Clara Bosak-Schroeder, Assistant Professor of Classics, has published a new book titled Other Natures (University of California Press) that reveals how ancient texts are relevant to today’s relationships between humans and their environment.

In Other Natures, Bosak-Schroeder assesses how ancient Greek ethnographies—descriptions of other peoples—provide unique resources for insights into ancient Greeks’ understanding of how humans relate to nature. In this new work, she examines the works of authors such as Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus to show how non-Greek communities affected and were in turn deeply affected by their local animals, plants, climate, and landscape. She demonstrates that they used ethnographies of non-Greek peoples to explore, question, and challenge how Greeks ate, procreated, nurtured, collaborated, accumulated, and consumed.

By studying the work of these seminal writers, Bosak-Schroeder makes their work newly relevant to vital questions and ideas currently being put forth in the environmental humanities. She asserts that human life and well-being are inseparable from the life and well-being of the nonhuman world, and that contemporary authors can find important models for confronting environmental crisis by re-examining ancient ethnographies.

For more about the book: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520343481/other-natures