The Aral Sea: 1989 (l) and 2014 (r).

In the early 1960s, the Aral Sea—in between today's Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan—was one of the four largest lakes on the planet. By 2007, it had reduced to ten percent of its former size.

The Aral Sea's name roughly translates to “The Sea of Islands,” a reference to, shockingly enough, its many islands. It played a vital part in the region's history, economy, and culture, as well as feeding much of the region with rich fisheries. And then, in the early 60s that started to change.

The Soviet Union began a series of projects in the region. The largest of these was the diversion of the two main rivers that fed the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, for the purposes of agricultural irrigation.

The USSR planned to use the water to turn the region into one of the world's largest cotton exporters, and this actually worked, for a little while. As many of the irrigation canals were poorly constructed, they often lost as much as 75% of the water flowing through them.

And so the Aral Sea began a slow but steady decline in water level. The rate of evaporation increased as more and more water was taken from the rivers for irrigation purposes. The Soviet Union was aware that the lake would disappear. They simply weren’t concerned. As more water evaporated and wasn't replaced, the salinity of the lake steadily increased, by almost 500%.

By 2007, at ten percent of its normal size and split now into two lakes, the North and South Aral, it had a salinity almost three times that of the ocean, killing almost all its natural life. (Though it still wasn't as salty as the Dead Sea.)

The huge plains left as a result of the sea evaporation are coated with salt and toxic chemicals (weapons tests, industry, and agricultural runoff.) These nasty sediments are picked up by the wind and carried great distances, causing cancer and other ailments all over the region. There's so much of the toxic dust that the region now regularly has poisonous dust storms.

Some conservation efforts have slowed the evaporation of the sea. Engineers have begun to repair and strengthen the irrigation canals in order to minimize the losses through them. The northern half, in Kazakhstan, has been dammed off from the southern half, resulting in a rise in sea level in the northern half, with salinity levels dropped to the point where life can survive there again.

There's little hope for the southern half. Uzbekistan has no interest in reducing its irrigation demands, or efficiency, and has instead begun working on exploiting the exposed seabed for oil.

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Quotable

Okay, Yard Ramp Guy — S-omething to quote (in case yours isn’t quotable):

“Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.”

— Kahlil Gibran

Air and water are our two most heavily-used natural resources and, though not as obvious, dirt is number three. What's number four, though?

Surprisingly enough, it's sand.

Endangered?

We’ve used sand for construction since the time of ancient Egypt, if not longer. We utilize certain high-grade sands for glass, with other grades for detergents, toothpaste, cosmetics, solar panels, and computer chips.

The biggest use? Concrete. Essentially, concrete is just sand and gravel bound together by cement.

You might wonder why I'm distinguishing between dirt and sand. They're both just stuff on the ground, right? Well, no. Dirt contains a high degree of biological debris and is great for growing things in. (It often contains sand.) Sand is just ground up bits of minerals, usually quartz.

As common as sand is, turns out that it's also a finite resource. Humans use more than 40 billion tons of sand and gravel every year, and the demand is getting severe enough that riverbeds and beaches all over the world are being emptied out. We can't use desert sand because it's too rounded to bind together well—a result of wind erosion rather than water erosion.

And shortages are beginning to crop up. The absurd construction boom in Dubai has so denuded local sources that they're literally buying and shipping their sand from Australia now.

As local riverbeds, beaches, and quarries run out, sand miners have started to turn to the seafloors, vacuuming up sand from the seabed while dealing marine ecosystems massive amounts of damage.

Alarming ripples.

At least two dozen Indonesian islands are simply gone now due to Singapore's sand requirements (its artificial land construction projects make it the largest sand importer in the world). Environmental damage in the region has gotten so bad that three countries have already banned exports of sand to Singapore.

Construction sand now even has a black market, profitable enough that violent organized crime groups are building up around it.

The environmental damage from the sand trade is immense. This hardly gets any attention in much of the world. After all, it's just sand, and for millennia now we've used “grains of sand” as a metaphor for something countless.

Our sand turns out not to be countless after all.

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Quotable

Ahem, Yard Ramp Guy — T-ry this one on for size:

“Take away the cause, and the effect ceases.”

— Miguel de Cervantes

Younger Dryas...

I've written a good bit about archaeological sites before, including Göbekli Tepe, one of the oldest sites in existence. And it's not a topic I'm likely to exhaust any time soon. Today, I want to share fascinating info about the oldest agricultural site on the planet.

People lived and worked Tell Abu Hureyra—located in present-day Syria, about 75 miles east of Aleppo, between 13,000 and 9,000 years ago. The epoch shows civilization’s clear transition from hunter-gatherer communities to agricultural communities.

Abu Hureyra was home to the earliest known farmers in history. The Tell part of its name refers to the hill over the site; a tell is a large, flat hill composed of collapsed buildings, debris, and household items that piled up over the years the village existed.

Agricultural activity at the site started at the beginning of the Younger Dryas, which is commonly described as the cause of the rise of agriculture. The Younger Dryas was a brief return to the climate of the Ice Age, 13,000 to 11,000 years ago. (That’s brief…in geological term.)

…and Older McCoy

Many scholars believe this period kick-started agriculture. The rapid and prolonged temperature dip of the Younger Dryas rendered the Middle East less capable of supporting hunter-gatherers, forcing them either to migrate southwards or adopt new strategies for acquiring food. And here we’re talking about agriculture.

Abu Hureyra shows this exact pattern. Most of the hunter-gatherers fled early in the Younger Dryas, with the remainder switching to agriculture. It remained inhabited for another 4,500 years after that.

Sadly, Abu Hureya is no longer accessible to anyone. It was drowned underneath Lake Assad following the construction of the Tabqa Dam in 1974. The site had only been excavated for the two years prior to that. And in great haste: archaeologist knew their time was limited.

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Quotable

Okay, Yard Ramp Guy: No complaints from me, but know that my challenge is greater than yours. You try spelling backwards.

“Values are tapes we play on the Walkman of the mind any tune we choose so long as it does not disturb others.”

— Jonathan Sacks

Anabranching: From the Air

If you live on the East Coast, especially in the mid-Atlantic region, you might be familiar with the types of streams you often find there—meandering streams, with high banks full of fine sediment. They tend to erode badly, so stream restoration has become a multi-billion-dollar industry on the East Coast.

Here's the interesting bit: those high-banked streams they're restoring aren't natural.

Prior to European settlement, streams on the East Coast tended to be composed of multiple channels that were divided by islands and wetlands, with fairly low banks (also called anabranching). The wetlands tended to be highly effective carbon sinks. You definitely didn't find the single-channeled meandering streams you do today. So what happened?

In a word? Millponds. Water-powered mills dammed up rivers and streams all across the East Coast. This slowed down the streams and created spots where the sediment could settle out of the water at much greater rates than normal, producing those high stream banks.

A Millpond

Now that we don't use water-powered mills to grind our flour and cut our lumber like we used to, most of those mills have vanished over time. And most of that multi-billion- dollar stream restoration industry? It's just trying to keep the streams and rivers flowing in a manner unnatural to them.

The stream restoration industry players aren't fighting an entirely uphill battle. Some of them are starting to listen to the science. Instead of repairing the eroding streambanks, they're accelerating the process in order to return the streams to their former state.

This approach is not exactly popular yet because it involves bulldozing all the plants and trees that have grown on the stream banks, which isn't very pretty.

There's a more important lesson to take from all this: namely, that we change the world around us in ways we seldom recognize.

Many of our ideas about what nature is come from what we see around us, which is seldom untouched. And nature possesses nearly unstoppable inertia; look at the stream banks eroding now.

Nature had to wait centuries, but she’s still reclaiming her streams on the East Coast. We need to be cautious about where we build and how we alter nature. It’s best to work with her. In the long run, working against nature is seldom a winning strategy.

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Quotable

Yep, Yard Ramp Guy: Backwards we continue with the alphabet quote-off:

“Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.”

— Seth Godin

Yep. That works.

Quick quiz: What's the most important resource for civilization? Let’s exclude water, which is, far and away, the most important (and would, ahem, leave me without the topic I chose to write about this week).

You’ll be tempted to say oil, but that's not even close. Nor is metal.

The correct answer? Dirt.

“Yes,” you’ll say, “dirt is literally everywhere. It's what the ground is made of, for Pete's sake. How can something so common be that important? I mean, yeah, we need it to grow all of our food, but it's not like we're going to run out anytime soon.”

Unfortunately, I've got some bad news for you but, naturally we'll first need to go back in time.

During the Roman Republic, the fields of Italy were famed for their fertility and were a big part of Rome's early conquests. And during the Roman Empire? All of the grain was shipped from the fertile fields along the Nile via the Port of Alexandria. In time, the fields of Italy were no longer capable of supporting the population of Rome; the soils had been exhausted of nutrients, with much of the topsoil stripped away.

Let's travel even further back to ancient Mesopotamia. The end of Mesopotamia's reign as the center of civilization ended due to the very thing that made it possible: irrigation. Long-term irrigation caused the salinity of the fields to increase until the fields were too salty for crops.

“But,” you’ll say, “we're talking thousands of years, here. Technology's increased to the point where we don't need to worry about that anymore.”

Nope. Doesn't work.

Sorry to be a downer, but we need to worry about it now more than ever.

Soil is fragile stuff that can take decades—sometimes centuries—to form. Our ancestors needed millennia to master agricultural methods that preserved the soil, and we've largely discarded their methods.

Terracing, contour plowing, no-till farming, use of compost and manure: those are no longer in the playbook for most of our farms, especially the largest ones.

Tractors, nitrogen fertilizers, and genetically engineered crops allow us to do an end-run on soil. We can use them to grow crops in even the worst soil, at least for three to four years.

After that? They just move to a new field. That's not sustainable, though. We're already using about 40% of the Earth's surface for agriculture. We can't keep moving fields forever. We're simply eroding away soil faster than it's produced.

This isn't a situation where there's going to be a simple technological solution, in large part due to the fact that this is a technological problem. Instead, we need to concentrate on careful husbandry of the land, especially encouraging small farms that use sound long-term strategies.

Thankfully, this is starting to happen, but it's got a long, long way to go. Every single civilization that's neglected its dirt has suffered for it. We've neglected ours for far too long.

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Quotable

Dear Yard Ramp Guy: Onward, reverse-alphabetically. In the meantime, you B most excellent.

“Years later, people look back upon their darkest day and say—as Churchill said of London's war years—‘This was our finest hour.' In a tough spot right now? You may be on the very edge of winning.”

— Guy Lynch