As I promised this post contains a few tidbits from the book, Dark Age Ahead. Ideas from the book are in normal text; my comments are bulletted.The Ainu are a caucasian people that inhabitted Japan before the current Japanese; they now occupy "isolated reservations" on the northern most isalnd (of Japan), Hokkaido.
How do areas, like Mesopotamia, lose a lead, in terms of civilization, over Europe? According to Jared Diamond, the lead was lost through environmental ignorance.
- Beginning to sound familiar, huh?
In ancient times, much of the Fertile Crescent and Eastern Mediterranean were covered by forests. But to obtain more farmland and more timber. The forests were cut faster than they could regenerate. The valleys began to accumulate silt, intensified irrigation built up salt accumulations in the soil, and over grazing by goats prevented new plant life. The damage became irreversible by 400 B.C. The Ottoman Turks finished off the last forests in Jordan during railroad construction prior to WWI. Most of the wetlands in southern Iraq fell to a drainage scheme by Saddam Hussein, leaving another barren, salt encrusted desert.
3 comments:
Google "wetlands and iraq" and many interesting things come up, like...
The United Nations Environmental Programme says about 90% of the up to 20,000 square kilometres of marshlands have been lost because of drainage and upstream damming in "one of the world's greatest environmental disasters".
I was going to post something but this computer is so damn slow I forgot what I was going to say by the time the comment screen came up. So instead of writing something interesting, I wrote this.
Interesting Pat. Keep us updated.
Post a Comment