Landscapes have a crucial role in bridging nature and culture and are therefore essential for biodiversity and ecosystem integrity preservation. As they are ingrained in regional customs and belief systems, they serve as a useful tool for biodiversity conservation. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) represents a vast region of many natural and cultural landscapes. This chapter presents the question “what are the causative factors of landscape alterations and potential threats to biodiversity in the MENA region?” An integrative review was conducted to provide actions to promote the development of effective policies and strategies for landscape and biodiversity conservation in the region. The chapter highlights natural/spatial, policy/institutional, socio-economic, technological, and cultural factors as the main influences on land changes in both regions. The chapter highlights priority actions in the areas of increased education and awareness, collaboration, and policy integration to effectively promote landscape and biodiversity conservation in the MENA region.

This chapter draws on approaches from the environmental humanities in exploring the hypothesis that late Hellenistic literature was unusually positive in its representations of landscape alteration. It first sketches out the predominantly negative tradition of representing landscape alteration in ancient literature from Herodotus onwards, before examining the more celebratory versions that we find in Strabo and Diodorus Siculus. At the same time it points out, with special reference to the work of Diodorus, that even the most positive treatments of that theme tend to show signs of equivocation and ambiguity. That conclusion has implications for our understanding of the long history of human interaction with the environment: it helps to expose the risks of over-simplification involved in any account that seeks to generalise about the idea that ancient culture either anticipates or stands in contrast with modern anthropocentrism. In the process the chapter also explores some of the similarities and differences between ancient and modern representations of environmental damage, pointing out especially that ancient accounts anticipate in some respects modern concerns with the impact of environmental alteration on human populations.