5 ms·

I always wondered if this happened in the middle east, with essentially the same cause. It seems hard for me to imagine that the "cradle" of civilization began

I always wondered if this happened in the middle east, with essentially the same cause. It seems hard for me to imagine that the "cradle" of civilization began in such an arid place, though it would be quite fitting if civilization transformed it.

bpodgursky 5y ago
1. The whole Sahara + mideast was a lot greener a few thousand years ago due to ice ages et al, not due to soil depletion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period 2. The Euphrates floodplain is still quite green, like the Nile's. It's not like the US midwest where you have thousands of square miles of grass, but you do have a strip of extremely reliably fertile land (and for civilization-building, reliable seasons are super important).
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Until 8000 years ago most of the present Persian Gulf was fertile valley. It is a good bet that archaeological sites critically important to understanding the rise of civilization are under it now. Deforestation is a common cause of desertification worldwide. Trees help to capture moisture from the air and bring it to ground. Cut them down, and the moist air blows past. Trees are commonly cleared for farmland, and then the farmland has to be abandoned when it gets too dry. In the Amazon basin and along the northwest coast of North America, trees were the basis of productive agriculture, carefully chosen mixes of trees of different sizes and species. To this day the Amazon basin is dominated by tree species that were once cultivated throughout, supporting tens of millions until they were wiped out by smallpox and other pandemics. In North America, such tree gardens can still be found centuries after they were abandoned.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    > Deforestation is a common cause of desertification worldwide. Trees help to capture moisture from the air and bring it to ground. Cut them down, and the moist air blows past. Trees are commonly cleared for farmland, and then the farmland has to be abandoned when it gets too dry. Trees alone do not help. There are a lot of tree farms which do not capture moisture and are prone to forest fires. We need forests with good ecosystems not tree plantations.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Planting trees (particularly the wrong ones) might not help much, but cutting down trees seems to reliably do harm.
oh_sigh 5y ago
That's why the Tigris/Euphrates was so important. Even to this day, despite recent mucking about with waterflow, there is still a fairly large series of swamplands/marshes in southern Iraq that most people don't imagine when they are asked to describe the geography of Iraq. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamian_Marshes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamian_Marshes
edgyquant 5y ago
From everything I’ve read the Middle East used to be a kind of paradise. Maybe not as lush as Central Europe or Southern Asia but it was not as arid as it is now. The common reason is that early agriculture was not efficient, or understood, and sometime in the Bronze Age an equivalent of the Great Dust Bowl occurred as Early societies basically salted the Earth they depended on (completely on accident.) Also certain places, e.g, Israel, were actual forests just 10-12,000 years ago.
- syrrim 5y ago
  I believe it had to do with the way they irrigated. They would flood their fields, which would leave sediment from the river as the water evaporated. The sediment contained salt, which slowly accumulated, and made the fields infertile.
  - ido 5y ago
    the last ice age only ended about 12,000 years ago[0]. The fertile crescent and ancient egypt's golden age was half way from then to today & the climate was a lot cooler overall. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      But how does that square with things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period ?
      - ido 5y ago
        This was thousands of years later (significantly closer to our time than it was to the ancient civilizations of the fertile crescent - remember that the pyramids were older to Cleopatra than she is to us). Climate isn't linear and that was one of several fluctuations, but 5000-6000 years ago it was cooler in that area than today.
crishoj 5y ago
An ambitious project to regreen the Sinai desert, with John D. Liu, known for successfully greening the barren Loess Plateau: https://www.greenthesinai.com/home https://www.greenthesinai.com/home
kingsuper20 5y ago
Goats.
lebuffon 5y ago
There are references in the bible to the "un-penetrable forests of Lebanon". That's on the order of 3K years ago. I would think that the the cause is complex but humans removing trees until they are gone is probably part of the problem.
- sb057 5y ago
  More than the Bible; the cedars of Lebanon were perhaps the single-most famous natural land feature in the ancient near east. You'll find references to them in virtually every ancient text of the area that has any length, including the Epic of Gilgamesh.

bpodgursky 5y ago

1. The whole Sahara + mideast was a lot greener a few thousand years ago due to ice ages et al, not due to soil depletion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period 2. The Euphrates floodplain is still quite green, like the Nile's. It's not like the US midwest where you have thousands of square miles of grass, but you do have a strip of extremely reliably fertile land (and for civilization-building, reliable seasons are super important).

ncmncm 5y ago
Until 8000 years ago most of the present Persian Gulf was fertile valley. It is a good bet that archaeological sites critically important to understanding the rise of civilization are under it now. Deforestation is a common cause of desertification worldwide. Trees help to capture moisture from the air and bring it to ground. Cut them down, and the moist air blows past. Trees are commonly cleared for farmland, and then the farmland has to be abandoned when it gets too dry. In the Amazon basin and along the northwest coast of North America, trees were the basis of productive agriculture, carefully chosen mixes of trees of different sizes and species. To this day the Amazon basin is dominated by tree species that were once cultivated throughout, supporting tens of millions until they were wiped out by smallpox and other pandemics. In North America, such tree gardens can still be found centuries after they were abandoned.
- hulitu 5y ago
  > Deforestation is a common cause of desertification worldwide. Trees help to capture moisture from the air and bring it to ground. Cut them down, and the moist air blows past. Trees are commonly cleared for farmland, and then the farmland has to be abandoned when it gets too dry. Trees alone do not help. There are a lot of tree farms which do not capture moisture and are prone to forest fires. We need forests with good ecosystems not tree plantations.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Planting trees (particularly the wrong ones) might not help much, but cutting down trees seems to reliably do harm.

oh_sigh 5y ago

That's why the Tigris/Euphrates was so important. Even to this day, despite recent mucking about with waterflow, there is still a fairly large series of swamplands/marshes in southern Iraq that most people don't imagine when they are asked to describe the geography of Iraq. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamian_Marshes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamian_Marshes

edgyquant 5y ago

From everything I’ve read the Middle East used to be a kind of paradise. Maybe not as lush as Central Europe or Southern Asia but it was not as arid as it is now. The common reason is that early agriculture was not efficient, or understood, and sometime in the Bronze Age an equivalent of the Great Dust Bowl occurred as Early societies basically salted the Earth they depended on (completely on accident.) Also certain places, e.g, Israel, were actual forests just 10-12,000 years ago.

syrrim 5y ago
I believe it had to do with the way they irrigated. They would flood their fields, which would leave sediment from the river as the water evaporated. The sediment contained salt, which slowly accumulated, and made the fields infertile.
- ido 5y ago
  the last ice age only ended about 12,000 years ago[0]. The fertile crescent and ancient egypt's golden age was half way from then to today & the climate was a lot cooler overall. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    But how does that square with things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period ?
    - ido 5y ago
      This was thousands of years later (significantly closer to our time than it was to the ancient civilizations of the fertile crescent - remember that the pyramids were older to Cleopatra than she is to us). Climate isn't linear and that was one of several fluctuations, but 5000-6000 years ago it was cooler in that area than today.

crishoj 5y ago

An ambitious project to regreen the Sinai desert, with John D. Liu, known for successfully greening the barren Loess Plateau: https://www.greenthesinai.com/home https://www.greenthesinai.com/home

kingsuper20 5y ago

Goats.

lebuffon 5y ago

There are references in the bible to the "un-penetrable forests of Lebanon". That's on the order of 3K years ago. I would think that the the cause is complex but humans removing trees until they are gone is probably part of the problem.

sb057 5y ago
More than the Bible; the cedars of Lebanon were perhaps the single-most famous natural land feature in the ancient near east. You'll find references to them in virtually every ancient text of the area that has any length, including the Epic of Gilgamesh.