Greek Thought and Forest Science

Abstract

Two columns equally support the structure of European forest science, considered historically. On one hand, the progress of forest science rests on an experience of forest practices going back through the centuries to the Frankish Middle Ages. On the other hand, the column of modern analytical thinking rises from its base in Greek natural philosophy, striving toward an as yet hardly articulated science of the forest as natural phenomenon. It is fascinating, but not particularly easy, to trace the antecedents of this forest science in classical Greece. The wretched condition of most of the ancient texts often does not allow us to make a definitive determination of forest tree species mentioned by them or of the basic principles of forest lore therein contained. But in the last few decades botanists and philologists working on the botanical writings of Theophrastus have improved the state of the problems in regard to them, and have so advanced our knowledge of the facts, that the forester can also draw from them new conclusions concerning his picture of ancient Greece. The author can at least sketch a frame for such a new picture here. He does this in gratitude to his teacher Kurt Mantel, the Director of the Institute for Forest History in Freiburg, who through the creation of a Forest History Section sought to direct the diverse efforts and attempts of contemporary research into an integrated channel, and to establish it securely in the universities over the long run.