The First Eden: The Mediterranean World and Man was published by Collins and Little, Brown in 1987. The book accompanies a four-part BBC television series and covers the natural and human history of the Mediterranean region across geological time.
Attenborough begins with the Messinian Salinity Crisis — the extraordinary event, roughly six million years ago, when the Strait of Gibraltar closed and the entire Mediterranean Sea evaporated, leaving a vast salt desert thousands of feet below the surrounding land. When the Atlantic broke through the Gibraltar dam, the resulting flood (the Zanclean Deluge) refilled the basin in a catastrophic torrent that may have taken as little as a few months — one of the most dramatic events in the geological record.
From this dramatic beginning, Attenborough traces the development of the Mediterranean’s unique ecology (hot, dry summers; mild, wet winters; extraordinary biodiversity in a relatively small area) and the human civilizations that shaped and were shaped by it: the Minoans, the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arab conquest, and the modern tourist economy. Each chapter pairs natural history with human history, showing how the Mediterranean’s climate and geography influenced the development of agriculture, navigation, architecture, and religion.
The book’s final chapters address the environmental consequences of millennia of human activity: deforestation, soil erosion, overfishing, and the pollution of a nearly enclosed sea by the industrial economies on its shores.
Collecting The First Eden
First edition (Collins, London, 1987): Cloth binding, dust jacket, illustrated.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $5–$15