events of its universe.” Brosius et al. (1986, p. 187) bifurcate indigenous knowledge into two categories:
On the one hand, there is knowledge that is inherited from generation to generation and is generally shared by most of the members of the society. This cultural information is often passed on as folk wisdom in the context of folktales or is preserved and transmitted in the context of rituals and various religious ceremonies. The second category includes information gained through individual experience‐empirical observations made by individual[s] … during the course of [life] activities. The two categories of indigenous knowledge are not mutually exclusive. Information collected by an individual may become knowledge that is shared by members of the group through time.
There is then in cultural environmental knowledge an ongoing flow of information between individuals in a social group, some of which over time is inscribed into the cultural repertoire of the group and is transmitted to new generations as agreed upon reality. It should be stressed that not all knowledge in a group is equally or fully shared, as there may be some that is mostly retained by subgroups (e.g., traditional healers, mothers) within the wider society (e.g., knowledge about plants used to make traditional medicines, how to prepare them, and where they can be found). Moreover, traditional knowledge about the environment may contain entities not recognized by outsiders, such as spiritual beings and sacred places.
Human knowledge of the environment is conditioned by language and the ability to have complex thoughts entwined with memories, values, and cultural norms. Consequently, environmental perceptions are filtered through cultural perceptions. This point is emphasized by Vayda & Rappaport (1968) in the distinction they draw between the “operational environment,” which they define as the sum total of all environmental features, whether or not they are locally comprehended, and the “cognized environment,” which is the environment as it is perceived and understood within a social group. Notably, some features of an operational environment may affect a group even if its members are unaware of their existence (e.g., pathogens, disease vectors, climate change). Because of cultural filtering, people of different cultural backgrounds can view the same operational environment differently.
The study of indigenous environmental knowledge has a long history. One of the earliest efforts was conducted by Carl Linnaeus, the renowned 18th‐century Swedish botanist, zoologist, and physician, and the creator of the binomial system we still use to give species their Latin names (e.g., Homo sapiens). While in his mid‐20s, Linnaeus undertook a field study of the indigenous Sami of northern Sweden. The primary motivations for his six‐month foray by foot, boat, and horseback to the northernmost Swedish province of Lapland were to discover new plants and animals and, if possible, find valuable minerals like silver, copper, and iron. At the same time, he was curious about the lifestyle and customs of the native Sami people, a reindeer‐herding society of semi‐nomads who traditionally followed their livestock across the tundra‐covered areas of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia in search of available grazing foods like mosses and lichen. Based on his journey, Linnaeus described about 100 formerly unidentified plants and wrote about them in his book, Flora Lapponica (Frängsmyr et al. 1983). In his grant application to the Royal Scientific Society, he described his interest in studying the plants of Lapland but additionally, if vaguely, noted that he also hoped to learn about the plant‐based home remedies used by the Sami and what kinds of food they resorted to in times of scarcity. In fact, Linnaeus had numerous questions he hoped to answer about