L’oiu te ulia lu male porta via — Olive oil will take away all evil

As anyone with a true connection to the Mediterranean basin will attest–Olive trees are our family. Our deeply rooted enduring relationship with them persists into modern times as we continue to revolve our yearly calendar and daily lives around them. They are main characters of our terrain, the food ways of the cultures lucky to live with them are dependent upon the fruit and oil they produce. Their leaves keep us healthy, their oil keeps us clean and anointed. Every batch of soap I make, and oil I infuse with herbs, is thanks to these trees. I am incredibly grateful to source the Olive oil I use in my herbal practice from close family friends who tend trees on their land on the slopes of Etna. I am also incredibly concerned about the challenges the trees are currently facing, driven by human behavior.

Based on fossil evidence, the Olive tree originated between 20-40 million years ago in what now corresponds to Italy and the eastern Mediterranean basin. Olives are one of the oldest cultivated trees on Earth, their story deeply intertwined with ours, with their expansion and ecological success more the result of human activity than environmental conditions. While it's largely been thought that Olives were first domesticated around 6,500-7,000 years ago in the historical fertile crescent, a recent study has revealed that Olive trees were already being utilized in Eastern Sicily as early as the 18th century BCE during the Early - Middle Bronze Age. Researchers from the Universities of Tuscia, Pisa, Rome La Sapienza and the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology examined lake sediment samples from Pantano Grande, a coastal salt marsh in Sicily to analyze fossil pollen remains and other paleoecological markers. Their findings demonstrate that early Sicilian cultures were actively propagating Olive trees and utilizing wild Olives for multiple purposes. The other key insight to emerge was the link between human activity and the success and spread of Olive cultivation–the history of the Olive tree in Sicily, for example, is not a simple linear continuous expansion, but a complex ebb and flow determined by social, economic, and environmental changes over time.

“One of the most striking conclusions of this research is that the ecological success of the olive tree was more closely tied to human activity than to climate change. While environmental conditions played a role, it was human societies—through trade, agriculture, and cultural exchange—that determined when and where olive trees thrived. This highlights the deep connection between human civilization and the landscapes we shaped over millennia.

Today, olive groves continue to be a defining feature of Mediterranean landscapes, providing economic and cultural value. The history of the olive tree is a testament to the enduring relationship between humans and nature, showing how our choices can influence ecosystems for thousands of years.”

–Jordan Palli, University of Tuscia

Of course, the climate change referenced here, is referring to the historical natural changes in Earth’s climate over long periods of time due to factors like Earth's orbit and tilt, volcanic activity, ice ages and warmer interglacial periods. Today, the climate change we are experiencing as a result of our own activities–namely the burning of fossil fuels, misuse of land, deforestation, and overconsumption and the resulting pollution–poses a great threat to all life on Earth. This man-made climate change is impacting the Olives in the same ways all plant life and agriculture is being impacted, but Olives are also dealing with an immense problem unique to them–Quick Olive Decline Syndrome. QODS is the result of a bacteria called Xylella fastidiosa that kills plants by obstructing the flow of nutrients and water through their vascular pathways. Xylella is one of the most destructive plant pathogens that we know of on Earth, and has been around for a long time, and caused a lot of harm to a wide variety of plants. Most recently, it has been wreaking havoc on the Olive trees in the Mediterranean basin, namely on the Southern European coast, and most notably in the Southern Italian region of Puglia. Xylella was first detected in Puglia in 2013, and in the last twelve years has decimated Olive groves across the region, killing over 60 million Olive trees accounting for over one third of the region's population.

Xylella survives in the veins, or xylem of trees, hence its name, and also in certain insect mouths. In Puglia, it is the spittlebug which is understood to be the main vector for Xylella–they feed on infected leaves, become a new home for the bacteria, and then transmit the bacteria to the next tree they feed on. If you have been to, or seen photos of Puglia, you may be familiar with its image as a land of endless Olive groves. With family from Bari, I’ve spent a lot of time in the region beginning in the mid 90’s, and the endless expanses of Olive trees are certainly my image and memory of these lands. My grandma and great grandmother, however, have very different memories of what this terrain used to look like. While there have always been many Olive trees, beginning in the 1970s the land underwent a pretty drastic transformation. They remember woods, forests, diverse fields of fruit trees, grains, and an abundance of wild herbs all growing together with the Olive trees. Throughout the 70s this all rapidly became a monoculture of Olive trees. This is now becoming more understood as a key reason Puglia has been hit harder than other Italian regions—with vast open expanses of nothing but Olive trees, with no other plants to create buffers between them, the spittlebug moves from tree to tree with ease. Death by Many Cuts is an excellent article on the situation in Puglia and all its complexities, written by Agostino Petroni, with photographs by his brother Stefano. They are from Puglia, their family tends Olive groves which they take care of in ecologically rooted ways, and they are deeply invested in saving the trees. The Dark Side of Puglia's Olive-Grove Aesthetic is a short but important piece attesting to the transformation of the Puglian landscape and highlighting Damien and Cosimo Terlizzi's efforts to bring diversity back to the region, beginning with their own land at Lamia Santolina.

Mahfodah Shtayyeh, hugging the trunk of an Olive tree after being destroyed by Israel. Still from video below.

While the Southern European coast of the Mediterranean basin battles Xylella which continues to spread by the day, the far east coasts of the basin are plagued by a different violence. In Palestine, according to a report by the UN from 2015, the apartheid state of Israel has uprooted over 800,000 Olive trees since 1967. We know this destruction has only continued to worsen and intensify since October 2023 with several thousand more Olive trees being killed by Israel since. This has been a core part of their ongoing ethnic cleansing of the region, aimed at terrorizing the Palestinians, destroying their spirit as people deeply connected to their land and the Olive trees, as well as their livelihoods with Olive oil production supporting over 100,000 Palestinian families. There is also a longstanding cultural practice of Palestinian families with land and Olive trees leaving some fruit on the trees after they do their harvest so families without land of their own can harvest some for themselves—a sharp contrast to the attitudes and actions of the occupying forces. Some of the Puglian trees killed by Xylella, as well as some of those killed by Israel, were previously some of the oldest on Earth. While there is no known cure for Xylella currently, efforts to contain it can be helpful, and reintroducing diversity both in the landscape and in the trees themselves, specifically through grafting them with resistant Olive varieties is showing promising results.

On the other hand, in Palestine, where there are very clear ways to prevent and stop the destruction of an entire people, their land, and their Olive trees—we see little to no real action on behalf of any of the so-called leaders in our world. As I type this, I switch back and forth between this tab and another that tracks the Global Sumud Flotilla, a massive effort by everyday people to break the illegal siege on Gaza by opening a humanitarian corridor. Citizens from 45 countries are on boats, some taken out of storage that haven't been used in decades and are hardly fit for the trip they’re making—all to do what our governments refuse to.

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This is an excerpt from the Mamma Mediterranea Autumn Apothecary Box document that is a digital component of the collection.

Mamma Mediterranea—Oliva Excerpt