Back to the garden : nature and the Mediterranean world from prehistory to the present / James H. S. McGregor.

By:

McGregor, James H. (James Harvey), 1946-

Material type: Text

TextPublisher: New Haven : Yale University Press, [2015]Description: xii, 366 pages ; 24 cmISBN:

9780300197464 (hardback)

Subject(s):

DDC classification:

304.2091822 BAC 23

Other classification:

NAT010000 | HIS054000 | HIS052000

Summary: "The garden was the cultural foundation of the early Mediterranean peoples; they acknowledged their reliance on and kinship to the land, and they understood nature through the lens of their diversely cultivated landscape. Their image of the garden underwrote the biblical book of Genesis and the region's three major religions. In this important melding of cultural and ecological histories, James H. S. McGregor suggests that the environmental crisis the world faces today is a result of Western society's abandonment of the "First Nature" principle--of the harmonious interrelationship of human communities and the natural world. The author demonstrates how this relationship, which persisted for millennia, effectively came to an end in the late eighteenth century, when "nature" came to be equated with untamed landscape devoid of human intervention. McGregor's essential work offers a new understanding of environmental accountability while proposing that recovering the original vision of ourselves, not as antagonists of nature but as cultivators of a biological world to which we innately belong, is possible through proven techniques of the past"--

Holdings ( 1 )
Title notes ( 4 )

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Book	State Botanical Collection	RBG	304.2091822 BAC (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Available		RBG00026627

Includes index.

Bibliography: pages 339-353.

"The garden was the cultural foundation of the early Mediterranean peoples; they acknowledged their reliance on and kinship to the land, and they understood nature through the lens of their diversely cultivated landscape. Their image of the garden underwrote the biblical book of Genesis and the region's three major religions. In this important melding of cultural and ecological histories, James H. S. McGregor suggests that the environmental crisis the world faces today is a result of Western society's abandonment of the "First Nature" principle--of the harmonious interrelationship of human communities and the natural world. The author demonstrates how this relationship, which persisted for millennia, effectively came to an end in the late eighteenth century, when "nature" came to be equated with untamed landscape devoid of human intervention. McGregor's essential work offers a new understanding of environmental accountability while proposing that recovering the original vision of ourselves, not as antagonists of nature but as cultivators of a biological world to which we innately belong, is possible through proven techniques of the past"--

Donated by Paul Fox, January 2024.