A stark climate warning from the cradle of civilization
In Iraq, fabled Fertile Crescent is turning to dust
ALBU JUMAA, Iraq — Every schoolchild learns the name: Mesopotamia — the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization.
Today, much of that land is turning to dust.
The word itself, Mesopotamia, means the land between rivers. It is where the wheel was invented, irrigation flourished, and the earliest known system of writing emerged. The rivers here, some scholars say, fed the fabled hanging gardens of Babylon and converged at the place described in the Bible as the Garden of Eden.
Now, so little water remains in some villages near the Euphrates River that families are dismantling their homes, brick by brick, piling them into pickup trucks and driving away.
“You would not believe it if I say it now, but this was a watery place,” said Sheikh Adnan al Sahlani, a science teacher here in southern Iraq near Naseriyah, a few miles from the Old Testament city of Ur, which the Bible describes as the hometown of the Prophet Abraham.
These days, “nowhere has water,” he said. Everyone who is left is “suffering a slow death.”
You don’t have to go back to biblical times to find a more verdant Iraq. Well into the 20th century, the southern city of Basra was known as the Venice of the East for its canals, plied by gondolalike boats that threaded through residential neighborhoods.
Indeed, for much of its history, the Fertile Crescent — often defined as including swaths of modern-day Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Iran, the West Bank, and Gaza — did not lack for water, inspiring centuries of artists and writers who depicted the region as a lush ancient land. Spring floods were common, and rice, one of the most water-intensive crops in the world, was grown for more than 2,000 years.
But now, nearly 40 percent of Iraq has been overtaken by blowing desert sands that claim tens of thousands of acres of arable land every year.
Climate change and desertification are to blame, scientists say. So are weak governance and the continued reliance on wasteful irrigation techniques that date back millenniums to Sumerian times.
Another culprit is common to large swaths of the world: a growing population whose water demands continue to rise, both because of sheer numbers and, in many places, higher living standards, increasing individual consumption.
In Iraq, the fallout is everywhere, fraying society, spurring deadly clashes among villages, displacing thousands of people every year, emboldening extremists, and leaving ever-more land looking like a barren moonscape. Depleted, dirty rivers and groundwater are causing outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and hepatitis A. The creeping desert sands are swallowing farmland, forcing people to crowd into cities.
For the rest of the Middle East and some other areas of the world, Iraq and its neighbors offer an unmistakable warning.
“Because of this region’s vulnerabilities, one of the most vulnerable on the planet, it is one of the first places that is going to show some kind of extreme succumbing, literally, to climate change,” said Charles Iceland, director of water security for the World Resource Institute.