Why is the Fertile Crescent all that fertile anymore? In fact...

Lebanon is also famous for it's cedar forests

SALTED.com

Salination of the soil due to flood plains
War destroying irrigation canals
Mini ice age and climate change nowadays
Muslims trying to make pasture for their tribes herd/killing the Copts and Chaldeans who farmed
Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt used scorched earth when he realised he was losing

No shit. That's obviously not the point of the OP, you braindead retard.

In modern times, one of the big reasons for the areas getting drier is the fact that the Iraqi government has been attempting to revive its agriculture for a number of years, but to do that they had to divert some of the water in the rivers from the marshes it naturally flowed to places in need of irrigation. This lead to lots more salinity in the soil, which leads to its degradation.

Keep in mind that, although the area is drier than it once was, it still wasn't all the green to begin with. Mesopotamia was always two rivers with lush green strips of land adjacent to them and the area between the two rivers being mostly desert. Same with Egypt, all of its major cities were built either next to, or very close to, the Nile.

The lushness of these places might not be as expansive as it once was, but its erosion isn't as severe as some people make it out to be. I

It was called the FC 5000 years ago retard.

were those rivers really THAT big of a deal? why were places like persia and italy seen as less valuable despite having way more arable lands?

SyriaAnon here. If you ask any old person here or even your parents they would say that syria was way mkre green and lush than it is now.. Apparently the goverment cut down massive swaths of forests and burned down double that to make room for farmland. When fires broke out in forests the goverment mostly ignored them since they weren't properly equipped. Also farmers diverted rivers to irrigate their lands increasing saltiness and making them unusable.i can name hundreds of shitty agricultural policies but you get the picture. Global warming didn't help either. Farmers illegaly dug wells where barada originates draining the river and wastefully using the water(barada river some decades ago used to overflow and flood lots of areas in the ghouta needing boats to corss and now you can barely see it rraching Damascus let alone flood anything)
Tl:dr levantines can't into agriculture(I assumw it's the same for other arab countries)Such a shame since the photos my grandparents and parents have shot beautiful landscape that just doesn't exist anymore.truely sad.
The problem is much more recent although that is certainely a factor.

>were those rivers really THAT big of a deal?
Well, yeah. They were pretty much the basis for entire Middle Eastern civilisations.

More sotries: mount qasyoon that overlooks damascus was full of greenery and pine trees but christians over-cut it to get christmans trees and it's judt horrible to look at now.
The goverment neglected the envirmoent so much so that turkey had to come down and put out fires in lattakia govetnate so that they won't spread to them since the goverment wasn'r gonna do anything about them.
Massive increase in population forced us to drain some lakes making them 20 times smaller than what they were before.
Shitty water preservation policies applied by the goverment didn't help.basicallu they used to cut off water 9+hours a day and when we presented this to the arab league they conducted studies which concluded that this leads to 18% more water usage than if the water was on all day long (since syrians would fill up everything they have and just get rid of the extra they had when water comes back again so they can refill with fresh water)
Corruption led to many wild animal preservations being burnt or cut down.

After the Mesopotamians died out and Arabs came the entire place went to shit

Kek

Iraq was never truly "green", but more of the region used to look like pic related (which was taken just recently along the Tigris river). So it's a lot easier to imagine it turning into a desert when you realize that, at its peak, it looked like this - not exactly what you'd see in Europe, East Asia or North America. Think more of a Southern California climate. In addition, countries like Iraq and Syria got absolute booty-blasted just in the last century by grossly incompetent governments, like this user pointed out:
Yes, because of easy mobility. To really get a nice civilization going, you need all the burgeoning towns and villages to have easy communication and trade with each other, so it can blossom into a solid cultural entity. Travel via rafts and river-boats is easier and less time-consuming than foot or horse (or more realistically donkey, since those were more common).

Europe was WAY more fertile and verdant than Mesopotamia or Egypt, and there were plenty of settlements in Europe at around the same time too, but they didn't have any kind of cohesive river culture, so it took them longer to "get the memo".

Attached: northern iraq.jpg (1024x768, 823K)

>they didn't have any kind of cohesive river culture
haha ok

Not on the level of Mesopotamia, Egypt or China. There's a term for those kinds of cultures: river valley civilisation. Like that user said, Europe's lushness is historically a lot more bountiful than these regions, so Europeans didn't have to rely on rivers as much as they did.

Vinca was more advanced than Middle Eastern cultures from the same time period. Europe never developed a culture like that because it was raped by steppe niggers 2500 BC.

Climate change mostly
The Tigris and Euphrates actually used to freeze over in winter, if you had some ice skates you could have some fun with it. The last recorded time that the Tigris froze over was in the 1700s

>We wuz civilised and shit

They developed Minoans and other advanced culture anyway

>Vinca
Who?

sad

No shit. That's obviously not the point of the OP, you braindead retard.

In modern times, one of the big reasons for the areas getting drier is the fact that the Iraqi government has been attempting to revive its agriculture for a number of years, but to do that they had to divert some of the water in the rivers from the marshes it naturally flowed to places in need of irrigation. This lead to lots more salinity in the soil, which leads to its degradation.

It was called the FC 5000 years ago retard.

The problem is much more recent although that is certainely a factor.

Are you salty?

>Europe's lushness is historically a lot more bountiful than China
Only if you equate semi-desert regions like Gansu to the whole country. Even in its overpopulated state the Chinese heartland still has tons of forests and jungles.

Attached: nature-tours-jiuzhaigou-545.jpg (768x545, 284K)

no