"[...] Nabhan has traveled to the Sahara, the Gobi, Pamir, and other deserts, to learn how farmers manage not just to survive, but to thrive. In the Turpan Basin of western China, for example, where it rains less than an inch a year, farmers have built tunnels, some eight miles long and 60 feet deep, that channel the flow of groundwater moving down from the mountains. They’ve developed heat-tolerant varieties of grapes, grain, and apricots. Grape trellises shade the walkways of the city. This gravity-fed system waters 50,000 acres of farmland and supports 250,000 people. Others have noted that we’re not the first to deal with water shortages. There are all sorts of old technologies for sucking the moisture from a dry land [...] Often, however, we look for technologies that let us keep farming the same way as always — just sucking harder, not smarter. Sometimes, as Tom Laskawy has noted here, that just sucks. But, if we are flexible and creative, our technologies for a hotter future won’t have to look like those used by the inhabitants of Dune. Nabhan has collected dozens of techniques, some familiar, some arcane: Waffle gardens, fog harvesting, olla pottery irrigation, catchments, fortifying soil, eliminating tillage. He has a penchant for mystics and traditional knowledge. As we adapt to a warming world, we’ll probably also need new technology. But there’s a tendency to strive for exciting, moonshot technologies when there are simpler, proven innovations all around. Nabhan offers a nice reminder that, as we move forward, it’s sometimes useful to look back."
Posted on: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 23:20:03 +0000
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