for - progress trap - example - from history - Sumerian civilization

progress trap - example - from history - Sumerian civilization - the really big progress traps uh come with with the invention of agriculture and - i mentioned the first full-blown civilization in the old world the sumerians who perfected the art of irrigation in what is now southern iraq and - for for several centuries everything went really well - They had built canals and ran the water onto the desert and were able to - raise more and more crops and - expand their farmland and - expand their population and - their cities got bigger - their numbers got greater but - what they didn't know is that the kind of irrigation they were practicing - was causing the land to get saltier and saltier - and after a number of centuries they suddenly saw their farm meals declining because of salinity - and they had to switch to crops that could tolerate more salt - and then eventually they ended up producing only about one quarter of the food that they'd been able to produce when they started -and the civilization collapsed - So they had walked into what i call in my book a progress trap - and this is where the myth of progress is so seductive - You do something that in the short run produces obvious benefits so you're getting this positive feedback from some new invention, whether it's - a new way to drive mammoth over a cliff or - it's a new way to expand your farm base through irrigation - but there's a hidden cost down the road which is often hard to foresee

Progress traps through history: * 1. Sumerian civilization (Iraq) irrigation system turned fields into salty desert * Greek and Roman empire - chronic soil erosion also eroded these empires * Classic Mayan empire may have collapsed due to the last 2 of 7 megadroughts because it was over-urbanized and used up all water sources, leaving no buffer in case of drought: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/new-clues-about-how-and-why-the-maya-culture-collapsed/