Wild Free and Happy Sample 45

[Note: This is the forty-fifth sample from the rough draft of my far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews.  These samples are not freestanding pieces.  They will be easier to understand if you start with sample 01, and follow the sequence listed HERE — if you have some free time.  If you prefer audiobooks, Michael Dowd is in the process of reading and recording my book HERE.]

SACRED WATER

Like soil, water is essential for all life — no water, no life.  Access to wetness determines the essence of every ecosystem, from rainforests to deserts.  The plant and animal communities that inhabit them are species attuned to surviving in local conditions.  Wherever our wild ancestors wandered, they simply ate the healthy wild foods the land provided.  Until fairly recently, it never occurred to them to play the game of stewardship, and assume the role of owner and master.  They had no need to.  They were wild, free, and happy.  Life was good.

Everyone who reads these words has spent their entire life in a fossil-powered era of super-insanity, a temporary catastrophic blip in the human saga.  Many believe that oil is also essential — far more so than soil or water.  But in the coming decades, we’ll have no choice but to abandon our addiction to fossil energy — cold turkey — and migrate to a more traditional path that is much slower, simpler, saner, and far less crowded.  Joy!  It was a crazy-making bad habit.  It turned much of the mob into full-bore lunatics who lost all common sense and lived like they were the final generation.  I can assure you that we’ll always need water.  Water is good stuff.

J. R. McNeill wrote that salt water is 97 percent of all H₂O.  About 69 percent of all fresh water is frozen, mostly in Antarctica.  Of the 31 percent that is not frozen, about 98 percent is stored in underground aquifers, many of which are too deep to be molested by tropical primates and their boring gizmos.  The water in all lakes and streams is about a quarter of one percent of all freshwater.  An essential benefit of incoming sunbeams is desalination.  As salt water evaporates, water vapor is released into the atmosphere, where it can travel the world and become dew, rain, frost, or snow.

McNeill wrote that for almost the entire human saga, water was mostly used for little more than drinking and bathing.  Today, we use far more, waste far more, and pollute far more.  Three major guzzlers are agriculture (70%), industry (20%), and cities and towns (10%).  In 1990, we were using 40 times more water than in 1700.  In the twentieth century alone, water consumption increased 900 percent.

Similar to their abusive relationship with soil, clever control freaks are working like crazy to exploit water in every unsustainable way they can imagine.  Their objective is to keep the unsinkable Titanic, with its seven-point-something billion passengers, afloat for as long as humanly possible, by any means necessary (as long as it’s profitable). 

Irrigation

Water-guzzling agriculture began in places like southern Mesopotamia.  James Scott wrote a new and improved version of the story about the dawn of plant and animal domestication, and the eventual emergence of civilization.  He focused on southern Mesopotamia, where wild folks originally wandered into a region of thriving wetlands loaded with wild wheat, barley, and many other wonderful things to eat.  It was delicious paradise, full of wild game, and nobody owned it, so they decided quit wandering, build luxurious huts, and enjoy a life of prosperity.

By and by, the growing number of bambinos began to strain the party.  Their unfortunate solution was to increase food production by transforming desert into productive cropland.  In the following pages, we’ll examine some of the downsides of irrigation.  This was a daunting fork in the path.  Once again, some folks who, for centuries, were well adapted to prospering in a wild ecosystem, eventually became possessed by an urge to control and exploit it.  One lesson that environmental history teaches us, over and over and over again, is that some cultures can lurch out-of-balance, and develop an obsessive compulsion for cleverly controlling people, places, plants, and animals. 

Unfortunately, this devilish cleverness is not kept tightly caged by knowledge, understanding, wisdom, respect, or acute foresight.  (Hey, we’re just happy horny hungry savannah primates!  We didn’t know any better!)  Sometimes, it can make you wonder if Big Mama Nature deliberately conjured the dark juju of cleverness, because overseeing millions of years of ongoing sustainability was getting really monotonous and boring.  Bring in the clowns?

Sandra Postel is fascinated by a dirty and destructive habit called irrigation.  Today, about 17 percent of global cropland is irrigated, and it produces 40 percent of our food.  Crops can be grown in lands too dry for rain-fed agriculture, and they can produce higher yields.  Irrigation fans the flames of population growth, which is usually the opposite of helpful.  Since 1800, irrigated cropland has grown 30 times in area, and global population has soared from one billion to nearly eight.

In the early days, irrigation was a game of moving surface water into fields using low tech methods.  Keeping the irrigation channels from silting up was a major and never-ending job that gave legions of slaves and peons satisfying work to enrich their lives.  When enemies came to visit, a cruelly enjoyable way of destroying your society was to deliberately rubbish your irrigation system. 

After the Second World War, powerful electric and diesel powered pumps became affordable and popular.  So did drilling rigs, which were used to bore tube wells for the extraction of groundwater.  Cheap and abundant energy allowed far more water to be produced, compared to old fashioned muscle power or windmills.  This spurred a massive expansion of the area of irrigated land, which tripled between 1950 and 2000.

Today, the mining of underground aquifers makes possible about a tenth of world grain production.  Huge fossil aquifers are being drained in the U.S. Great Plains, the North China Plain, and under Saudi Arabia.  Ancient water is being extracted far faster than the aquifers can naturally recharge — a one-time reckless joyride. 

Walter Youngquist was no fan of aquifer mining, because it created “food bubbles,” where crops could be raised in locations where highly productive agriculture was otherwise impossible.  In 2011, the World Bank estimated that these temporary bubbles were feeding 175 million in India, and 130 in China.  The bubbles will inevitably burst.  Then what?

In the U.S., the huge Ogallala Aquifer lies beneath eight states in the Great Plains.  It now provides the water for about 27 percent of the irrigated land in the U.S.  The aquifer contains water that may be 25,000 years old.  After the Second World War, folks started using automotive engines to pump wells.  Rotating motorized center pivot irrigation systems sprayed water over large circular patches of land.  Irrigation transformed marginal grassland into a highly productive environment for ranching, and growing soybeans, corn, and wheat.

The Ogallala is mysterious, and humankind has yet to develop X-ray vision.  Writing in 2007, Clive Ponting reported that the aquifer could be depleted as early as 2010.  More recently, experts predict it could fail as soon as 2028.  What is measurable is that in some regions, since the 1940s, the water table has dropped more than 300 feet (90 m).  Youngquist noted that “in north Texas, some 15,000 square miles (39,000 km²) of agricultural land has had to be abandoned as the Ogallala aquifer is totally depleted.”  Luckily, what gets pumped out today will be replenished by nature in a mere 6,000 years, maybe.  Others say hundreds of thousands of years.

And so, as topsoil is taking a beating, aquifers and surface water are being overpumped, and population keeps zooming upward (oh-oh!).  Joel Bourne noted that agriculture guzzles most of the water used by humans.  Irrigated fields have yields that are two to three times higher than rain fed fields.  Demand for water is projected to increase 70 to 90 percent by 2050, but water consumption today is already unsustainable.  The solution is easy, all we have to do is “double grain, meat, and biofuel production on fewer acres with fewer farmers, less water, higher temperatures, and more frequent droughts, floods, and heat waves” (and rising energy costs).  No worries!

Draining Rivers

Irrigation is draining major rivers.  For example, Erling Hoh described the Yellow River in China, which is 3,400 miles (5,472 km) long.  Its waters have been intensively overdrawn for irrigating cropland.  In 1972, for the first time in history, the flowing river never made it to its normal outlet in the Yellow Sea.  In 1997, lower sections of the river were dry for 227 days, reducing the harvest by an estimated 8.5 million tons.  Some sections have been so polluted by cities and industries that the water is unfit for both irrigation and human consumption.  Fish no longer survive in some regions.

Sandra Postel noted that a growing number of major rivers are, for months at a time, discharging little or no water into the sea.  They include the Colorado, Rio Grande, Yellow, Indus, Ganges, Amu Darya, and Murray.  Rivers deliver both life-giving water, and death-bringing pollution.  As the volume of flow diminishes, there is less water to dilute the crud.

The Ganges is getting sucked dry.  Old fashioned irrigation, which moved river water to fields via canals, worked for centuries, when there were fewer people, and more forests.  As demand increased, the water level of the river dropped lower and lower, until the old canal distribution system could no longer work.  Luckily, our hero technology came to the rescue.  Tube wells were drilled, and motorized pumps began extracting water like crazy, and the crops prospered. 

Naturally, with this increased demand, underground water tables dropped.  Consequently, less groundwater naturally flowed back into the river.  So, to an increasing degree, the Ganges is looking less like a mighty river, and more like a big mudflat.  [LOOK]  Breezes drifting over the mountain from the future have the pungent aroma of food shortages.  Progress!

Subsidence

Clive Ponting noted that many folks today are still able to snatch as much water as they want, pay nothing for it, and not worry about waste.  Irrigating cropland with state of the art, maximum efficiency technology is prohibitively expensive.  It’s far more practical and affordable to continue using highly wasteful methods.  In India and China, two-thirds of irrigation water never reaches the plants, because of losses due to evaporation, or seepage from delivery canals.  U.S. farmers merely waste half of their water.

Postel wrote that water tables are dropping beneath large regions of northern China, India, Pakistan, Iran, the Middle East, Mexico, and the western United States.  Ground water is being pumped out faster than the aquifers are naturally replenished.  When a well begins to wheeze, they keep drilling it deeper and deeper, until it finally goes dry.  Up to 10 percent of the global food harvest is made possible by aquifer mining.  This path does not have a happy ending.

Subsidence is a common but unintended consequence of aquifer mining.  It affects locations where the geology is not sufficiently rigid.  Underground, as the water is removed, it leaves behind an empty void that the land sinks to fill.  Aquifer compaction can be irreversible — nature may never again be able to recharge the aquifer.  Game over.

J. R. McNeill reported that in 1990, Mexico City was using 35 times more water than it did in 1900.  The land surface subsided.  On the streets, some locations have unevenly sank up to 23 feet (7 m), which damaged sewer pipes, streets, and buildings.  Walter Youngquist wrote that the entire San Joaquin Valley is sinking.  In some areas, the water table has dropped up to 500 feet (152 m).  Near Mendota, the land surface has sunk more than 28 feet (8.5 m).  [LOOK] 

Subsidence is an issue in many places, including Osaka, Tokyo, Bangkok, Beijing, Alexandria, New Orleans, Houston, Las Vegas, and southern Arizona.  Jakarta, Indonesia is the fastest sinking major city in the world.  It gets 300 days of rain per year, and it sits on a big freshwater aquifer, which its huge population is guzzling faster than it can recharge.  Because so much of the city is paved, not enough rain can soak into the ground to keep the aquifer full.

Around the world, farmers, industries, and cities engage in aquifer mining.  Subsidence is the shadow of overpumping.  The problem will increase as long as irrigation and extreme overpopulation continues.  While population continues growing, water mining makes it harder for food production to keep up with growing need.

Salinization

Big Mama Nature often presents prestigious awards to honor the great achievements of human cleverness.  One of her golden awards for the invention of irrigation is called salinization.  By around 6,000 years ago, irrigation was cleverly transforming the deserts of southern Mesopotamia into a (temporary) utopia of highly productive fields of wheat, barley, peas, and lentils.  The long and winding soap opera in this region could fill 100 pages.  Let’s boil it down to a quickie.

Southern Mesopotamia is a flat, hot, nearly rainless desert covered with fertile soil that has above average salt content.  The Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow through the region.  To the north, a higher and wetter region, there is an annual rainy season.  When the rains arrive, both surging rivers move heavy loads of silt downstream.  Something odd happens here. 

Over the centuries, as silt dropped out of the water flow, layer upon layer accumulated in the flood plains, deeper and deeper.  Eventually, both rivers were travelling through channels that were elevated above the surrounding land.  Clever folks recognized the possibility that life-giving water could be diverted from the rivers into irrigation canals, via a labor saving magic called gravity.  So they did. 

Now, all they had to do was dig miles and miles of irrigation canals to deliver the water across the desert and start growing crops — good healthy exercise.  Unfortunately, year after year, the rivers continued to deliver more and more silt, which took great delight in repeatedly plugging up the tidy canal systems.  Keeping the canals clear was a never ending challenge. 

Big Mama Nature thinks this is hilarious.  She laughs until the tears flow.  Technology and progress always bites us on the ass.  It’s so much easier to simply adapt to elegantly sustainable wild ecosystems, like the rest of the family of life does.

Anyway, irrigation made it possible for folks to produce lots of food, and feed lots of people, which enabled the emergence of the first states, cities, and empires — and the endless bloody clashes between super ambitious, testosterone powered, glory-seeking control freaks.  Meanwhile, out in the fields, dissolved salt ions were deeply involved in a project to teach the too-clever critters important lessons about agriculture, irrigation, and unintended consequences.

Several types of mineral salts, at varying levels of concentration, are natural components of soils and water.  Even rain drops can contain traces of dissolved salts.  All irrigation water contains some salt.  Salinization is a process in which the accumulation of salt in the soil can reach levels that affect plant health, or even prohibit plant life.  When cropland is not well drained (as in Mesopotamia), irrigation can make the water table rise.  When this happens, water containing dissolved salts moves upward, closer to the root zone of the crops above. 

When salty moisture migrates close to the ground surface, the water evaporates, and the salt is left behind.  When plants are thirsty, their roots take in water, and leave the salt behind.  As salt levels intensify near the soil surface, eventually not even weeds can survive.  At the end of the road, evaporation of saline water can leave the ground surface covered with a white layer of salt crystals, looking a bit like fresh snow.  Coroners would issue these lands a death certificate.  They remain useless to this day.

Clive Ponting indicated that salinization can be a slow motion catastrophe that may remain largely invisible to multiple generations.  In Mesopotamia, wheat and barley were grown in equal amounts in 3500 B.C.  Barley is more salt-tolerant than wheat.  By 2500 B.C., wheat was just 15 percent of the grain grown, indicating salt problems.  By 1700 B.C., wheat growing had gone extinct.  Around 2000 B.C., there were some reports that “the earth turned white.”  At its peak, Mesopotamia maybe had a population of 1.5 million.  By A.D. 1500, just 150,000 lived there.

Now, let’s fast forward to modern times, an era when folks built lots of big dams — a subject that fascinated Marc Reisner.  Many were built in the Colorado River basin, for flood control, hydroelectricity generation, recreational fishing and boating, and to store water for irrigation and municipal water systems.  Historically, salinization has been a tireless serial killer of civilizations.  In the big dam era, human cleverness achieved new levels of brilliant incompetence.  Irrigation grew explosively.

As water in the Colorado moves downstream, it is diverted multiple times to irrigate the land it passes on its long journey from the Rockies to Mexico.  The water is dumped on a field, where it keeps crops on life support, dissolves salts in the soil, and eventually finds its way back into the river.  The salty water flows down to the next irrigation project… and then the next, and the next.  Along its journey, the water takes rest stops in reservoirs, where about a tenth of it evaporates, concentrating what is left behind.  By the time it reaches trendy restaurants in southern California, the water is so salty that it’s sometimes served with a lemon slice.

Reisner noted that in the Grand Valley, when Colorado River water is diverted for irrigation, it contains 200 parts per million (ppm) of salt.  When it returns to the river, it has 6,500 ppm.  On rivers like the Colorado and Platte, the water may be used up to 18 times.  Eventually, the Colorado flows across the border into Mexico, where the water has become “liquid death.”  At the end of its journey, the river used to empty into the Gulf of California.  Today, it dries up before it can reach the finish line.

The salt problems could be reduced by installing state of the art drip irrigation systems, in which far more water actually makes contact with plant roots, but this option is insanely expensive.  Another option is installing drainage systems in irrigated fields, so dissolved salts can be leached out of the soil.  This is also insanely expensive, and it produces very salty dreck that should then be disposed of in a thoughtful mature manner.

Regions of salt damaged soils are found in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas.  Writing in 2015, Pooja Shrivastava summed it up like this:  “It has been estimated that worldwide 20% of total cultivated and 33% of irrigated agricultural lands are afflicted by high salinity.  Furthermore, the salinized areas are increasing at a rate of 10% annually for various reasons, including low precipitation, high surface evaporation, weathering of native rocks, irrigation with saline water, and poor cultural practices.  It has been estimated that more than 50% of the arable land would be salinized by the year 2050.”  Hmmm…  Maybe we won’t be having ten billion for dinner after all.

Siltation

On the day you squirted out of the womb, you took your first breath, and began a fun-filled journey that will inevitably conclude with your final breath.  Likewise, the working life of every dam is also finite.  Brilliant engineers design them to survive earthquakes, landslides, and intense floods — and they usually do.  Most will peacefully die from a natural cause, siltation.  Rivers transport both water and silt.  When the water flows into reservoirs, it slows down, and the silt is dropped.  Year after year, the silt accumulates, displacing space for water storage — the purpose of the dam.

The Advisory Committee on Water Information (ACWI) is an organization within the U.S. Department of Interior.  One of their areas of concern is dam sedimentation, and they have created an excellent document that addresses FAQs (frequently asked questions).

Every dam that doesn’t experience a catastrophic failure will eventually fill with silt, and become a concrete waterfall — as useful at the tits on a bull.  Engineers understand this.  Typically, dam project plans are calculated to have a sediment design life of 50 or 100 years — planned obsolescence.  So, mommy and daddy get to enjoy the wonderful benefits from their hard earned tax dollars, and the grandkids inherit a collection of concrete waterfalls that are obscenely expensive to properly dispose of, and increasingly prone to failure as they deteriorate with age. 

More than 5,000 large dams in the U.S. are over 50 years old, approaching the end of their designed lifespans.  Some are already goofy bull’s tit waterfalls, enduring monuments to shortsighted pork barrel politics — idiotic projects demanded by slick-talking legislators to delight their donors, and enrich the rich.  The folks who get most of the financial benefits are entrepreneurs who adore the golden benefits of socialism, but hate government, and are hysterically allergic to taxes. 

Marc Reisner wrote that President Jimmy Carter detested dam projects because the national debt was in the stratosphere, there was double-digit inflation, and dams made little or no economic sense.  He was cursed to frequently suffer from painful mental impulses known as principles.  “He began to wonder what future generations would think of all the dams we had built.  What right did we have, in the span of his lifetime, to dam nearly all of the world’s rivers?  What would happen when the dams silted up?  What if the climate changed?”  This didn’t win him many friends in the arid west.  He didn’t get reelected.

Anyway, the ACWI FAQs note that “proper maintenance” is required to provide dams with eternal life.  Proper maintenance involves periodically dredging out many tons of polluted sediment, hauling it somewhere, and disposing it in a thoughtful mature manner.  Proper maintenance is massively expensive.  This begs a follow-up FAQ:  “Is reservoir sediment managed in the USA?”  Answer: “With only a few exceptions, the answer is no.”  It is done at just two reservoirs that fill rapidly.  There is no dredging.  The dam gates are opened, and the sediment is flushed downstream, which blindsides the riparian ecosystem.  This proper maintenance is highly destructive.

An extreme example of “proper maintenance” is the Xiaolangdi Dam on the Yellow River in China.  Its reservoir accumulates an estimated 30 million tons of sediment each and every year!  So, every year, a team of maintenance professionals open the base drains, and allow 30 million tons of muck to ooze downstream.  It’s much cheaper than dredging.

In 1950, there were about 5,000 large dams in the world.  Today, there are more than 45,000.  Big dams are enormously expensive, and the cost of decommissioning a hydropower dam can exceed the cost of building it.  Corporations have no interest in building them, because the odds for making meaningful profits are slim at best.  So legislators order them, and taxpayers enjoy getting the huge bills

Of course, dams can also be very exciting.  Reisner shared some thrilling stories.  In the summer of 1975, typhoon Nina blasted Asia.  In the vicinity of China’s Banqiao Dam, a massive flood resulted from 64 inches (163 cm) of rain, half of which fell in just six hours.  The dam collapsed, and the outflow blew out a number of smaller dams downstream.  Floods killed 171,000 people, and 11 million lost their homes.  Today, everyone in the Southwest prays several times a day that there will not be a similar chain reaction failure on the Colorado River. 

In the 1960s, the Bureau of Reclamation was running out of ideal sites for new dams.  For maybe 40 years, Idaho farmers had begged for a dam on the Teton River.  Conservatives who detested socialism were eager to have U.S. taxpayers buy them a dam, despite the fact that the costs would far exceed the expected benefits.  This was earthquake country, and the proposed site had highly porous bedrock, an unbelievably stupid place to build a dam.  It was OK’d in 1973, and built in 1976.  The Teton Dam did a spectacular blowout two days after it was filled.

The reckless and idiotic impulses that conjured the Teton Dam into existence, and non-existence, strongly resemble the impulses that have brought the twenty-first century global economy into existence.  It too was built on a dodgy foundation, and is now springing more and more leaks.

Damn Dams

Oh-oh!  I feel a rant coming on.  What right did we have to build the dams?  Who is going to pay to remove the ever growing number of useless concrete waterfalls?  Where are we supposed to put millions of tons of polluted silt where it will not poison life?  The dam building binge was an atrocious insult to younger generations of all species.  Why are we promoting sprawling cities in bone dry blast furnace climates, regions that import most of their food, and depend for survival on snowmelt water from faraway places?  Perpetual growth is not the purpose of life.  It isn’t even fun.

In my perception of reality, salmon lives matter.  Eel lives matter.  Sturgeon lives matter.  Vast regions of land are now used to grow corn and soybeans to feed cattle who are far happier eating the natural food they evolved to enjoy, grass.  Is the Extinction Rebellion complaining that the climate is being destroyed by salmon farts and belches?  Salmon need no ranchers or herders.  They feed themselves.  They don’t overgraze public lands, or rubbish riparian areas.  They don’t fill huge sewage lagoons.  They don’t need to be treated with antibiotics or pesticides. 

They are sacred wild and free beings, not enslaved feedlot meat machines.  Their flesh is highly nutritious, and organic.  When they return to the place of their origin to spawn and die, they leave behind enormous amounts of precious nutrients from the sea, not synthetic fertilizers from chemical plants.  Salmon carcasses enrich ecosystems, rather than running off into waterways, stimulating algal blooms, and creating sprawling oxygen-free dead zones where nothing can live.  Salmon rock!  Dams don’t.  Long live the salmon!

There!  I feel better now.  Sorry!

Wild Free and Happy Sample 29

[Note: This is the twenty-ninth sample from my rough draft of a far from finished new book, Wild, Free, & Happy.  I don’t plan on reviewing more books for a while.  My blog is home to reviews of 202 books, and you are very welcome to explore them.  The Search field on the right side will find words in the full contents of all rants and reviews, if you are interested in specific authors, titles, or subjects.] 

Goats

Cattle and sheep cannot thrive on depleted grazing land, but goats are especially capable of being hardcore survivalists.  They can live on barren lands, and keep them barren.  Simon Fairlie wrote that goats are popular in India, because they can survive on the same wastes that cattle consume.  While cows are sacred, goats are not, so it’s perfectly OK to eat them.  While a goat is being raised, it can devour ten acres (4 ha) of vegetation.  They do not gently nibble on the grass, they can hungrily rip it out by the roots.  They kill young trees.  Goats can be a disaster.

Paul Shepard wrote that goats are smarter than cattle or sheep, and they are blessed with interesting personalities.  They can learn to follow instructions from their master.  They are smaller than cattle, so losses to predators are less costly to the herder.  Goats get high grades in sex education classes, and are able to produce numerous offspring.  Rustlers love them because they are easier to steal than cattle.  Goats are known as the “poor man’s cow.”  A goat can produce more milk than a sheep.

Shepard imagined that in the coming years, when our reckless turbocharged joyride of decadence runs out of gas, and glides into the misty realm of embarrassing memories, our faithful companions amidst the ruins will be goats, the “avatars of poverty.”  They have given us a 5,000 year lesson in environmental catastrophe.  He was no fan of any type of domesticated livestock.  He called them “hooved locusts.”  A primary objective for many pastoralists is maximizing wealth (larger herds), not a loving, long-term, predator tolerant, ultraconservative relationship with their ecosystems.

The Earth Policy Institute (EPI) reported that ever growing numbers of livestock are working hard every day to diminish the health of world grasslands.  The EPI has been tracking livestock population trends, nation by nation.  They report that when goat numbers are rising faster than those for cattle or sheep, this is an indicator of deteriorating grassland. 

Not fussy eaters, goats are the livestock most associated with overgrazing.  As vegetation is gobbled up, less greenery survives to absorb periodic rainfall.  Consequently, more rain runs off the land, which can lead to destructive flooding.  In addition to depleting the forage, their sharp hooves also pulverize the soil surface, making soil particles more susceptible to erosion via wind or water.  Stripped landscapes led to massive floods in Pakistan in 2010.

The EPI noted that between 1970 and 2009, while the global cattle population increased by 28 percent, goat numbers more than doubled (100+ percent).  The goat trend line began rising quickly around 1980.  The Sahel region, south of the Sahara in Africa, is becoming a dustbowl.  Every year, 867,000 acres (350,862 ha) of rangeland and cropland are being lost to desertification.  Another dustbowl is rising in central Asia, western Mongolia, and western China.

John Livingston noted that only two animals create habitats: goats and humans.  Goats create deserts.  Humans create ecological train wrecks.  Sheep and goats don’t know any better but, in theory, there are some humans who are capable of making intelligent choices.  History is clear on one thing, we excel at repeating the same mistakes, century after century.  As long as they satisfy immediate needs, self-destructive habits are devilishly difficult to shake.

Daniel Hillel didn’t resent goats, because goats weren’t the problem.  The problem was pastoralists who allowed their herds to get too big.  When goats were herded on overgrazed rangeland, they ate whatever they could find, because they had no other choice.  They were far better survivalists than cattle.

Of course, stepping back even further, and using perfect hindsight, it’s not hard to see a pattern that associates animal domestication with deforestation, soil destruction, and desertification.  Wild and free animals do not have a reputation for being desert makers or forest exterminators. 

Back when all critters were wild, wolves were simply ordinary neighbors, not demonic enemies.  Their role in the ecosystem was to dine on herbivores, which helped limit the herd size, which helped keep the land healthy.  Wolves have never suffered from obnoxious beliefs about owning other animals, and gaining personal status by forcibly controlling as many as possible.  Unfortunately, herders have zero toleration for non-human predators.

Cedars of Lebanon

Lebanon is located on the east shore of the Mediterranean, just north of Israel.  It has a narrow coastal plain, and a mountainous interior.  Big Mama Nature originally clothed Lebanon with grasslands and forests, and they absorbed precipitation and kept the springs flowing — a healthy ecosystem.  The cedars of Lebanon were described in older sources as a legendary forest, a sacred land (“the cedars of god”).  Originally, the forests covered almost 2,000 square miles (5,180 km²).  That was prior to the arrival of the Phoenicians.

Tom Dale wrote that, in the early days, the Phoenicians were likely nomads who herded goats.  This could have been a low impact mode of living, as long as the population of goats and humans had remained modest, via mindful self-restraint.  Agriculture required far more hard work than goat herding, so smart folks shunned it whenever possible.  As the human population grew, feeding the growing mob became more challenging.  Consequently, farming expanded across the coastal plains, and then began spreading up into the hills.

The agriculture practiced in early civilizations, like Egypt and Mesopotamia, was enabled by irrigation.  Folks at the east end of the Mediterranean, like the Phoenicians, were the first to attempt large scale rain fed agriculture on steeply sloped land (up to 34°).  They received heavy winter rains, followed by fairly dry summers, the pattern we call a Mediterranean climate (like California).

Over time, experiments in self-restraint (if any) eventually failed.  By 2500 B.C., a civilization emerged in Phoenicia.  It had an impressive merchant fleet, communities of skilled artisans, and good ports at Tyre, Sidon, and Beirut.  The biggest threat to their prosperity was insufficient food production (i.e., insufficient family planning).  As hillside agriculture intensified, stone terraces had to be built on the slopes to keep the soil from washing away.  Constructing and maintaining stepped terraces took lots and lots of hard work.  An increasingly pissed off Big Mama Nature sometimes conjured intense cloudbursts to suddenly wash them away. 

King Solomon sent 150,000 men to Lebanon to cut and haul lumber back to Palestine, where it would be used for building temples, palaces, and trophy homes for fat cats.  Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Egypt were also growing rapidly, and needed lots of lumber.  Wood was traded for food, but the food imports were not enough.  So, the Phoenicians created a number of colonies along the Mediterranean coast from which they could extract resources.  Their civilization peaked between 1200 and 800 B.C., and blinked out in 332 B.C., when Alexander the Great conquered them, and crucified 2,000 upper class folks in Tyre.

Dale wrote that by then, most of the forests were already history.  Over the next few centuries, Greeks and Romans finished off what remained, with a few exceptions (four small groves).  Topsoil had largely washed off the hillsides, and silted up the harbors.  Clogged river deltas became malarial marshlands.  The damage was so severe that the land could not recover and allow another thriving civilization to rise from the ruins.

Anyway, over time, almost all of the cedars of Lebanon got mowed down.  Green vegetation emerged amidst the stumps, and herds of goats hungrily chewed it up.  Lebanon’s cedars don’t produce their first cones (seeds) until they are about 40 years old.  There were almost no inaccessible rocky crags where goats could not eat new trees, as fast as they appeared.  Consequently, the forests were doomed.  Deforestation, hungry goats, and winter rains were the prime causes of massive erosion that turned Lebanon into “a well-rained-on desert.”  It will take many, many thousands of years for nature to replace the lost soil.

Trendy societies destroyed their ecosystems as fast as possible, in order to soar off into a giddy high called decadence (sort of like glue sniffing kids today).  For centuries, a series of Mediterranean civilizations took turns rising and falling, conquering and being conquered.  Raiders and pirates worked hard to snatch whatever they could, whenever possible, by any means necessary. 

Writing in 1955, Dale wrote that today, Lebanon, Crete, Turkey, Palestine, Tunisia, Algeria, Spain, Italy, Sicily, Yugoslavia, and Greece were far more torn and tattered than in the good old days.  All had lived way too hard, something like a long intense binge of oblivion drinking (…and then cometh the excruciating hammer blows of a merciless permanent hangover).  In the twenty-first century, we (the most “educated” generation ever) knowingly continue repeating the same stupid mistakes, all around the world, on a vastly more destructive scale, at a much faster rate.

In 1938 and 1939, Walter Lowdermilk toured North Africa and the Middle East to learn about how ancient civilizations destroyed themselves.  He discovered that only four small groves of Lebanon cedars still survived.  The largest one was home to about 400 trees, of which 43 were old ones.  One grove was saved because a monastery was built in it, and it was surrounded by a fence to keep the goats out.  Lowdermilk took a photo of the walled grove — a modest group of trees surrounded by a vast barren mountainous moonscape.

Land of Milk and Honey

Palestine was just south of Phoenicia.  It was home of the Israelites.  Like the Phoenicians, the Israelis were pastoralists.  Both were Semitic people, and they likely had common ancestors.  “Goat” appears in the Bible 132 times, and “sheep” 188 times.  Moses helped his people escape slavery in Egypt.  They spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness.  Their destination was the Promised Land, located on the far shore of the River Jordan.  It was “a land that floweth with milk and honey,” a phrase that appears in the Bible 20 times.

Before they got there, they were blocked by the warriors of seven nations, the Amorites, Perizzites, Canaanites, Hittites, Girgashites, Hivites, and Jebusites.  All were slain in a single day, with miraculous divine assistance.  Their deity instructed the Israelites to burn the chariots of their exterminated opponents, and hough their horses.  Hough?  It means to slash the tendons of the hind legs, to cripple the animals.  Wading through the blood and guts, they finally crossed the Jordan.

Lowdermilk’s tour of the Middle East also made a stop in the Jordan Valley.  He snapped a photo of a heavily damaged hilly landscape, and wrote: “This is a present-day view of a part of the Promised Land to which Moses led the Israelites about 1200 B.C.  A few patches still have enough soil to raise a meager crop of barley.  But most of the land has lost practically all of its soil, as observed from the rock outcroppings.  The crude rock terrace in the foreground helps hold some of the remaining soil in place.”

“We found the soils of red earth washed off the slopes to bedrock over more than half the upland area.  These soils had lodged in the valleys where they are still being cultivated and are still being eroded by great gullies that cut through the alluvium with every heavy rain.”

“What is the cause of the decadence of this country that was once flowing with milk and honey?  As we ponder the tragic history of the Holy Lands, we are reminded of the struggle of Cain and Abel.  This struggle has been made realistic through the ages by the conflict that persists, even unto today, between the tent dweller and the house dweller, between the shepherd and the farmer.  The desert seems to have produced more people than it could feed.”

Mongolian Desertification

Kathleen McLaughlin described how grasslands in Mongolia are currently being degraded by climate change, and by overgrazing the variety of goats that produce cashmere wool.  Soft cashmere was formerly used to make expensive clothing.  Today, better technology for knitting in China, combined with the fast fashion trend, has moved cashmere products from the luxury class to the mass market.  Because herders make a decent income from raising goats, they are now more than half of Mongolia’s grazing livestock.  Unfortunately, goats are the most destructive grazers, because they not only eat the roots of plants, but also the flowers that produce seeds for new grasses.

The harsh winter of 2017–2018 killed hundreds of thousands of grazing animals.  The Mongolian steppe is twice the size of Texas, and it’s slowly turning into a desert.  About 70% of the grazing lands are degraded.  A number of lakes and rivers have dried up.  Overgrazing is a primary factor in grassland deterioration. 

In the 1990s, the former communist government set quotas on grazing animal numbers.  Quotas are gone now, and grazing livestock have increased from 20 million to 61.5 million.  Dead areas are growing, and soil erosion is rising.  Native grasses are being displaced by exotic species that are toxic.  Grassland degradation is also a growing threat to wildlife species.

Deep Water

The completion of the Hoover Dam in 1935 was a head-snapping experience — something like the moon landing, or the atomic bomb — history-making techno-craziness.  It was the greatest construction project in human history, and the world’s biggest power plant.  It was a giant leap forward in humankind’s crusade to enslave and abuse Big Mama Nature, and leave behind enormous messes for the kids.

Legions of hustlers were thrilled to realize the fabulous new opportunities for becoming rich whilst not getting their hands dirty.  From 1935 to 2000, about 45,000 large dams were constructed in 140 nations.  In his book, Deep Water, Jacques Leslie takes readers to India, Africa, and Australia to explore the dark world of the dammed.

In India, we meet Ms. Medha Patkar, a charismatic full-throttle activist determined to stop the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River.  It would flood the homes of 200,000 to 300,000, many of whom were indigenous tribal people.  Tribal folks were happy to live in the roadless forest, where the Hindus didn’t molest them.  In the Hindu world, tribal people were assigned a status even lower than the untouchables.  Tribes had zero political power.

The primary villain in this book was the World Bank, which poured billions of dollars into dam projects, to spur what is comically referred to as sustainable development.  Devious bureaucrats in India were highly skilled at diverting a good portion of this flood of money into their own pockets.  The politicians of India were so corrupt that they made American officials almost look virtuous.  Social and environmental concerns went out the window.

In India alone, dams have displaced somewhere between 21 and 55 million people (40 to 80 million worldwide).  In the relocation game, officials promised the sun and moon to the families to be displaced, like five acres (2 ha) of good land and a government job.  What they actually ended up getting was screwed.  Their fields were under water, and they were prohibited from fishing in the reservoir.  Often the tribes scattered to the winds, and ended up in urban nightmares.

India’s population is projected to be larger than China’s by 2050.  The privileged folks hunger to enjoy a planet-trashing consumer lifestyle, and have little concern for what happens to the politically invisible.  The nation has already built 4,300 large dams, and has plans for 700 to 1,000 more.  Dam building is easier and more profitable than population management.

The next section of the book takes us to Southern Africa, where we meet anthropologist Thayer Scudder, who spent decades as a consultant specializing in the resettlement of unlucky people who resided in future reservoirs.  He was skilled at creating high quality resettlement plans, and disappointed to see them all mostly ignored.  Once again, the natives were screwed, the officials pocketed a lot of money, and the ecosystem was damned.

Scudder had no doubt that dams were cool, in theory.  In theory, it was not impossible to create water projects that were fair, equitable, beneficial, and environmentally sensitive.  On the other hand, he believed that 70 percent of the world’s 45,000 large dams should have never been built.  Decade after decade, he nurtured a fantasy that some day he would be involved in creating just “one good dam.”  Instead, the great triumphs of his long career were his successes in killing a few stupid projects.

The last stop is Australia, where we meet water commissioner Don Blackmore, and get a thorough analysis of his frustrating struggle to keep the dying ecosystem of the Murray-Darling Basin on life support.  It’s the continent’s only major river system, but its annual flow is a wee trickle compared to the Amazon.  Australia was an especially unsuitable place to transplant the British way of life, and many experiments have fallen far short of their lofty goals, agriculture for example.  Much of the continent is arid, droughts are common, the ancient soils are low in nutrients, and the supply of fresh water is far from dependable.

Before the colonial invasion, thirsty Australian forests prevented most precipitation from reaching the water table in the Murray Basin.  When the white lads chopped down 15 billion trees to create cropland, the water table surged upward, as much as 75 feet (23 m), mobilizing the salts stored in the soil, and poisoning large areas of land.  The soils in the basin contain 100 billion tons of salt.  It would be a terrible place to attempt large-scale irrigation, but they did. 

Radical reductions of water diversions would slow the growing damage, but without water, farming is impossible.  Climate change presents a new wild card.  It could add major strains to a system that’s already staggering.

Leslie spent a day with an Aborigine man, Tom Trevorrow.  He lives in the Coorong, a 90-mile (145 km) lagoon near the mouth of the Murray.  When he was young, the land was thriving with abundant wildlife.  Today, with 75 percent of the water diverted upstream, the Coorong is very salty, and the habitat for birds, fish, and trees is devastated.  He wants the dams removed.  “The River is a living thing.  When you start interfering with it, everything dies.”

Aborigines managed to survive with an unrestricted free-flowing river for 50,000 years.  They survived because they learned how to live with the land, an extremely intelligent strategy.  They were not possessed with unhealthy impulses to temporarily control and exploit nature.  And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the powerful wisdom that our ancestors forgot — wisdom that we damn well need to remember if humankind is to have any chance for sticking around for a while.

This book is a powerful parable.  Readers are given a backstage tour of the hideous world behind the dazzling magic show of endless growth and sustainable development.  The heroes of our culture, the wealthy pioneers of progress, without their makeup and glittering costumes, are sad creatures, like spoiled two-year olds.

Every single one of those 45,000 dams will die, sooner or later.  About 5,000 large dams are more than 50 years old.  As they age, the costs of maintenance rise, eventually eliminating profits.  Investors must make an important decision — should they abandon the dam, or come up with billions of dollars to safely decommission it?  It often costs more to decommission a major hydropower dam than it did to build it.

Many dams are nearly impossible to safely decommission.  Exactly where do you dispose of billions of tons of accumulated sediment, mud often loaded with pollutants?  Abandoned dams become the responsibility of taxpayers, who may not have the expertise, funds, or desire to safely decommission them.  Earthquakes may decommission some dams.  So might terrorists or wars.  Old age and normal decay will certainly remove many.

The good news here is that we enjoy a surplus of super-important lessons to learn.  We currently have access to outstanding tools for learning and teaching.  We have a ridiculously out-of-balance culture to practice on, and little to lose.  We have been presented with a fabulous opportunity to become the most beloved generation of ancestors ever.

Leslie, Jacques, Deep Water — The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2005.