I think it's important to note that this phenomenon is not one that has gone without challenge, and the thought of an ideal environment being something that we have lost is a deeply rooted idea in culture.

Raymond Williams, though a scholar of literature, writes in his most famous work 'The Country and the City' about what he calls 'The Escalator Effect'. The book itself is a study of the ways in which both city and country have been portrayed in literature, particularly English literature, throughout history. He starts by looking at a book called 'Change in the Village' by George Sturt, a text that insists that rural England is "dying out now" (ref. in Williams, 13). Williams then says "what seemed like an escalator began to move" (13) as be traces back the idea of idyllic country, from Sturt to Thomas Hardy, Hardy to Richard Jefferies, Jefferies to George Eliot, each writing about rural life as it was decades before the writing and publication of their work.

The escalator effect is thus the phenomenon Williams traces back in time where each writer who speaks of the country harks back to the generation before, writing of the country as though that were the ideal. He notes that "we notice their location [of the a lost idyllic country] in the childhood of their authors" (16), and attributes part of the force of the escalator effect to nostalgia, but also insists that "what seemed a single escalator, a perpetual recession into history, turns out, on reflection, to be a more complicated movement: Old England, settlement, the rural virtues - all these, in fact, mean different things at different times, and quite different values are being brought into question" (16-17).

This question about Medieval views on the nature of today may well be interesting, therefore, but it must be remembered that our nostalgia for an environment of the past is a cultural phenomenon, and that values about nature have changed over the centuries.

Works cited:

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City, Penguin Vintage Classics. 1973, 2016.

I cannot give a holistic picture of the environment, but I do think an important early voice to consider on this question comes from Lynn White's 1966 "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis". Though rightly regarded today as too parsimonious, the paper provides an important backdrop for current discussions of the relation between medieval man and nature.

White's thesis is that the Christian view of the relationship between man and nature was unique and transformative - whereas other belief systems throughout history viewed humans more or less as part of nature, Medieval Christianity took the view that humanity was charged by God with overcoming nature, and thus went about exploiting it in increasingly technologically advanced ways.

White notes, for example, that

In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain,or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism,Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.

As a result, White argues, the introduction of the moldboard plow was unrestrained by any concerns for natural balance:

Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature. Nowhere else in the world did farmers develop any analogous agricultural implement. Is it coincidence that modern technology, with its ruthlessness toward nature, has so largely been produced by descendants of these peasants of northern Europe?

Now, critical historians would say "yes, it is coincidence", and argue that it tends to confuse correlation with causation - just because Christianity was the dominant religion in these areas that gave rise to technological advancement doesn't mean that Christianity in any way caused that rise. Nevertheless White does start an ongoing discussion about the "break" that occurs at some point in the Middle Ages and gives rise, eventually, to the technological civilization we inhabit now. So White and those who agree with his general thesis would say that at some point in the Middle Ages, humans started to be far more exploitative of nature than they were previously, and therefore you might have to dig further back into the past that you might expect to arrive at some sort of "pristine" natural environment.

Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.

If you're enjoying the in this thread, please don't forget to check out The Best of 2019 Nominees! Read some of the best content of last year, and vote for your favorites!