Posted on 08/16/2011 7:25:40 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Throughout human history unsustainable agricultural practices have turned fragile ecosystems into wastelands and left people starving. During the Dust Bowl, American farmers learned the consequences of removing the deep rooted grasses from the Great Plains when the soil blew away in tremendous dust storms. Icelandic shepherds learned that the sheep rearing practices their ancestors used on the European mainland destroyed the thin soils of their island and left them with starving herds and little to eat.
The ancient inhabitants of what is now Peru also learned the unhappy consequences of farming in a delicate ecosystem. The Ica Valley, near the coast of southern Peru and the famous Nazca lines, is now a barren desert, but was once a fertile floodplain, anchored by the roots of the huarango tree.
People were able to raise a variety of crops there for several centuries. But intensive agriculture in pre-conquest times led to ecosystem collapse. The history of the land was recently reconstructed by bioarcheologist David Beresford-Jones of the University of Cambridge by looking at plant remains left in ancient garbage heaps.
Beresford-Jones and a team of archeologists studied plant remains associated with settlement sites spanning roughly 750 B.C. to 1000 A.D. They observed the change as the valley inhabitants went from eating mostly gathered foods, to a period of intense agriculture, then back again to surviving on what they could eke out of nature's diminished bounty.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thanks Renfield. |
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Too bad they didn’t have Al Gore around to “consult” them on their environmental issues.
Of course this had nothing at all to do with natural climate variability, like when the “wet band” shifted North and South of the equator, making the lands closest to the equator dry (Sahara Desert and The Land of Milk And Honey are pretty parched now when they once were fertile). This MUST be caused by the hand of Man.
Aficianados of Pisco will understand that a so-called "man-made natural disaster" may be God's way of permitting Evil in the attainment of a greater Good!
I thought that a Korean martial art.
This was pretty much a thousand years before there were any Incas.
The coast of northern Chile and southern Peru has been extreme desert as long as people have lived there, in fact the most extreme desert on earth. Agriculture has never been possible except with irrigation.
The article is pretty incoherent, but it appears the natural ecosystem of trees that held the water and soil from regular flooding got buggered up. Presumably the soil washed away.
OK, then substitute sacred, all-knowing indigenous peoples living in peace and harmony with Nature in Paradise before the sacred, all-knowing Incas living in peace and harmony with Nature in Paradise.
Say, that's the same rough time frame for the collapse of the Anasazi and the classic Mayan civilizations too. Were they all bad farmers then? /s
The Ica Desert of Peru was once the thriving seafloor of an ancient ocean. Today, it’s one of the driest places on the planet and among the best fossil-hunting grounds ever found. Gregory Dicum, a travel writer from San Francisco, hiked for two days with a local guide to discover preserved giant shark teeth, fields littered with fossils, and seashells from creatures long extinct. At one place, standing in a remote desert gully, Dicum and his guide walked up on a pod of fossilized whales—skulls, fins, ribs, vertebrae, baleen, and skin preserved through the eons under shifting Peruvian sands.
3m-long fossilised skull of the creature was discovered by researchers in southern Peru in 2008
I found some other stories about this place and history.
Scientists write that the place was really agriculturally rich between 100BC and 400AD (especially after 100AD), but an El Nino event trashed the place with a massive flood at or before 500AD, ruining irrigation systems and forests.
They write that human deforestation made the place much more vulnerable to flood damage (but obviously didn’t cause the flood).
To: SunkenCiv
I found some other stories about this place and history.
Scientists write that the place was really agriculturally rich between 100BC and 400AD (especially after 100AD), but an El Nino event trashed the place with a massive flood at or before 500AD, ruining irrigation systems and forests.
..........
On this there was one haltingly sad story that showed up five to ten years ago in National Geographic or Archaeological Digest. Archaeologists found the bodies of hundreds of high caste people on the top of a pyramid in Peru that dated to about 500 AD. They all had their heads bashed in and their throats cut. The events date to a large el nino and the manner of their deaths suggests they were sacrificed.
One can see the locals endlessly bashing in the heads of their nobles in a desperate attempt to stop the rains.
I hear that the use of goats has been very hard on the lands of the middle east and north africa. Experiments have been done fencing off areas of scrub land so they cannot be grazed and they have become renewed with vegetation.
One can see the locals Liberals endlessly bashing in the heads of their nobles people in a desperate attempt to stop the rains climate change.
Did American farmers cause the Dust Bowl?
That was Mother Nature.
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