The Fertile Crescendo
What the cradle of civilization is still telling us today
Armies swept across the desert in their desert gear, armed against sand and sun. And from time to time a thought would occur: isn’t this the Fertile Crescent? Where’d the greenery go?
The Crescent is an essential part of the circularity of human industry and climate change. In short, it turns and turns again like this: climate change spurred the creation of human industry; human industry is now exaggerating, exacerbating, multiplying climate change; in response, we will either turn once more into new revolutions in human industry, or the wheel will halt and we will be overtaken by what we unleashed in the last great turning. And it can all be seen where it began: in the Fertile Crescent.
Even today the Crescent, despite the sere images on our televisions, is not all desert; if it were, millions would be starving and the regional conflicts would be even worse than the chaos of recent years. But it’s not as fertile as it once was, either. There has been and will be continuous change, there and everywhere. That’s the nature of change, it’s not static and never can be. But the specific changes at a specific time in the specific area of the Fertile Crescent, where civilization and human industry began, tell us something about this world we’re in today. And that lesson is either terrifying or inspiring, depending largely on how you feel about our human capacity to do again what we have done before.
The (very) short version of a (very) long process goes like this: roughly 12,000 years ago, the last ice age was gradually ending. There had already been spare, scattered agriculture in the region of what would later be called Mesopotamia, but as the amount of available water receded, so-called “islands of productivity” shrank, and people were forced to look for newer, hardier plants like cereals. These grains had previously been considered weeds, and they took a great deal of work (grinding, baking) to be turned into proper food; but the plants did well in the increasingly-arid conditions. And as animal populations shifted away, people realized it would be easier to keep them and herd them rather than being eternally on the move. In other words: to deal with a changing climate, people began to be industrious. They discovered that with a growing population and higher food yields from agriculture, it was no longer necessary for everyone to hunt for or cultivate food — some could devote themselves to other tasks. Cities. Architecture. Complex irrigation systems. Writing. The rich soil of the Fertile Crescent became the cradle of civilization, driven by the slow grinding changes of a shifting climate.
But of course, climate is not at all a static thing: the wheel’s still in spin. The area around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers has continued to get hotter and drier. The floodplain between the two rivers has shrunk, the forests of antiquity have largely disappeared, the coastal zone adjacent to the Mediterranean has diminished significantly. But also, millennia of farming in the area, and animal grazing, and irrigation systems that only slowly grew in sophistication, created soil erosion and depletion. The Fertile Crescent is still fertile today, beyond doubt — but it’s not what it was.
Which begs the question: how much of that is a natural process, and how much of it is a result of human meddling in a natural process? That’s hard for anyone to answer for a whole host of reasons (to pick just one, writing was only invented about 3,500 years ago in Mesopotamia, and we’re talking about processes that began tens of thousands of years earlier, so most of the evidence is indirect), but really, does it even matter how much of modern-day climate change is caused by human activity? Does it really?
If your house is flooding, do you turn on the spigot in your bathtub? If it’s a blazing-hot day, will you crank up the heat? Of course not. It would be absurd to do the very thing that makes a difficult moment more difficult. And that’s exactly where we are, right now, at this moment of historical time. We know that pumping carbon into the atmosphere contributes to global warming. We know this. Whether the percentage of human contribution is 5% or 50%, the first rule of problem-solving is to stop making the problem worse. Given a warming process that has been ongoing for tens of thousands of years, why would we ever knowingly, willfully, deliberately crank up the heat?
We are, though. That’s exactly what we’re doing.
And yet the circularity of all this is perhaps hopeful. Like our civilization-creating ancestors in the Fertile Crescent, we are all faced with increasingly difficult climatological changes. And already, in what might be the modern equivalent of the discovery of agriculture, we are beginning to discover the power of renewable energy. Wind, solar, hydro, geothermal. We are, perhaps, at the beginning of a new era of advancing human civilization, powered by abundant energy that has little to no impact on climate processes.
For this new turning of the wheel, only one thing is required: we have to be as creative, as committed to our own survival, as our neolithic ancestors of the Fertile Crescent. As we face a similar necessity, we must find within ourselves a similar courage, a similar willingness to change where change is needed.
Or the wheel will grind and buckle and stop, and our part in the great turning will be done.
