Desertification Moving Rapidly In Greece - Ekathimerini

Rising temperatures and dwindling rainfall are leading to water shortages and the increasing desertification of land in Greece, experts warned yesterday ahead of today’s World Day to Combat Desertification.

Already more than a third (35 percent) of Greek land is under immediate threat of desertification (aridity and loss of fecundity, generally caused by a combination of drought and excessive agricultural exploitation), while 49 percent is likely to face that threat in the near future, according to the National Committee to Combat Desertification, set up by the Agriculture Ministry in 1996. The worst-affected regions include Crete and Thessaly, the eastern Peloponnese and certain Aegean islands.

“The intensification of our use of natural resources is exhausting our land,” Costas Cosmas, professor at the Agricultural University of Athens, told Kathimerini. “Intensive agriculture, increasingly deep irrigation works and the excessive use of pesticides are leading to poor land quality, erosion and excessive salt deposits in underground water sources,” Cosmas said. Excessive grazing by farm animals also contributes to land degeneration, he added. He said that these problems could be partially countered through organic farming and linking subsidies to environmentally friendly farming practices.

Meanwhile, international experts attending a seminar on climate change in Athens yesterday warned that the global trend of rising temperatures and dwindling snowfall is showing no signs of abating.

EDIT

http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_100008_17/06/2006_71008

The description of lush forests and amber waves of grain were also present in Sicily during classical Greece/Rome. So also was the same description of North Africa.
Over grazed, over farmed and over populated (then in North Africa). The deforestation of much of southern and central Spain has had the same effect there.
Once a lang has been "lost", I don't know of any succesful historic return to its original state.
Global warming only compounds the product.

is actually an extension of the desertification happening in north africa.

i like to think of it as big desert with an ocean in it.

But it turns out the people there were not to blame for the desertification -- they were merely the victims of it. It turns out that the desertification was due to the warming of the Indian Ocean. That is to say, the desertification is the result of global warming -- and the tremendous humanitarian disaster that resulted is arguably the first major disaster to result from global warming. This according to Tim Flannery in his book The Weather Makers.

"Conquest of the Land through 7000 years"

by W. C. Lowdermilk, published originally in 1953


http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/news/pub/pdf/conquest.pdf

Still pretty good reading, maybe better reading than ever

to drought.

Our own midwest is not doing all that well either.