Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Ancient Deforestation

Starting point is 00:00:00 The symbol on the national flag of Lebanon is the cedar tree. The problem is, there aren't many cedar trees in Lebanon anymore. In the ancient world, wood was used as a building material and a source of fuel, and there weren't many alternatives. And as civilizations and empires grew, they had an insatiable demand for wood and agricultural land, which led to the systematic destruction of ancient forests. Learn more about deforestation in the ancient world in this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. This episode is sponsored by What Could Go Right?

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Starting point is 00:01:46 or wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday. The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus, starring Emmy Rossum. Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine,

Starting point is 00:02:11 the line between right and, and wrong begins to blur. Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu original series Furious on July 27th, only on Hulu on Disney Plus. Deforestation has been practiced by humans since before the rise of civilization. Archaeologists believe that Paleolithic peoples actively engaged in deforestation through controlled fires to reduce unwanted tree density, making hunting and gathering easier. Early stone tools provide evidence of hand axes used to fell smaller trees. Neolithic people began to deforest almost as soon as they settled in fertile river valleys to provide irrigation and to create permanent communities along their banks. These people

Starting point is 00:02:55 practice slash and burn farming, purposely burning trees to enhance the soil. The benefits of the process were quickly evident in higher crop yields, but the impacts were short-lived, as the boost in fertility they generated was soon wiped out by the cycle of erosion driven by the lack of trees. When the soil was exhausted, the community just moved to the next forest repeating the cycle. And as long as the tribes were small, this really wasn't a big problem. But as human societies transformed into greater civilizations, these patterns continued, now reinforced by new lumber needs and the construction of city walls. In Mesopotamia, the arid landscape of the southern Tigris-Nufrates River valleys left early city states completely starved of native timber. To build their grand temples

Starting point is 00:03:45 and fleets of riverships, these societies launched massive logging campaigns in the forested highlands to the north. As local wood supplies dwindled, Mesopotamian rulers had to look further away, embarking on long-distance logging expeditions outside their borders. We can see direct evidence of this in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the subject of a previous episode, where the king journeys to the distant mountains of Lebanon specifically to cut down its legendary cedar forest. The commonly cited estimate is that 99.6% of Lebanon's original cedar forest has been lost. As a result of this persistent deforestation, soil erosion choked the river valleys, destabilizing the entire water system. This triggered a severe salinization crisis, lifting toxic salt deposits from deep underground to the surface crust. The white

Starting point is 00:04:37 salt-encrusted soil, eventually crippled Mesopotamian agriculture, turning the cradle of civilization into a barren desert. Further east, the great Indus Valley cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro committed many of the same mistakes as their Mesopotamian counterparts. To build their sprawling urban areas, they stripped the surrounding woodlands bear, consuming vast tracts of lumber, to fuel the mass of kilns that produced millions of water-resistant baked bricks and a flourishing bronze industry. The deforestation destabilized the Indus River Basin triggering severe soil erosion and causing devastating floods that ultimately pushed their civilization to the brink. In a region irregularly battered by seasonal monsoons and torrents of Himalayan snowmelt,

Starting point is 00:05:23 these trees along riverbanks and their deep root systems had acted as a vital natural sponge, observing the shock of annual floods. In their absence, the floods grew increasingly violent and more unpredictable. This escalating chaos sparked desperation, fueling a devotion to early Hindu deities like Indra, the god of storms and thunder, who was desperately implored by the people to tame the raging waters. The Greco-Roman world also faced severe deforestation.

Starting point is 00:05:53 Unlike Egypt or Mesopotamia, Greece was not dependent on a great river system to irrigate their fields. It was a decentralized maritime power. To build its massive fleet of triremes, that projected power across the Mediterranean, they stripped the trees from the hills surrounding the hundreds of Greek city-states. In the ancient Greek world, these city-states were fiercely competitive, so if Athens built a large navy, then Corinth and Thebes would rush to follow suit. The biggest casualty of this ancient arms race were the Greek forests. Finding trees

Starting point is 00:06:27 worthy of building triremes, and the hundreds of powerful long ores that propelled them was extremely difficult. The Aegean world never possessed the massive, resilient timberlands that were found in, say, the Americas. Mediterranean forests were relatively thin, and once they were gone, they didn't easily return. This acute timber scarcity permanently damaged local ecosystems, forcing the Greeks to launch colonization missions across the Mediterranean, in no small part, in search of more trees. We know that the effects of deforestation were well known in Greece, because, their philosophers wrote about it. Plato noted, quote, there are remaining only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be called,

Starting point is 00:07:11 as in the case of small islands, all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away and the mere skeleton of the land being left, end quote. As Rome expanded, their thirst for timber followed them. Like the Greeks, the Romans relied heavily on shipbuilding to project imperial power across the Mediterranean, a body of water that they called the Mayor Nostrum, or Our Sea. But the Roman Empire also had massive timber needs that went far beyond building warships. Romans demanded an unprecedented amount of constant fuel to feed the great public bathhouses that dotted every corner of the empire.

Starting point is 00:07:50 These sprawling complexes were energy black holes, powered by massive wood-burning furnaces, operating directly beneath the bathhouse floors, running continuously. In addition to the typical effects of deforestation, Roman deforestation unleashed a cycle of death from mosquito-borne illnesses as marshland expanded amid coastal erosion. By stripping the Italian hillsides of their trees, the Romans destroyed the Earth's ability to absorb water, just as it had in so many other places. Severe soil erosion would choke local river deltas such as the Tiber, transforming former fertile valleys into stagnant, sunlit swamps, such as the Pontine Marshes, which were located along the coast, southeast of the city of Rome. These human-made landscapes became the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes. When the highly lethal malaria parasite arrived from Africa, these artificial swamps turned a regional

Starting point is 00:08:47 nuisance into a centuries-long nightmare. The resulting epidemics rendered vast parts of rural Italy completely uninhabitable, crippling some parts of Roman agriculture, altering its labor force, and leaving a permanent scar on the empire. During the reign of Emperor Nero, an agriculturalist named Colomella warned of the dangers. He said, quote, and neither should there be any marshland near the buildings, for the former throws off a baneful stench in hot weather

Starting point is 00:09:16 and breeds insects armed with annoying stings, which attack us in dense swarms, whereby hidden diseases are often contracted, the causes of which even physicians cannot understand. End quote. Despite their wisdom, science, and innovation, the Greeks and Romans still fell prey to the damaging effects of deforestation. But perhaps the civilization most dramatically impacted by deforestation were the Maya. The Maya, which was a conglomerate of city-states in Mexico and Central America,

Starting point is 00:09:50 unintentionally inflicted severe damage on their civilization because of deforestation. Maya deforestation was largely driven by an unlikely culprit. Their monumental architecture building. Every rival city-state across the Mayan world constructed massive pyramids and sprawling plazas. To preserve these sacred ceremonial buildings, the Maya encased them in a thick protective layer of stucco. But producing this material came at a staggering ecological cost.

Starting point is 00:10:20 To create the lime plaster, the Maya had to burn raw limestone at temperatures exceeding 800 degrees Celsius or 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Generating that intense prolonged heat required an incredible amount of wood. When the Mayan civilization first began, their environment was a dense, unbroken tropical rainforest. Villages were entirely shaded by massive tree canopies,

Starting point is 00:10:46 with farmlands carefully carved out on the edges of the jungle. But as the architectural arms race intensified in the Mayan world, the trees began to vanish. Historian and biologist Jared Diamond described the impacts of the Mayan deforestation in his book, Collapse. He wrote, quote, Calculation suggests that most of those felled pine trees were being burned for fuel, while the rest were used for construction or making plaster. At other Maya sites from the pre-classic era where the Maya went overboard in lavish use of thick plaster on buildings,

Starting point is 00:11:20 plaster production may have been a major cause of deforestation. Besides causing sediment accumulation in the valleys and depriving valley inhabitants of wood supplies, that deforestation may have begun to cause a man-made drought in the valley bottom, because forests play a major role in water cycling, such that massive deforestation tends to result in lowered rainfall. End quote. The ecological fallout of this plaster-driven deforestation had drastic consequences for the entire region. The Maya engaged in such widespread clear-cutting that Diamond and other scientists argue that they actively transformed their entire ecosystem.

Starting point is 00:12:01 Trees play a vital stabilizing role in regulating the water cycle, and when that defensive canopy of the forest is compromised, the environmental feedback loop turns disastrous. Stripping the forest didn't just suppress rainfall. The naked landscape absorbed massive amounts of surface heat, rapidly baking and drying out tropical soil. That desiccated soil became entirely vulnerable to severe erosion. While it was completely unintentional, the Maya's desperate need to fuel their ceremonial architecture triggered a catastrophic ecological collapse. This man-made crisis fundamentally broke the southern lowlands, facilitating the end of the classical Maya era, and permanently shifting the center of Maya urban civilization hundreds of miles to the north to the arid plains of the Yucatan Peninsula, Peninsula, giving rise to legendary new cities like Chichen Itza. Under the weight of agricultural and social collapse, the Mayan kings, who had practiced the

Starting point is 00:13:02 principle of divine right, lost their divine sovereignty. When the rains failed year after year, and the rulers proved utterly powerless to produce the vital agricultural surpluses needed to feed their people, the social contract fell apart. Desperate starving people turned on their elites, triggering a wave of violent revolt and civil unrest that resulted in the collapse of the Mayan world in the 10th century. Perhaps the most famous example of human-induced deforestation and its dramatic effects is the tragedy that unfolded on Easter Island. When the Polynesians first settled the island in the 13th century, the island was lush

Starting point is 00:13:39 with palm trees. Once they settled, they launched a rapid campaign of deforestation, stripping the land of its giant palm trees. It was an ecological disaster that induced widespread soil erosion, exacerbated by the intensity of ocean winds. To make matters worse, the Polynesians also introduced rats, which ate the palm seeds, which prevented natural reforestation. Wood, in many ways, was the ancient equivalent of what oil is to the modern world. It supplied energy, tools, ships, buildings, and farmland. Because wood performed many of the rolls later filled by coal, petroleum, steel, concrete, and plastics, ancient, economies were deeply dependent upon it. States could postpone local limits by importing timber

Starting point is 00:14:25 or conquering new territory, but they could never escape the dependence. Deforestation wasn't the sole cause of the collapse of most ancient civilizations, but it was certainly a major contributing factor in many of them. The thirst for the one commodity that was used for almost everything had unforeseen and devastating consequences. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. Research in writing for this episode was provided by Joel Hermanson. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon.

Starting point is 00:15:05 Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord, as this is where everything happens outside of the podcast. As always, if you leave a review on any of the major podcast apps, you too can have it run in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Ancient Deforestation

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