What can we learn from ancient environmental wisdom?
The Chimera makes for a fun story: a fire breathing animal, a combination of a lion and a goat, that breathes fire. It shows up in the Iliad and Hesiod’s Theogony. It was a fierce enemy, finally defeated by Bellerophon, riding Pegasus, who lifted the hero into the air, out of range of Chimera. This sounds to the modern reader like a weird myth, but if you visit Mt. Chimera in Turkey you’ll find natural gas vents where methane and other flammable gases escape from cracks in the rock. These vents are generally on fire — the myth was in fact a description of a dangerous place that people in the ancient Mediterranean understood; it’s modern people who see it only as a simplistic myth.
It turns out that people in the ancient and medieval world understood their environment better than we think they did, and, in some ways, better than we have until recently. Many societies had traditional notions about where to settle that we might have done well to heed. A Japanese paleontologist named Koji Minoura found an ancient poem that referred to massive (and well-known) waves that occasionally hit the area around modern Fukushima. He then found records dating back as far as 869 CE about earthquakes and tsunamis that had battered the region. There were medieval-era carvings that advised people not to build close to the ocean because of the danger of flooding. The…
