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The Infertile Crescent
Like forests and prairies, deserts seem like they’ve been there forever, but, in fact, the rapid desertification of this planet is one of humanity’s most pressing challenges. Vegetation and particularly trees not only hold soil, but also actually help generate the weather patterns that keep vast areas hydrated.
In his wonderful book, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Thom Hartmann, tells one of the earliest and most cautionary tales of humans destroying the lands that brought them their food.
Remembering the Past
Today we think of Iraq as a place of endless and eternal desert, but just five thousand years ago, during the Sumerian and Mesopotamian civilizations, it was the cradle of civilization and its lands were known as The Fertile Crescent. Lebanon, its neighbor was famous for its cedars. 90% of its lands were graced by these majestic towers, and the air was filled with their sweet pungency. To the east in Mesopotamia, a great civilization fed its citizenry with the huge crops of barley grown on its rich and giving lands. We know today, however, that it did not last. As its farmers continued to irrigate and its loggers continued to harvest trees, the land became saturated with salt and would no longer produce viable crops. As its trees were removed, their dead roots could no longer hold the moisture in place and their vast sweepings of the sky no longer served to assist the rainfall.
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Repeating History
Four thousand years ago, the Mesopotamian culture collapsed, a victim of the same overuse of the land we continue to practice to this day. Today that huge area of agricultural bounty has shrunk to include only the farms which follow the course of the mighty Nile in Egypt, and even there the land is no longer replenished by yearly flooding since the Aswan Dam was built and the floods were controlled.
The land suffers similar insults today. In China, where air pollution and smoking are so endemic that 25% of its people die of lung disease and acid rain should be an overwhelming problem, instead the huge, alkaline dust storms that sweep off its denuded Western mountains are enough, in many areas, to completely neutralize the acidic effects of its coal fired electrical generation system. However, the desert continues to sweep toward Beijing in a wall 165 feet high, and it moves so rapidly, 30 feet a year, that it is called the "Flying Desert."
Thirteen percent of what until the last thirty years was pristine Brazilian rainforest is now a read, cracked, barren plain, not so unlike the dry and lifeless plains of Mars, and in the United States, the fires rage unchecked in ten western states and the air is tinged with radioactive particles from three of those fires that swept across or approached US Nuclear Reservations. At Hanford, the scientists issue a press release that, yes, atmospheric levels of plutonium have increased, but not to dangerous levels. Yet plutonium will absolutely, 100% produce lung cancer if a particle of it weighing just 1/300,000th of an ounce is inhaled.
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