The famed ancient herb, known to the Romans as silphium (Greek silphion), is widely regarded as the first recorded instance of human-induced species extinction. Modern scholars have largely credited direct exploitation (e.g., over-harvesting; over-grazing) as the primary cause of silphium's extinction, due to an overwhelming demand for the plant in ancient times. Recent research has revealed strict cold-stratification requirements for the germination of silphium's closest living relatives, revealing the likelihood that silphium shared these same germination requirements. Documented environmental changes in ancient Cyrenaica (e.g., widespread deforestation; cropland expansion) likely resulted in accelerated rates of desertification throughout the region as well as the direct disturbance of silphium's habitat, effectively eliminating the necessary conditions for silphium's successful germination and growth within its native range. Contrary to previous conclusions, this evidence suggests that anthropogenic environmental change was instead the dominant factor in silphium's extinction, marking silphium as the first recorded instance of human-induced climate-based extinction.

The ancient herb silphium is known as the first recorded species extinction, documented by Pliny the Elder in the first-century CE. Pliny, however, was an outlier among his peers; the predominant religious and scientific views of his time understood extinction as only local and/or temporary. Frameworks ranging from Aristotle to Stoicism understood ecology as occurring within a divinely natural order, whose broader realities humans could only influence in a limited way. We are therefore able to identify two distinct poles of Stoic scientific and religious thought around ecology: The first, drawing from Aristotle, sees nature as divinely providential and hierarchical, allowing for higher-order beings such as humans to freely extract from an self-replenishing environment; the second, with Pliny and others, understands nature more holistically and argues that humans’ ecological activity can be irreversibly destructive and should therefore be sustainable. We then explore how these two poles of thought extend all the way into the nineteenth century. There, a similar debate occurs in the views of Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Georges Cuvier, all foundational voices around the relationship between religion, science, and ecology that influentially shaped modern environmental views on humanity’s proper relationship to nature.