Here is an awesome and inspiring documentary. from Geoff Lawton of the Permaculture Research Institute on the challenges behind “Greening the Desert” project in Jordan – from the DVD Harvesting Water the Permaculture Way. www.permaculture.org.au Courtesy of Flashtoonz Films www.flashtoonz.com/blog/
They demonstrated the technology, the know how that deserts can be brought to life once again.
From the Caveman Forum:
…apparently it was agriculture, specifically grain-farming, that caused desertification of vast expanses of Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of the world that used to lush and fertile. So if the entire world went to a grain-based diet, we’d kill the earth pretty quickly through desertification.
Here’s that excerpt:
http://fourfoldhealing.com/articles/#books
Imagine the Middle East 10,000 years ago when the only people living in what we now call Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, etc., were nomadic hunter-gatherer types. This area was referred to as a paradise; it was lush, fecund; Lebanon was the land of the cedar forests. The area between the Tigris and Euphrates was literally paradise on earth. Then came agriculture, specifically the growing of grains. As happens where grains are grown and irrigation is used, the soil began to lose its vitality, the humous layer was lost. The irrigation and the converting of perennial grasses and the animals that live on these grasses to annual crops is akin to mining the nutrients and the fertility out of the soil. Without sufficient animal manure and animal bodies to put nutrients back into the soil, without the annual flooding of the plains that is stopped when irrigation systems are used, the land loses its nutrients, the soil becomes more salty and, as evidenced in the Middle East, eventually, inevitably the land becomes a desert. Lierre describes this process in intimate detail so the reader is left with no doubt that in human history, whenever the transition from perennial grass-based land – alongside naturally flowing lakes and rivers, co-existing with verdant forests – is converted into grain based agriculture, the inevitable result is everything dies. Everything – the plants, the insects, the wild animals and eventually the people.