This book describes and analyses the environmental history of the
mountain areas of the Mediterranean world, focusing on Turkey, Greece,
Italy, Spain, and Morocco. The author examines the land and its people
and concludes that great changes in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries created the often barren and depopulated countrysides of
today. These changes, he suggests, lie behind much of the social and
political turbulence of modern times as mountain people came to terms
with worsening conditions. Written in a lively style, the book is the
first environmental history of the Mediterranean area.