Plato’s Pigs and Other Ruminations: Ancient Guides to Living with Nature

Mark D. Usher. (2020). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Inspired by Henry Thoreau’s theory of deliberate reading, Usher approaches ancient texts in search of lessons in living intentionally and sustainably, a practice termed “environmental philology”. The linking of ancient theories to modern examples (e.g. the comparison of the civic modelling in Plato’s Republic with the computer game SimCity in Chapter 4), makes this overarching idea that sustainability can be taught through ancient thought particularly accessible. The book is organised more-or-less chronologically, opening with the mythology of Potnia Therōn with reference to Hesiod and Greek religious cults (Chapter 1). It then moves through the Presocratic theories of cosmology of Anaximander (Chapter 2) and Heraclitus (Chapter 3) to Classical Athens and Plato’s theories of an ideal and sustainable society (Chapter 4), Cleisthenes’ reforms of Athens in the context of Pythagorean thought (Chapter 5), and then an ecological investigation of Stoicism and Cynicism (Chapter 6). Usher then moves to a study of Roman agricultural practices in the late Republic and early Empire (Chapter 7) before closing with the reception of classical ideas Christians in Late Antiquity with the example of the rule of St Benedict (Chapter 8).

Example quotation

Partly a collection of case studies about systems and sustainability in Greek and Roman institutions, myth, literature, and philosophy, partly a meditation on living deliberately and ecologically in the modern world, partly a history of emergent ideas, and partly a work of literary and cultural criticism, this book is hybridic by necessity and design and somewhat experimental in form. […] it’s a reader-response approach to our inherited past, a response informed by the pressing contemporary issues of climate change, environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, wanton overconsumption in some echelons of society, crippling poverty in others, and dehumanizing, politically volatile socioeconomic inequities across the board.

(p.10)