Ancient Greco-Roman Views of Ecology, Sustainability, and Extinction: Aristotle, Stoicism, Pliny the Elder on Silphium, the Modern Legacy in Cuvier, Humboldt, Darwin, and beyond

Abstract

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.