Desertification

Reader Contribution by Staff
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For about 4 million years, human beings were hunter-gatherers. We couldn’t put much pressure on our habitat because as soon as the food or water ran a little short, we moved on. If we couldn’t find food freely available, our numbers dwindled. Then, just 10,000 years ago, humanity got its agricultural thing going. By some estimates, when agriculture was introduced human population growth rates increased 100-fold. In a geographic area that previously spawned 100 new human inhabitants each year, suddenly there were 10,000 new people every year. The land could accommodate the growth, thanks to agriculture. Studies of population densities from the time indicate that the “carrying capacity” of human habitats also increased by a factor of 100 when agriculture was introduced.

In one way it was a better deal for nature, too. By using a comparatively small space intensively, human beings left more of nature untouched. An agricultural society uses less property, per capita, than a hunting-and-gathering society. A lot less. But as we became attached to particular locales and as our populations, thanks to agriculture, became less vulnerable to variations in the weather, we also invented overgrazing, deforestation, erosion and topsoil depletion.

Desertification is the oldest type of long-term environmental damage we can trace directly to human activities. Biologists and archaeologists read the signs of land abuse and growing deserts in the Middle East dating back to the very earliest years of agriculture 12,000 years ago during the Neolithic Revolution. Almost as soon as humans domesticated their first goats and sheep, it appears we began overgrazing our lands.

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