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The cedar tree, a symbol of Lebanon, is under threat from global warming, as too little snow, sawfly infestations and forest fires disturb the balance in the Mediterranean, writes ALASDAIR SOUSSI

WHEN the French Romantic poet, Alphonse de Lamartine, travelled through the Middle East in the 1830s, he was so taken with Lebanon’s natural beauty that he declared: “Scotland, Savoy and Switzerland, do not exhibit to the traveller a busier scene of life, with more contentment and peace, than the foot of these mountains of Lebanon, where we had expected to meet only barbarians.”