Between 11,000 and 5,000 years ago, the Sahara was “green.” The Green Sahara, recently studied by Jessica E. Tierney, Francesco S. R. Pausata, and Peter B. deMenocal,* was for northern Africa a time of greater humidity, with an interrupting arid pause about 8,000 years ago. During the green period, rainfall was more abundant than it is today, and Neolithic people inhabited the region. And then as evidence from westernmost Sahara indicates, humid conditions ended to give us the great desert we know today.
Probably most people, and even you, don’t associate vegetation with the Sahara Desert though exceptions like oases and riverine environments, such as that of the Niger River and the Lower Nile, might come to mind. Timbuktu is not a place with lush vegetation today, and its population has dwindled under the same kind of desertification that has taken its toll on plant density in northern Africa over the past 5,000 years.
Landscapes change all the time and have always undergone change. Such change is sometimes slow. You and I are not going to outlive the desert nature of the Sahara. But question not: The land will once again become green. Within our short lifetimes, we can sense that there is some physical stability on the planet all the while we understand that variability is the product of ongoing geomorphological and climate processes. Vast thick sheets of ice no longer cover Canada and northern United States; all that ice has returned as water to the seas.
The change in the landscapes of North America coincided with the greening of the Sahara. Earth runs its own compensation scheme: The Sahara was green, but Canada and northern USA weren’t; then green left the Sahara as North America greened. Take something from here and put it there; circulate the waters of the oceans and the gases of the atmosphere. We could almost convince ourselves that all this change evidences teleology with regard to our planet. But there’s really no proof of a purposed end. Earth changes because, well, it’s Earth, a dynamic planet. We don’t need to struggle to find a purpose. Without offending our belief systems, we can accept that change does occur: it might be purposeless or it might be purposeful. If we want to see a purpose, we have that prerogative. I think it might be better to accept that all change, physical as well as social, is inevitable and that even when we believe the world is static, it isn’t.
I’m wondering whether you, like the continents and their generations of inhabitants, might have undergone either a desertification or a melting, a drying up of resources and a dwindling population of those who once seemed to be friends in abundance or a melting away of what at one time seemed a stable, though frigid, environment. Time and space do that to friendships and, if I may coin, “strangeships.” I’m also wondering whether or not you believe that somehow you or those missing friends are to blame or that somehow some unseen driver is at work against you, changing the landscape of your life with malicious intent.
Neither Green Sahara nor continental glacier lasts, and lands once covered in vegetation can become quite barren just as lands once frozen can become lushly vegetated. Individuals do not experience changes that occur over thousands of years, but generations do. Imagine the Neolithic inhabitants of the Green Sahara, slowly by generations facing a slightly different landscape from that of their ancestors and deciding to move little bit by little bit. They had no choice but to walk toward a new green.
The landscape of friendships always changes on a dynamic planet, but that fact doesn’t prohibit any of us from taking a walk toward a different social environment. Since so many changes are gradual, we usually don’t have to walk far to recapture some semblance of a former, greener world, but we do have to walk.
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/1/e1601503.full “Rainfall regimes of the Green Sahara,” ScienceAdvances 18 Jan 2017: Vol 3, no. 1. E1601503, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1601503
Probably most people, and even you, don’t associate vegetation with the Sahara Desert though exceptions like oases and riverine environments, such as that of the Niger River and the Lower Nile, might come to mind. Timbuktu is not a place with lush vegetation today, and its population has dwindled under the same kind of desertification that has taken its toll on plant density in northern Africa over the past 5,000 years.
Landscapes change all the time and have always undergone change. Such change is sometimes slow. You and I are not going to outlive the desert nature of the Sahara. But question not: The land will once again become green. Within our short lifetimes, we can sense that there is some physical stability on the planet all the while we understand that variability is the product of ongoing geomorphological and climate processes. Vast thick sheets of ice no longer cover Canada and northern United States; all that ice has returned as water to the seas.
The change in the landscapes of North America coincided with the greening of the Sahara. Earth runs its own compensation scheme: The Sahara was green, but Canada and northern USA weren’t; then green left the Sahara as North America greened. Take something from here and put it there; circulate the waters of the oceans and the gases of the atmosphere. We could almost convince ourselves that all this change evidences teleology with regard to our planet. But there’s really no proof of a purposed end. Earth changes because, well, it’s Earth, a dynamic planet. We don’t need to struggle to find a purpose. Without offending our belief systems, we can accept that change does occur: it might be purposeless or it might be purposeful. If we want to see a purpose, we have that prerogative. I think it might be better to accept that all change, physical as well as social, is inevitable and that even when we believe the world is static, it isn’t.
I’m wondering whether you, like the continents and their generations of inhabitants, might have undergone either a desertification or a melting, a drying up of resources and a dwindling population of those who once seemed to be friends in abundance or a melting away of what at one time seemed a stable, though frigid, environment. Time and space do that to friendships and, if I may coin, “strangeships.” I’m also wondering whether or not you believe that somehow you or those missing friends are to blame or that somehow some unseen driver is at work against you, changing the landscape of your life with malicious intent.
Neither Green Sahara nor continental glacier lasts, and lands once covered in vegetation can become quite barren just as lands once frozen can become lushly vegetated. Individuals do not experience changes that occur over thousands of years, but generations do. Imagine the Neolithic inhabitants of the Green Sahara, slowly by generations facing a slightly different landscape from that of their ancestors and deciding to move little bit by little bit. They had no choice but to walk toward a new green.
The landscape of friendships always changes on a dynamic planet, but that fact doesn’t prohibit any of us from taking a walk toward a different social environment. Since so many changes are gradual, we usually don’t have to walk far to recapture some semblance of a former, greener world, but we do have to walk.
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/1/e1601503.full “Rainfall regimes of the Green Sahara,” ScienceAdvances 18 Jan 2017: Vol 3, no. 1. E1601503, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1601503
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