This book describes and analyses the environmental history of the mountain areas of the Mediterranean world, focusing on Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Morocco. The author examines the land and its people and concludes that great changes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created the often barren and depopulated countrysides of today. These changes, he suggests, lie behind much of the social and political turbulence of modern times as mountain people came to terms with worsening conditions. Written in a lively style, the book is the first environmental history of the Mediterranean area.