Laudator Temporis Acti

Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, "Pliny the Elder and Man's Unnatural History," Greece & Rome 37.1 (April, 1990) 80-96 (at 85-86):

It is a little bit tempting to represent him as a sort of proto-environmentalist. Certainly there is at points an unmistakeably green tinge to his ideas. He squarely accuses man of poisoning his environment. His contemplation of the variety of plants, their number, flowers, colours, scents, and juices, leads him to champion the cause of Nature. Are not poisons a design fault of Nature? But it is man who discovered poisons. Animals use their natural weapons (tusks, etc.), but only man uses poison. We poison our arrows, we poison our rivers and the very elements of nature, we turn the means of life to destruction (18.1-3). Even worse than the abuse of poison, in Pliny's view, is mining.

We excavate every fibre of the earth, and live above the cavities. Can we be surprised if it occasionally gapes open and quakes? As if this couldn't be a sign of indignation expressed by our sacred parent. (33.1)

Or again, he contrasts the rest of the natural world, which has been created for the sake of man, with the mountains, which nature created for her own sake, as a framework to give solidity to the guts of the earth, and to control the force of rivers and seas. Yet man by mining quarries away this protective frame (36.1).

Environmentalism is a useful analogy. It serves to remind us that the issue of man's relationship with nature is one which may properly engage a scientist, and which may indeed fuel some of the passion behind his work. But the Plinian framework is different. Pollution is not the issue, the ozone layer is not under threat. And though in part the antitheses are the same, of the natural balance of a self-regulating ecological system versus human greed, profit-making, and abuse, the key element in Pliny's equation is one of little importance to us, namely luxury.