Salt of the Earth - Krugman flays Shrub on the environment

Salt of the Earth
By PAUL KRUGMAN


Since we're stuck in Iraq indefinitely, we may as well try to learn something. But I suspect that our current leaders won't be receptive to the most important lesson of the land where cities and writing were invented: that manmade environmental damage can destroy a civilization.

When archaeologists excavated the cities of ancient Mesopotamia, they were amazed not just by what they found but by where they found it: in the middle of an unpopulated desert. In "Ur of the Chaldees," Leonard Woolley asked: "Why, if Ur was an empire's capital, if Sumer was once a vast granary, has the population dwindled to nothing, the very soil lost its virtue?"

The answer — the reason "the very soil lost its virtue" — is that heavy irrigation in a hot, dry climate leads to a gradual accumulation of salt in the soil. Rising salinity first forced the Sumerians to switch from wheat to barley, which can tolerate more salt; by about 1800 B.C. even barley could no longer be grown in southern Iraq, and Sumerian civilization collapsed. Later "salinity crises" took place further north. In the 19th century, when Europeans began to visit Iraq, it probably had a population less than a tenth the size of the one in the age of Gilgamesh.

Modern civilization's impact on the environment is, of course, far greater than anything the ancients could manage. We can do more damage in a decade than our ancestors could inflict in centuries...

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/08/opinion/08KRUG.html

Bush actually beleives that bullshit about the Rapture coming to take him and his fellow Christians to meet Jesus in the air.

That's why he doesn't care about the environmental damage he has done.