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Humans didn't speed up the drying of the Sahara, and in fact they may have delayed it
[...] The practice of early cattle farming, called “pastoralism,” has been blamed by some for the loss of vegetation and the shift from a green Sahara region to a dry desert. A team of scientists from University College London and King’s College London seek to dispel that notion with new climate models that show that the Sahara was destined to be a bone-dry desert regardless of human interaction.
[...] “The possibility that humans could have had a stabilizing influence on the environment has significant implications,” Dr. Chris Brierley of University College London and lead author of the work, said in a statement. “We contest the common narrative that past human-environment interactions must always be one of over-exploitation and degradation. The fact that societies practising ‘pastoralism’ persisted in this region for so long and invested both economically and ideologically in the local landscape, does not support the scenario of over-exploitation.”
The eventual collapse of the “Green Sahara” was caused by a dramatic decline in moisture over many years. Regular monsoons which blanketed the area in water eventually stopped, with less rain and thereby less vegetation to serve as the foundation for the rest of the ecosystem. Humans in the area would have done whatever they could to keep things going smoothly, but the long draughts would have been simply too much to overcome.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by ikanreed on Wednesday October 03 2018, @04:02PM (1 child)
It literally worked for centuries in England before the enclosure acts.
Not sure I buy it, but the leftist narrative about the enclosure acts is that they were based on publicizing a few particularly bad cases, and purposefully designed to hand over public lands to the already rich, and purposefully convert "commoners" who had had freedom to plan their own lives into capitalist workers who depended on the owners of the now large-scale farms.
Again, not sure I buy that, but I also don't know if I buy the notion that commons all over England at the beginning of the 19th century were simultaneously in ecological crisis from overuse, given the way the commons were actually allocated.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Thursday October 04 2018, @01:04AM
From what I understand, the left's narrative about the enclosure acts (or inclosure) is not necessarily wrong, but is way too simplistic.
The strip fields used since medieval times was inefficient, and enclosing land enabled agriculture to feed many more people, while employing fewer. br.
The people who left the land probably became the first factory workers as the industrial revolution happened.