Blog entry number #3 Thoughts and reflections on: The Cadillac Desert

Katie Taylor, Period 6                                                                                       September 25, 2013

Thoughts and Reflections on: The Cadilac Desert

by: Mark Reisney 

Every civilization has obstacles it must either over come or be destroyed by. Mesopotamia was in the fertile crescent meaning it was an oasis in the desert, but despite its locations there was still less than desired rain fall per year.

They able to over come this obstacle by constructing aqueducts and canals to help with irrigation. Once they had ways to store water they were able to grow more crops. One of Mesopotamia's other main obstacle was lack of metals, but this civilization over came this by trading. Due to irrigation it produced more than enough food for it self, so it had plenty to trade. It had such an abundance of food they were able to trade great quantities of it for valuable metals. Mesopotamia also had the problem of having there water have such a high salinity, but this did not limit the people.To get around the effects of the water's high salinity they grew more barley instead of relying on wheat, because barley was a more salt-tolerant crop. Barley was not effected by the salinity of the water, so it grew well and the salinity of the water was no longer as big of a limitation. As you can see Mesopotamia's environment presented many obstacles, but it was able to get around those environmental limitations and was a great civilization of the ancient times.   

Digital Scrapbook entry #2 -Agrarian Era

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/09/business/eco-singapore-vertical-farm/index.html

http://www.softschools.com/facts/wonders_of_the_world/hanging_gardens_of_babylon_facts/67/

In the agrarian era sometime around the 600 BC king Nebakanezer II is said to have built a spectacular hanging garden for his wife. Although no archeological evidence is left of these gardens they are believed to have existed due to many written accounts. Some say that the gardens were as high as 75 feet, 400 feet wide by 400 feet long and that the walls were more than 80 feet high.

It is said that the plants hung from many terraces creating a breath taking hanging garden that might be difficult to recreate even today. 

In today's modern world a group of environmental scientists are trying to creat something every similar to Nebaknezer's hanging gardens in the U.S. and have already succeeded in Singapore. They have developed sky farms.

These sky farms work by placing the plants on small terraces above one another inside or outside a skyscraper, creating a vertical farm that uses little land for the goods it produces. There are many designees for these sky farms. Some farms will be soil free hydroponic farms and others like the ones currently in Singapore will be simply soil beds placed on rotating terraces. Scientists in the U.S. are currently waiting for funding, but have designed a sky farm built in a 30 story skyscraper. In the hanging gardens of Babylon nothing as fancy as rotating terraces were used, but they did have a system for making sure the plants all received plenty of sunlight. In the hanging gardens the terraces were not stacked, but arranged on different levels of the ziggurat, similar to one current sky farm design. Sky farms, although obviously more advanced, follow the same idea as the hanging gardens of Babylon giving precent day farmers and interesting link to ancient history of the agrarian era. 

Hunter-gatherer blog post 1

In the hunter-gatherer era, unfortunately a great deal of food went to waste. Groups of hunters would stalk herds of bison and maneuver them toward cliffs. Then the hunters would cause stampedes driving the bison off the cliff and to their gruesome deaths. Hunters stationed below the cliffs would kill any bison who survived the fall. The mass slaughter of entire herds of bison left far more meat than the hunter-gatherers could possibly use, so they took what they could and left the remaining meat to rot or possibly for some scavenging animal to find. The hunter-gatherers were clearly very wasteful killing far more bison than they could use, but sadly this is not unlike modern times. Today in the U.S. alone it is thought that approximately 30-40% of all food goes to waste.

People today, not unlike people of the hunter-gatherer era, are wasteful. All throughout human history, including present times, people have greedily taken more than they could eat. Today the U.S. department of agriculture is striving to change that, but old habits die hard. For thousands of years people have killed more than they could eat and thought nothing of it and sadly this way of thinking is still around today. Perhaps this wasteful way of thinking is a predetermined mind set of humans through out history, but hopfuly this mind set will be somthing we can rid ourselfs of in the near future.