Abstract
The iconic landscapes of the Mediterranean Basin have long stimulated the imaginations of artists, writers, and scientists. They have primarily been portrayed as degraded, an interpretation absorbed into the developing discipline of ecology. The core concepts of Mediterranean vegetation ecology, though, are based largely on the work of Louis Emberger, a French colonial botanist. This chapter analyzes Emberger’s problematic approach and its use as the foundation of a great deal of scientific work on the ecology of the Basin. It concludes that Mediterranean vegetation ecology would benefit from “knowledge decolonization” that demonstrates the complex messiness of knowledge politics, material landscape change, and social dynamics together in order to avoid the ecologically and socially problematic outcomes that have been common in the Basin for a century.
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Notes
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This famous 1820 essay drew on his earlier, less well-known essay on the same subject in which he discussed the vegetation found in the Mediterranean region and noted that much of it was endemic to Africa (Drouin 1998, p. 153). De Candolle also drew on earlier work by his mentor, French botanist Réné Desfontaines, on North Africa.
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See, for example, the joyous account of the pleasing vegetation, “the garden of Europe,” and the “genial climate” Malte-Brun describes (Malte-Brun 1829 [1810]).
- 4.
By 1832, for example, the French explorer Bory de Saint-Vincent was describing parts of Greece as destroyed by deforestation and fire caused by human use in the French Exploration scientifique de Morée (1832–1838) (Drouin 1998, p. 151). There are similar lamentations of environmental ruin in the French Description de l’Egypte (1809–1829) and in the French Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie (1844–1867).
- 5.
For more details on phytosociology, see (Davis 2007, pp. 144–146), and (Barbour et al. 1999). The term phytosociology was first used in 1896 by the Polish scientist Josef Paczoski who was drawing on a long European tradition of phytogeography reaching all the way back to Alexandre von Humboldt. It was not formally adopted until 1910 at the International Congress of Botany attended by Flahault and other proponents.
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The kind of phytosociology promoted and taught by Braun-Blanquet and his French colleagues, including Louis Emberger, is often termed the “Zurich-Montpelier school.” Phytosociology is underpinned by the concept of plant associations, whereas the other main approach to vegetation analysis utilizes the continuum (or individualistic) concept of community; this has been much more common in the Anglophone world of the UK and North America (Barbour et al. 1999).
- 8.
Louis Trabut had been one of the first to apply phytogeographic methods, including the extensive use of relict vegetation, in Algeria and one of the first botanists to incorporate the deforestation/degradation narrative in his botanical research and publishing in the late 1880s.
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One of these was Emberger’s influential pluviometric quotient which was quite innovative since it takes into account the effects of temperature, precipitation, and evaporation on plant associations.
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Many scholars were working on these topics and his work complemented that of several others including Henri Gaussen, another French botanist, as well as the French geographer Emmanuel de Martonne and German geographer Wladimir Koppen.
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The use of the term “étage” reveals the history of the idea of vegetation groups being related to zones of altitude going back at least as far as von Humboldt and his influential writings on plant geography.
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This map may be viewed at: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5449747p/f769.item.r=emberger. Last accessed 26 December 2017.
- 13.
For a discussion of the significance of the taux de boisement, see Davis, D.K. and P. Robbins (under review) “Ecologies of the Colonial Present: Pathological Forestry from the ‘Taux de Boisement’ to Contemporary Plantations,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space.
- 14.
Emberger accepted the ideas of succession to climax vegetation as did most botanists of the period. For a helpful discussion of these ideas of “Clementsian succession” and their problems in a Mediterranean context, see (Allen 2001, pp. 162–164).
- 15.
In California, for example, French phytosociologists including some of Emberger’s students consider chaparral a degraded form of forest, whereas most American ecologists consider it a stable “climax” formation (Barbero et al. 1982, pp. 72–73).
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The Directory of forestry in Morocco, Paul Boudy lauded this map and Emberger’s method for the “precise scientific base” it provided which was a great help to foresters in the region (Boudy 1948, p. 170).
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A list of Emberger’s 82 students and their thesis titles may be found in a volume dedicated to him, see (Emberger 1971, pp. 509–512). Most of these students, while conducting independent research on the Mediterranean and often heading in new directions, carried with them Emberger’s underlying assumptions of a ruined landscape as is evident in the majority of their publications.
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These were Henri Gaussen, the French botanist, phytosociologist, and vegetation cartographer; Egyptian ecologist Mohamed Kassas; and an Italian ecologist (de Phillipis). All were trained in phytosociology and conventional succession theory.
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The descriptions of the stages and zones of vegetation are particularly enlightening in this respect as at least one-third of them are described as degraded or overgrazed (UNESCO 1969/1970, pp. 60–73).
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The western section was based on Emberger’s studies and maps as well as a variety of other sources on the western end of the Basin. The eastern section was derived from Kassas’ estimates using a very similar methodology, a lot of guesswork and a variety of secondary sources, but the data gaps were large as is made clear in the text. Gaussen contributed to southern European vegetation and to parts of the eastern Basin as well as directing and coordinating the cartography.
- 21.
It is interesting to note that one of Emberger’s later students gently questioned Emberger’s definition of the Mediterranean bioclimate and suggested that it might not be the best for diachronic studies of vegetation change (Daget 1977).
- 22.
See: http://www.grid.unep.ch/data/data.php?category=biosphere and then click on “GNV33, Vegetation Map of Africa, U.S. Defense Mapping Agency (1984)” (www.grid.unep.ch/data/summary.php?dataid=GNV33&category=biosphere&dataurl=&browsen=). Last accessed 6 September 2017.
- 23.
However, a few of the higher elevation mountainous parts of the Mediterranean do show a greater vegetation sensitivity than the surrounding lower elevation areas. See Seddon, 2016.
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For an example of puzzling over variability, see (Emberger et al. 1962, pp. 203, 206). Emberger even noted the “abundance of annual plants” and their seed production here as well as their importance for pasturelands. A few French ecologists have engaged with the newer theories of non-equilibrium ecology but primarily in the sub-Saharan African context (Hiernaux et al. 2002).
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Davis, D.K. (2018). Between Sand and Sea: Constructing Mediterranean Plant Ecology. In: Lave, R., Biermann, C., Lane, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Physical Geography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71461-5_7
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