MB Civic

WHERE WE ARE HEADED TODAY IS AN OLD, OLD STORY.

An Empire is an immense egotism. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the most historically compelling empires of all time is that of the Sumerians. A Friend of mine in Atlanta can tell you all about this ancient civilization. His dictionary collection consists of a stone fragment which was carved between six and eight thousand years ago in the Sumerian Kingdom of Uruk, in Mesapotamia, which is now known as Syria, Iraq, and lebanon.

 “Most people don’t even remember the early Sumerians,” Tom told me as he lovingly handed me his Sumerian dictionary fragment. “But they were the earliest fathers of our way of living, what we call Western Civilization”.

 According to ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’, the oldest written story in the world, one of the first kings of the earliest Sumerian civilization (the Uruks) was a man named Gilgamesh. He was the first mortal to defy the forest god, Humbaba, who had been entrusted by the chief Sumerian deity, Enlil, to protect the ceder forests of Lebanon from mankind.

King Gilgamesh wanted to build a great city, Uruk, to immortalize his contribution to Sumerian civilization. So he and his loggers rebelled against Humbaba and began to cut the forests, which then stretched from Jordan to the sea in Lebanon. The story ends with Gilgamesh decapitating the forest god, Humbaba, infuriating the god of gods, Enlil. Enlil then avenges the death of Humbaba by making the water in his kingdom undrinkable and the fields utterly barren- killing off Gilgamesh and his people.

Along with its other distinctive qualities, ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ is the earliest recorded story of downstream silation and desertification caused by the extensive destruction of forestlands. Lebanon went from over 90% forest (the famous “Ceders of Lebanon”) to less than 7% over a 1,500- year period, causing downwind rainfall to decrease by 80%. Trees and their roots are an important part of the water cycle. As a result, millions of acres of land in the fertile crescent area turned to desert or scrubland, and remain relatively barren to this day- fertile no more.

The staple food of the Mesopotamians was barley, but over a period of several hundred years of continuous growth of barley on irrigated land, the land became exhausted and had such high levels of salt (carried in by the irrigation water) that it would no longer grow crops. At the same time, because of the rapid destruction of the forests, wood had become such a precious commodity that it was equal in value to some gem and mineral ores: neighbouring countries were conquered for their wood supplies, as well as to get fertile land to grow barley. Vast areas of timberland along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers were cut bare, increasing the situation of their irrigation canals and cropland and futher decreasing downwind rainfall.

The result of this local climatic change more than 5000 years ago was widespread famine. The collapse of the last Mesopotamian empire happened around four thousand years ago, and the records they left behind show that only at the VERY END OF THEIR EMPIRE did they realise how they had destroyed their precious source of food and fuel by razing their forests and despoiling the rest of their environment. For thousands of years they “knew” that their way of life was fine. But although things looked good at the time, they didn’t realise it wasn’t sustainable: it only worked as long as they had other people’s lands to conquer. Once they ran out of neighbours, their decline was sudden  and  devastating, just like a Ponzi scheme.

Excerpt taken from Thom Hartmann’s ‘ The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight’