I'm continuing my way through Rosemary Ruether's Gaia and God.
In my reading today, Ruether discusses the environmental factors behind the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Granted, she acknowledges other factors, such as the Roman bureaucracies draining cities of their wealth, as well as the danger of the northern "Celtic and Germanic peoples" to Rome (page 187). But she believes that there were environmental factors as well. She states on page 187:
"Three millennia of exploitation of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea also took its economic toll. The irrigation methods of farming in the Tigris-Euphrates valley caused, even in the second millennium B.C.E., a process of salinization that gradually turned this fertile crescent into a desert.
"Phoenician, Greek, and Roman use of wood as the primary fuel, as well as material for all types of construction, denuded the forests of Lebanon, Greece, and Italy. Strip-mining and quarrying also ripped the ground cover and soil from hills. These hills, stripped of their cover, then became subject to vast soil erosion as torrential rains washed away the unprotected earth. Grazing sheep and goats completed the destruction of forest life. Deforestation dried up mountain springs, and soil erosion created malaria-filled swamps. This, together with inadequate disposal of sewage, often caused epidemics in crowded cities such as Rome.
"Almost all wild herds of larger mammals were also destroyed in Greece during the Classical period, and the Roman obsession with circus games wiped out vast herds of wild animals in Africa and Asia as far east as India...Ecological destruction was certainly one contributing factor to the collapse of the empire, and one that has generally been ignored by historians."
The heroes of this story, according to Ruether, are the Christian ascetics, who disliked the "accumulation of wealth" and "created a new union of subsistence agriculture with egalitarian spiritual community" (pages 187-188). Granted, Ruether holds that there were flaws in the Christian ascetics: their "contempt for the material world in favor of life after death" and their misogyny. But she maintains that the Christian ascetics can teach us about health and "harmony with other humans as with nature", as St. Francis exemplified.