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Over-grazing and desertification in the Syrian steppe root causes of war (2015)
- WJW 3y agoFascinating if true, though hardly a "root" cause. Overgrazing doesn't happen by itself, even TFA acknowledges that nationalization of the steppe by the Soviet Union in 1958 played a key role in the degradation of the ecosystem. But such nationalizations also didn't occur in a vacuum, the SU did so out of a variety of ideological and practical reasons.
- ginko 3y agoIt wasn't the Soviet Union that nationalized the steppe, it was the Syrian government. At no point in time was Syria part of the SU. The article only mentioned the Syrians got the idea from the Soviets.
- kingofpandora 3y agoI really doubt the poster was stating that Syria was part of the SU. It was an analogy, which you can tell from the plural "nationalizations".
- mathgeek 3y agoThis immediately came to mind as well. IMHO they are root causes, but not the only one. It takes human decisions to start and continue wars, and those decisions have things that influenced them.
- awb 3y agoSure, maybe it played a part, but to say that overgrazing that started 50 years prior was the “root cause” turns quite the blind eye to the Arab Spring: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring
- julkali 3y agoArab Spring apparently was augmented by food scarcity, too: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-and-rising-food-prices-heightened-arab-spring/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-an...
- PicassoCTs 3y agoWhich was created by the us pivoting away from food aid towards bio fuels. But the arab spring is the end result, the outcome. Mismanaged resources are at the core, the root cause. Im not interested in the flash symptoms of a crisis. The interesting part is the little rock that starts the avalanche and how we can prevent such cascades in the future..
- greenieweenie 3y agoThe root causes of war in Syria are the Alawites. Headed by Assad, and his father before him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashar_al-Assad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashar_al-Assad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez_al-Assad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez_al-Assad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alawites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alawites Daddy Assad got swept into power as part of a military coup by the Ba'ath Party shortly after the same thing happened in Iraq with another familiar character, Saddam Hussein. He then proceeded to rule with the iron fist of a socialist military dictator (with the backing and advice of the Soviets). Up until the year 2000 people in Syria only had access to state sponsored television/radio/news until their information sphere got embiggened first with satellite dishes and later with smartphones which caused the minority tribe in charge to lose control of their internal propaganda narratives. Note on the map all the lines are straight as Syria was never an actual viable country by design. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes–Picot_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes–Picot_Agreement It is a violent tribal society. This goes much deeper than the basics of Sunni/Shia splits, if you are the wrong tribe or clan or from the wrong village or wrong family you deserve a gruesome death, 'etc. This pattern repeats across most of the Middle East region which traditionally needed strong rulers/empires to forcefully hold it together. I assure you the guys from the various rebel factions, ISIS, 'etc, who beheaded people and cut out their hearts on YouTube were not complaining about over-grazing or human rights. It didn't start with climate change, it started back here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_the_Ottoman_Empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_the_Ottoman_Empir...
- dopidopHN 3y agoYes, partition of the sick man of Europe. And resulting vacuum power.
- throw310822 3y agoOne interesting thing is that the Human Development Index of Syria just before the war was much higher than that of India and in par with China (and the world average). Now it's collapsed.
- the-printer 3y agoThank you for this. It feels like this article undermines the history of the region. To even evoke the Arab Spring, to me is an easy way to sound informed without acknowledging how/why the affected regions “sprung”. It’s an interesting supporting detail, but maybe “root causes” is a pun or something.
- nologic01 3y agoThis will likely be a pattern across the planet as unsustainable practices are still the norm and will likely be so for many more decades. The timescales of climate change, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss are too slow to be perceived as "real" risks. But they create underlying stresses that may push human systems beyond thresholds and tipping points at "random" times. In other words, indirect impacts may be much more visibly damaging, although the causal links not easy to internalize. For the majority of people the detrimental outcomes of their own behavior might as well be attributed to supernatural forces, "others" or any other deflection of responsibility.
- rainworld 3y agoThere was discontent and unrest, for various reasons, but the war began when billions worth of weapons and ammunition were poured in. And so-called “advisors”. First covertly then overtly.
- ImHereToVote 3y agoFreedom guns. So free they even made Al Qaeda rebrand themselves. Like a freedom loving corporation.
- lyu07282 3y agoIts always awkward when the treasury department needs to reshuffle their terrorist organization designations because the same organization is getting bombed in one country and gets a shipment of money, guns and explosives in another. Gets especially surreal when you got members of the group in gitmo, I guess you just hand them some weapons crate on their way out the door. Maybe the CIA can start to issue work visas for terrorists. Perhaps terrorists should just name themselves after whatever the state department is calling them, seems to work fine for the wikipedia.
- aredox 3y ago"were poured in" "Nice" use of the passive form. Do you think there weren't any weapons before? Or that advisors were needed to start an insurrection? Google "1982 Hama massacre" le "Alois Brunner".
- whimsicalism 3y agoThe scale of the Syrian civil war would not have been possible without substantial foreign assistance at the onset. You can look at reports of weapons seizures along the Iraq/Syria border in the lead up to the conflict.
- kingofpandora 3y agoThere is anothing wrong with using the passive voice.
- myshpa 3y agoCattle grazing is a climate disaster, and you’re paying for it https://grist.org/climate-energy/cattle-grazing-is-a-climate-disaster-and-youre-paying-for-it/ https://grist.org/climate-energy/cattle-grazing-is-a-climate... Blame it on the goats? Desertification in the Near East during the Holocene https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316721412_Blame_it_on_the_goats_Desertification_in_the_Near_East_during_the_Holocene https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316721412_Blame_it_... Environmental Implications of Livestock: Goats https://epar.evans.uw.edu/research/environmental-implications-livestock-goats https://epar.evans.uw.edu/research/environmental-implication...
- c0brac0bra 3y agoAlan Savory's holistic planned grazing seems to have worked for both preventing and reverting the desertification of brittle land. Would be very interesting to see more attempts at using it in these places, especially since it would be hard to make the land worse.
- roboticmind 3y ago>We find all of Mr Savory’s major claims to be unfounded.... Scientific evidence unmistakably demonstrates the inability of Mr Savory’s grazing method to reverse rangeland degradation or climate change, and it strongly suggests that it might actually accelerate these processes https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190052813500320?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019005281...
- c0brac0bra 3y ago> We conclude that transitioning to regenerative agriculture involves more than a suite of ‘climate-smart’ mitigation and adaptation practices supported by technical innovation, policy, education, and outreach. Rather, it involves subjective, nonmaterial factors associated with culture, values, ethics, identity, and emotion that operate at individual, household, and community scales and interact with regional, national and global processes. Findings have implications for strategies aimed at facilitating a large-scale transition to climate-smart regenerative agriculture. (Majority of farmers in the study are holistic practitioners) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959378018309117?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09593...
- _4cbz 3y agoThe incompetenes of the government might have lead to desertification but that's merely scratching the suface level of the problems. The article is full of confirmation bias and tunnel vision from an author who wants to think his work is the center of the universe. If you're seriously contemplating the author's idea, just try answering this simple question. If there was no desertification whatsoever, everything else the same, would the war still happen? It's honestly disgusting to throw away the blood of people and their struggles, and try to frame it as some sort of fairytale butterfly effect. Edit: Funny how me, a Syrian, is being down voted by people who claim to know more about his own country
- lostlogin 3y agoCould you explain what you mean and where the author is wrong?
- t-3 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U10p3Tn9V5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U10p3Tn9V5Y
- _4cbz 3y agoBecause I know for a fact, that no one on the ground was losing sleep over desertification. I'm not dismissing its ecological affect, but to claim it's the root cause, I see as belittling and trying to erase what the people were actually fighting for: If you're in the mood for harsh history lesson, there's a list of root causes here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Syria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Syria
- MichaelZuo 3y ago> Because I know for a fact, that no one on the ground was losing sleep over desertification. Why does that matter? What people lose sleep over or not can be due to totally trivial reasons or for reasons that are far removed from the actual biggest threat facing them.
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- bilsbie 3y agoMankind punished for sinning against the environment.
- Dowwie 3y agoTragedy of the commons.
- FreshStart 3y agoCrisises produce incompetent populist governments that produce stupid plans like "let's saw the bakery into pieces - that way nobody will ever go hungry again". After that it spirals right into the loop deformation. We are not so different from animals once we bump every generation into the environments resource ceiling.
- 1001101 3y agoThe role of the Ataturk Dam is something that I rarely see mentioned in this context.
- veave 3y agoDisclaimer: author works for the European Defence Agency.
- hulitu 3y ago> Over-grazing and desertification in the Syrian steppe root causes of war (2015) They forgot the part where Syria has oil and the US want it.
- pvaldes 3y agoNature destruction spawns war, as it always does. Mayans learnt a few things about how much profitable is deforestation in the middle term [1]. At war with everybody until their collapse. Spaniards arrived just in time to see the bulk of the work done yet. Ethiopians applied the same recipe... with the same results [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-did-the-mayan-civilization-collapse-a-new-study-points-to-deforestation-and-climate-change-30863026/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-did-the-ma...