Colorado-Valley wrote:But how many of those people are eating food created by heavy diesel machinery and the input of countless tons of petroleum-made fertilizers and pesticides?
I recently watched a documentary about a desertified city in north-central Africa - I think it was Timbuktu - that can no longer feed itself because sand dunes have swept over what used to be its forests and farmland.
The food comes to the city everyday in river ships filled with sacks of U.S. grain. To eat, the people are dependent on food raised a half a planet away, grown by diesel tractors and then shipped by diesel all the way to the interior of Africa.
These people are going to have problems ...
Timbuktu has always fascinated me for some reason, it is one of the oldest cities on Earth and has survived all sorts of upheaval in its long existence.
Now it is back in the news again because there is fighting going on there.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/2 ... 73109.html
SEVARE, Mali -- Timbuktu, the fabled desert city where retreating Muslim extremists destroyed ancient manuscripts, was a center of Islamic learning hundreds of years before Columbus landed in the Americas.
It is not known how many of the priceless documents were destroyed by al Qaida-linked fighters who set ablaze a state-of-the-art library built with South African funding to conserve the brittle, camel-hide bound manuscripts from the harshness of the Sahara Desert climate and preserve them so researchers can study them.
News of the destruction came Monday from the mayor of Timbuktu. With its Islamic treasures and centuries-old mud-walled buildings including an iconic mosque, Timbuktu is a U.N.-designated World Heritage Site.
The damage caused by the fleeing Islamists was limited, but irreplaceable treasures were lost.
Most of the manuscripts, which are as many as 900 years old, were gathered between the 1980s and 2000 from all over Mali for the Ahmed Baba Institute for Higher Learning and Islamic Research, which moved into its new home in 2009.
The library held about 30,000 manuscripts of which only about one third had been catalogued, according to its Web site. The world may never know what it has lost.
The manuscripts cover subjects ranging from science, astrology and medicine to history, theology, grammar and geography. All are in Arabic script, in the Arabic language and African languages.
They date back to the late 12th century, the start of a 300-year golden age for Timbuktu as a spiritual and intellectual capital for the propagation of Islam on the continent.
Michael Covitt, chairman of the Malian Manuscript Foundation, called them "the most important find since the Dead Sea Scrolls."
These writings are the common heritage of all of humanity, it is a tragedy and a crime that anyone would destroy them.
http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/201 ... hind-them/
(Librarian Aboubakar Yaro examines an Islamic manuscript from the 17th century at the Djenne Library of Manuscipts, in Djenne, September 1, 2012. Librarians from the northern Malian town of Timbuktu–besieged since April by Al-Qaeda linked Islamists–are urging the digitization of Djenne’s manuscripts. Picture taken September 1, 2012. REUTERS/Joe Penney )
The burning of a library housing thousands of ancient manuscripts in Mali’s desert city of Timbuktu is just the latest act of destruction by Islamist fighters who have spent months smashing graves and holy shrines in the World Heritage site.
The United Nations cultural body UNESCO said it was trying to find out the precise damage done to the Ahmed Baba Institute, a modern building that contains priceless documents dating back to the 13th century.
The manuscripts are “uniquely valuable and testify to a long tradition of learning and cultural exchange,” said UNESCO spokesman Roni Amelan. “So we are horrified.”
But if they are horrified, historians and religious scholars are unlikely to have been surprised by this gesture of defiance by Islamist rebels fleeing the ancient trading post on the threshold of the Sahara as French and Malian troops moved in.
“It was one of the greatest libraries of Islamic manuscripts in the world,” said Marie Rodet, an African history lecturer at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
“It’s pure retaliation. They knew they were losing the battle and they hit where it really hurts,” she told Reuters.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/01/29 ... -timbuktu/
"The Malian military is in control of Timbuktu," Modibo Traore told The Associated Press on Tuesday morning.
The French military operation began more than two weeks ago and has so far met little resistance though experts warn it will be harder to hold on to the towns than it was to recapture them from the Islamists.
Photos released by the French military showed throngs of jubilant residents greeting the arrival of troops in the town, where Islamists whipped women for going outside without veils and amputated the hand of a suspected thief.
This story reminds me of the stories we got out of Kabul, Afghanistan in 2003 showing men getting their beards trimmed or shaved off after the Taliban was driven out of the city. How long will the peace and happiness last?
Just that he was the most prominent of five proponents of this story which seems to come from a common source.