Trees!

This is coolbert:

Without question military actions have a marked impact on the environment.

One area where this impact can be best seen is in the area of the Mediterranean.

Many of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean are today what can best be described as barren landscapes. Turkey [Anatolia], the Levant [Syria, Lebanon, Israel], the areas of North Africa, Greece, the various Mediterranean islands such as Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and to a lesser extent Italy and Spain, are only sparsely wooded. This was not always the case. In prehistoric times the entire area including the mountainous areas of North Africa was wooded and supported an abundance of animal life. Thousands of years of human habitation have reduced this forested area so that in many areas where once was forest is now what is called garrigue or maquis:

"Small bushes - lavender and sage, rosemary, thyme and heather. [this is the garrigue] The maquis, with oleander and broom, gorse, mytrle, laurel, arbustus and rock-rose." From "The First Eden".

In forested areas, an area covered with vegetation of this type is sometimes called "wasteland", a non-productive vegetative covering. What is now, however, was not in the past.

And the destruction of the entire Mediterranean eco-system from pre-historic times is strongly related to the ravages of war.

Primarily the cutting down of the ancient forests for the building of ships for navies. And the cutting down of the forests to provide fuel for armies and the timbers used in sapping and mining. This has been touched upon in previous blogs.

In his book, "The First Eden", the naturalist David Attenborough remarks about the impact of war and how the leveling of the forests had a lasting and debilitating effect on the lands of the Mediterranean.

"The felling had begun long before, in the Greek times. Plato, in the fourth century B.C., had vividly described it's progress on the hills around Athens. 'What now remains, compared with what existed', he wrote, 'is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth wasted away and only the bare framework of the land being left.'"

"So most importantly, were ships. When states went to war, entire forests were devastated to provide the armies with vehicles and the navies with ships."

"Every one of these devices demanded huge quantities of timber for it's construction, and the great armies needed tons of wood for their fires. So the inauguration of a siege meant inevitably that all the trees for miles around would be felled."

"the Arsenal [of Venice] had to be kept supplied at all costs . . . Officials of the Arsenal scoured the Venetian territories on the Italian mainland in search of trees. They identified the few individual trees standing outside the forests that were big enough to provide the size of timber needed and marked them as property of the State."

"The flagship of the Christian fleet was a galley, the El Real. We know exactly how much timber was needed for her construction because recently an exact replica has been built. Fifty beech trees were required for her oars, three hundred pines and firs for her planks and spars, and over three hundred mature oaks for the timbers of her hull. Altogether the fleets that fought that day [Lepanto] had necessitated the felling of over a quarter of a million mature trees."

Once the trees were gone from the area, the soil became depleted, the agriculture suffered, and goats became a mainstay of pastoralists, goats that further weakened the soil and prevented further regrowth of the forests that had been cut.

War had such a severe impact on the forests of the Mediterranean area that they have not recovered and probably never will recover to the prehistoric environment.

War not only kills people, it can destroy the environment.

[Personal comment. In the early days of the United States, wood from live oak trees was much sought after for naval shipbuilding. And tall straight trees, very mature, were also highly sought after as masts. Now, I have read that when a rebuilding operation for the U.S.S Constitution was begun, the U.S. Navy had a supply of old growth timbers harvested decades before lying on the bottom of some pond that preserved the wood all that time [decades]. If and when the navy needed the timbers, which could no longer be harvested in such size in the wild, the timbers were waiting on the bottom of this pond. There must be something to this story, as it has become very fashionable nowadays to harvest from the bottom of rivers old growth trees that were harvested a century ago and sank to the bottom of a river during the trip to a sawmill. These trees are highly sought after as they have not rotted, being preserved to a large extent by the water itself, and possess a tightness of grain that cannot be found in modern harvested timber!].

coolbert.