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of the Empire seem puny by comparison.
But did they last long? The Romans
needed lumber for ships, cooking, fur–
niture and for heating the public baths.
Those trees, which could possibly have
been ranked with the Redwoods of Cal–
ifornia, were not left to be admired by
people of later generations; they were
more use'ful as lumber and fuewood.
Not a single one remains!
"What a Man Sows, He Reaps"
The Meaning for Us
The effect upon North Africa was
disastrous. With the destruction of trees
on the Atlas Mountains, the rains began
to wash off topsoil from the slopes.
Away from the mountains, much of the
timber was cut clown to make room for
the cereal crops for which North Africa
became famous. (Whereas in earlier
times the Romans practiced excellent
agrículture -
they understood the
importance of having varied animals on
farms, the use of legumes, proper crop
rotations and the value of verdant
pastures - in the later Empire many of
the sounder principies were neglected.)
Farming finally degenerated under
the later Empire to a kind of monocul–
ture system. Yields began to decline and
much of the topsoil became exhausted.
This, together with large-scale defores–
tation, left the soil exposed to the merey
of the weather. The desert, which exist–
ed along the southern bordees of the
fertile areas, began to creep northward.
Lands which were once used for crops
became poor pasturage for cattle. But
soon even the cattle gave way to sheep
and goat grazing.
As Professor Ellsworth Huntington
has written: "Sheep and goats eat not
only grass, but seed ling trees, and thus
prevent the growth of new forests.
Where they pasture in abundance the
soil is badly trampled, and is no longer
held in place
by
roots. Hence it is
washed away by the winter rain, leaving
the hillsides barren and ruining the
fields in the lowlands"
(The Fall of
Rome,
ed. Chalmers, p. 58).
And what do we
see
toda
y?
"Large areas of the 'granary of Rome'
in northwestern Afríca
are
1101/J
a desic–
cated wilderness.
The great amphi–
theatre at El Djem (in Tunisia), with
THE
DESERTS
OF
AFRICA
seats for
60,000
people,
stands in the
desert
surrounded
by
a few small Arab
villages. The important city of Timgad
has been abandoned since about
250
A.D., while beside it is the clearly
marked channel of a now vanished
river" (Murphy,
A.rso. Amer. Geog.
vol.
XLI,
no.
2,
p.
120).
"The Romans had at least
2,500,000
acres
OF WHAT IS Now
FULL DESERT
colonized and under cultivation in
South Algeria alone" (Wellard,
The
Great Sahara,
p. 85). In fact, Colonel
Baradez of the French Air Force, who
spent the years 1946 to 1949 aerially
surveying the desert of South Algeria,
found in the desert remains of roads,
forts, castles, observation posts and irri–
gation ditd1es along a frontier
1500
miles long. And with his aerial photo–
graphs he was able to identify the
ancient sites of
h11ndreds of villages and
fa,·ming communities where today there
i.r
nothing
b11t
desert and eroded rocks.
There are so many ruined areas to be
seen, that Wellard estimates it will take
SAHARA
AFRICA
KAlAHARI
historians and archaeologists hundreds
of years to investigate them all.
North Africa, a place to be envied in
the Roman wodd, now has the desert
covering half of it - not necessarily
shifting sand dunes, but nevertheless
DESERT!
And what is saddening is the
fact that most of this encroachment by
the desert was caused
by
man himself.
The Romans began to disturb na–
ture's ecological balance with their
killing of animals, felling the huge for–
ests
and adopting ruinous farming tech–
niques. True, the later invasions of the
Vandals, the Byzantines and especially
those of Islam played their part in the
deterioration of North Africa, but Rome
itself began the trend.
It is disturbing to realize that man
never seems to learn his lesson until it's
too late. The late Romans, no doubt,
were sorry about the irreversible damage
their ancestors had done to North
Africa and tried desperately to stem the
tide of disaster that was facing them.
They built aqueducts to bring water