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…