Glacken's "Traces on the Rhodian Shore" is perhaps the definitive history of "Western" natural thought ever written. It is a useful source for quotes and analysis of pre-19th Century texts that may not be widely available. Another review suggests that it is one of the most cited and least read geographic texts, and I suspect this is true. It is well indexed, and you can then pick and choose what you are looking for.
I highly recommend that students of geography and human-nature interactions read this book once. That said, I have a number of reservations about its ultimate usefulness. Firstly, this book, while exhaustive, almost moves into the realm of being pedantic. It is trying to construct a monolithic view of history, and belabors some small texts for several pages, while moving too quickly over a diverse period at the end. Second, this book is a product of its time. It has a highly Orientalist view of history, and this can be seen by the order of the book, in which Glacken organizes the authors he looks at chronologically, instead of the order in which they came to have influence on Euro-American thought. Thirdly, Glacken presents the texts unproblematically, with little social contextualization. About 50% of the book looks at Judeo-Christian interpretations of 2 verses in the Christian Bible, without questioning the wider social movements that made these two fragments important, including the movements of his own time that suggest these two verses as the source of all environmental degradation. Finally, this is a book without a clear ending. By finishing his book with the end of the Eighteenth Century, Glacken manages to sidestep the proliferation of views that erupted shortly after this time. While he notes in his introduction this is deliberate, the book is of limited utility in examining the current ontological crisis of socio-natural relations precisely because it is always backwards looking, rather than forwards.
That said, this book is still a classic of geography and offers a history of the "man-land" emphasis in geography that is still with us today.
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jillian miller
Good book lots of information
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 21, 2023
