All those mountains in Afghanistan must be an enormouse catchment area for rain. you could do some incredible rain harvestign there i suppose.
malleabis and wagrassman you both say it is crazy to push things on others and it is true and not true.
What interests me so much about Afghanistan is that i have observed here in Spain overgrazing for fear of fires and i want to know if that is a force in other places and i reckon it would probably be, our farming ideas good and bad come from places like china, the plough, the arabs were civilized long before us and their medicine and ideas have an influence in all of the hot countries their
irrigation system and other bits of arab farming are still to be seen in Spain, their irrigation system most famously in th epalace of the alhambra in granada. we elarnt from them and we pass there teaching all over the world. What happens in Spain got to al south america and to the southern states of north america cowboys their get up and al are spainish same saddles same leathers over the riders trousers and the habit of rounding up
cattle on horse back.
What I want to know about Afghanistan is if there are bare soils because of overgrazing that has been driven by fear of fires. if there is desertification for fear of fires there i want corroboration of what i see here and think might cause desertification elsewhere and as this is an american site i thought of afghanistan the same would go for Iraq. i did not think of america because mthey are always havign terrible fires in summer and talk of the benefits of fire i thought of looking for evidence i places that have had the same cultural influences i thought first of the rest of the mediteranean.
We know that though many places are populated by people who know how to farm know more about some bits of farming than others know about, they also suffer from desertification from bad farming methods in other aspects of their proffesion. Time can just bring into play factors that covnince people to take up things that are very beneficial in some ways but that have unexpected side effects, like who used to know that cutting down
trees would lessen rainfall.
The english took bad farming methods that caused loss of good soils and of rainfall and waterways to Kenya. You can read about it in Wangari Matthais autobiography. Farmers everywhere know how to grow stuff but they have learnt some things that are not good for the climate, like to take down trees. They are good at farming in some ways and a disaster in others. In kenya due to our influence, which is not to say our influlnce might not be more positive another day they started to do some thigns that in the long run were unproductive. . You can learn somethings from other cultures and there are others you would rather give the chuck and that would apply to Afghani farming as it does to farming all over the world and we in hte west have developed some terribly bad farming methods recently. partly pushed by greedy or greedy companies and partly becuase we could not see far
enough down the roads we have taken. agri
rose macaskie
