Clarence Glacken

Published in 1967 by the University of California Press, Traces on the Rhodian Shore is a sweeping survey of Western thought about the relationship between humanity and the natural world from antiquity through the eighteenth century. Glacken examines how philosophers, theologians, and naturalists across centuries grappled with three central questions: whether the earth was purposefully created for human use, whether environmental conditions shape human culture, and whether humans in turn modify their environment. The book runs to over seven hundred pages and remains a landmark in environmental intellectual history.

Glacken organizes his analysis around three enduring questions: the idea of a designed earth created for human benefit, the influence of climate and terrain on human societies, and the extent to which people modify the natural world through their activities. He traces how Greek and Roman writers, medieval theologians, and Enlightenment thinkers each addressed these themes in different ways. This framework allows him to show continuities and ruptures in environmental thinking across more than two millennia.

Glacken spent the bulk of his academic career as a professor of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was associated with the department's strong tradition of cultural and historical geography. His scholarship was deeply interdisciplinary, drawing on classical philosophy, theology, natural history, and the history of science. Traces on the Rhodian Shore was the product of decades of reading and synthesis rather than a conventional geography monograph.

Glacken's book became foundational for the emerging field of environmental history in the 1970s and 1980s, influencing scholars who sought to understand long-term human-environment relationships. Historians and geographers frequently cite it as a model of erudite, synthetic scholarship that bridges the humanities and natural sciences. Though Glacken never completed a planned sequel covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the original work remains widely assigned in graduate seminars on environmental thought.