One last thought on Pan's Travail

I was reading through all the posts on Pan's Travail and started thinking about different parts of the book that stood out to me, and I realized that one of the things that really struck me when I was reading, but no one has really brought up yet, was how many patterns in nature people really picked up on during the Ancient Greek/Roman times. You often hear about all of the ways people destroy their environments, and I guess when it comes to historical periods I often considered a significant amount of the destruction to be a result of a lack of knowledge. Which, although in a lot of cases it is, I was surprised at how many different people Hughes was able to cite when discussing the causes and results of problems such as deforestation, erosion and water pollution.
In a course I took last semester, we spent every class in discussions about ecological theories and ideas that have revolutionized how we think about ecosystems and our surrounding environments. What I found interesting while reading this book though, was how close a lot of writers/philosophers, that Hughes cites, came to many of these "new" ideas. Just to name one example that I found while going back through my notes, on page 63, Hughes talks about Herodotus and how he considered the relationship between predator and prey: "timid animals that are eaten by others produce young in abundance, while predators bring forth only a few offspring"...while I was unable to go back to the exact source to see how Herodotus stated it originally, I couldn't help but think of how close this observation is to the basic idea behind R and K selection--which is obviously a little more complex, but I found it interesting that two other philosophers from his time period also acknowledged this pattern. Perhaps my argument is a bit of a stretch, but I thought I would just throw the idea out there...