title: A Short History of Progress p79
date:  20140726 22:52:58
tags:  #readingnotes #environment #ancient

The Empire of Ur is apparently the source of the flood stories, the runoff became so bad -- there was no topsoil left to hold rainfall -- it would just wash across the land and there was so much salt it would turn the land white when the water dried.

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The short-lived Empire of Ur exhibits the same behaviour as we saw on Easter Island: sticking to entrenched beliefs and practices, robbing the future to pay the present, spending the last reserves of natural capital on a reckless binge of excessive wealth and glory. Canals were lengthened, fallow periods reduced, population increased, and the economic surplus concentrated on Ur itself to support grandiose building projects. The result was a few generations of prosperity (for the rulers), followed by a collapse from which southern Mesopotamia has never recovered.

By 2000 B.C., scribes were reporting that the earth had "turned white." All crops, including barley, were failing. Yields fell to a third of their original levels. The Sumerians' thousand years in the sun of history came to an end. Political power shifted north to Babylon and Assyria, and much later, under Islam, to Baghdad. Northern Mesopotamia is better drained than the south, but even there the same cycle of degradation would be repeated by empire after empire, down to modern times. No one, it seems, was willing to learn from the past. Today, fully half of Iraq's irrigated land is saline — the highest proportion in the world, followed by the other two 

p79