Nature 4

One digs into the earth in the hunt for wealth (…). We penetrate her bowels and look for treasures at the seat of the shadows, as if she were not sufficiently benevolent and fertile where one can walk on her (…).

Plinius, Historia naturalis 33,1. 33,33. 33,73

Pliny the Elder was a Roman historian.

During the Roman Empire, the Mediterranean region was extensively deforested for the construction of ports and cities. The soil was destroyed by mining, metal and precious metal extraction. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder critiqued this in his work Natural History (Historia naturalis), in which an examination of social relations with nature and the appropriation of nature were already hinted at. In this quote, he was describing the devastating consequences of gold mining (Müller 2017).

*Franziska Müller (2020) “Can the subaltern protect forests? REDD+ compliance, depoliticization and Indigenous subjectivities”, Journal of Political Ecology 27(1), p.419-435.

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