The Lowdermilk expedition, stuck in the mud in Syria Credit 47
Erosion was the key, and its cause was water. To grow food, societies needed to harness rainfall or deploy irrigation. But they failed in both. Rainfall rushed down slopes and carried topsoil into rivers and flushed it into the sea. Or water evaporated in irrigation channels and left behind salts that poisoned the land. Or water wasn’t saved when rain fell and the fields withered. Later Lowdermilk would also point to the role of overgrazing—especially by goats, animals he came to detest—but for the most part the devastation was wrought by water. Human incompetence with water management had destroyed countless societies over the millennia.
Civil war forced the Lowdermilks to flee China in 1927. Walter barely escaped with his life, but his zeal to preserve soil and water was undimmed. With a fellow anti-erosion advocate, Hugh Hammond Bennett, he helped establish the Soil Conservation Service, possibly the world’s first national anti-erosion agency. Bennett became its head. The two men did not get along. In 1938, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace suggested that the soil service could better plan for the future if it better understood soil problems of the past. Embracing the chance to work away from Bennett, Lowdermilk decided to survey soils in Europe, North Africa, and, especially the Middle East. Both Inez and Walter were devoted to their Christian faith. Visiting the Fertile Crescent—the Promised Land of Abraham, from the eastern Mediterranean shore to Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates rivers—was a long-held dream. Now they had the chance to realize it.
Lowdermilk was ready to see what Moses had seen on the hills east of the Jordan River: “a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs that flow out of valleys and hills.” He was ready to see the lush cedar groves of Lebanon, evoked in the Bible as “full of sap” (“His [the Lord’s] countenance is like Lebanon, excellent as the cedars”). He was ready to see Babylon, “fairest of cities,” where the Hanging Gardens had been one of the seven wonders of the ancient world and King Nebuchadnezzar II had built “great canals” that “brought abundant waters to all the people” and erected “magnificent palaces and temples” with “huge cedars from Mount Lebanon” and overlaid with “radiant gold.”
Instead Lowdermilk found an almost treeless waste: exhausted soil, untended ruins, scattered and scrubby vegetation, impoverished goatherds in “poverty, ignorance, and squalor,” “the Hanging Gardens of Babylon now heaps and piles in a salty desolation.” The Fertile Crescent was no longer fertile; the land of milk and honey had neither. Where once the mighty forests of Lebanon had provided wood for ships and cities across the Holy Land, only three small cedar groves remained, the largest with about four hundred trees. Because there were no roads, the family followed oil pipelines across Syria to Baghdad. The biggest city in Mesopotamia, it was a “dirty place,” Lowdermilk thought, “a heap and a pile.” And this was the heir to glorious Babylon! “What a decline in wealth, in buildings, in population, in attainments, in glory!” he wrote in a Soil Conservation Service report on his journey. “Is this the best that mankind can do? Is this our end after 7,000 years of civilization?”
Lowdermilk knew just what had happened. Prosperity in the Fertile Crescent, he said, depended on commanding the waters of its major rivers: the great Tigris and Euphrates in the east, the smaller Jordan and Litani near the Mediterranean. Around 5000 B.C., he said, ancient Mesopotamian societies began to construct canals for irrigation, which promoted agriculture and allowed these societies to flourish. By the days of Nebuchadnezzar, the canal network extended many miles into the dry land. Unfortunately, the rivers came from the mountains and filled with silt as they cut their way downstream. When the fast-moving rivers were channeled into irrigation canals, they lost velocity; the suspended silt precipitated to the bottom of the canals and eventually choked them. Maintaining the network required scraping out the silt. “A standing army of slaves for this task was required to toil without ceasing on this endless removal of silt from the canals,” Lowdermilk explained. These were the Israelites of the Old Testament. Roman and then Byzantine invaders took over but continued to dredge the canals. Then came Arab nomads with their new religion of Islam. “Despising the tilling of the soil and hating trees, the nomads sought to live off herds and off the plunder of settled areas.” As the water infrastructure fell into disuse, levees eroded; floods washed away topsoil. The canals dried up and left salt in the soils that glittered at night. Goats ate what was left. Nobody tried to restore the land—inactivity Lowdermilk attributed to “Moslem fanaticism, with its fatalistic belief that what happens is the ‘will of Allah.’ ”
Modern archaeologists think most of this is wrong. The irrigation systems were built up more slowly than Lowdermilk thought, not reaching their apex until about the birth of Christ. By then erosion was already epidemic. Societies throughout the Fertile Crescent had cut down forests to build cities and, especially, feed the forges that made bronze and iron. Without tree cover, the hills could not retain water; floods destroyed canals downstream. The same biblical peoples who had created the great city of Babylon set in motion its destruction. Islam and goats had little impact. And the failure to restore the land was due not to nomadic peoples but to the wholly sedentary Ottoman Empire, based in faraway Istanbul, which ruled the area from the fifteenth century until the end of the First World War. In its bureaucratic way, the empire extracted wealth from the area while refusing to invest in it. Still, Lowdermilk got one big thing right: the Fertile Crescent had become a desert and a major cause was human incompetence with water.
Escaping from fascism, European Jews had poured into Palestine—more than sixty thousand in 1935 alone. Arab residents reacted angrily to the flood of immigrants. The British government was convinced that the hostility was due, in part, to the region’s lack of resources; the immigrants were exceeding Palestine’s “absorptive capacity” (that is, its carrying capacity). The limit to absorptive capacity was water—British experts argued that regional supplies couldn’t sustain a big influx of immigrants. In this arid, eroded landscape, the supply of well-watered farmland was so small that incoming Jews who used their superior financial resources to acquire it would necessarily create “a considerable landless Arab population.” Zionist groups sent out water testers, who proclaimed that they had found much more water than Britain allowed. London ignored the reports and in 1939 restricted Jewish immigration to fifteen thousand a year.
No! Lowdermilk protested. Britain had it backward! The new Jewish settlements were the only bright spots he had seen in the entire dismal region! In the midst of the desolation were Zionist village cooperatives where jointly owned farms grew newly bred crop varieties that thrived in the dry heat. The farms were investing their profits to buy advanced well-boring equipment and create small industries—carpentry and printing shops, food-processing facilities, factories for building material. Most important to Lowdermilk were the irrigation and soil-retention programs—“the most remarkable” he had encountered “in twenty-four countries.” If the British increased immigration, rather than restricted it, he said, Palestine would be able to support “at least four million Jewish refugees from Europe.”
Lowdermilk’s years at the Soil Conservation Service had been a series of battles with agronomists (“plant men,” he called them) who thought that bad land should be revived mainly by revegetation—covering the soil with a mosaic of ground-hugging plants that would shield it with an absorptive mulch. To Lowdermilk, a proto-Wizard, engineering had to come first. Dams, pumps, and pipelines were needed to divert water from places where it was plentiful to places where it was not. The land that would receive it had to be prepared by reshaping its contours to avoid runoff and erosion. Only then could planting play a role. And all of the work should be on the biggest scale possible—entire regions guided by a precisely hewn plan—rather than working plot by plot, in small-scale endeavors.
Palestine, Lowdermilk proclaimed, offered “a splendid opportunity” for a water-and-power project of
transformative scope. The region’s north had water—almost forty inches of rain per year; the Sea of Galilee, fed by the Jordan River—but little arable land. In the south, 130 miles away, the Negev Desert had arable land but little water—no lakes, less than four inches of rain per year. Redirecting water from north to south, Lowdermilk said, would allow farmers to irrigate more than 300,000 acres of good soil.
The Sea of Galilee drains through the Jordan Valley into the Dead Sea, a salty lake 1,412 feet below sea level. If much of the Sea of Galilee’s water were diverted to the south, other water would need to feed the Dead Sea. An obvious solution: pumping desalinated seawater from the Mediterranean into the Jordan Valley. The water coursing into the deep valley could be used to drive turbines, Lowdermilk said, generating electricity for “well over a million” people. Water and power would be supplemented by a program of range management and reforestation; the project would also extract minerals from the Dead Sea.
The Second World War broke out as Lowdermilk was completing his trip. Swept up in the war effort and beset by health problems, he didn’t publish his ideas about water for the Holy Land until 1944. The book, Palestine: Land of Promise, appeared just as the U.S. public was learning of the plight of German Jews. By an accident of timing, the book offered good news to offset the bad news of the concentration camps. There is “hope in Palestine,” the book declared. In a region of “utter decline,” its Jewish settlements were “one of the most remarkable phenomena of our day.” They proved that with proper technology even ruined land can bloom. “Water was the main problem in ancient times as it is today,” Lowdermilk proclaimed. “But in this machine age we have more perfect instruments for our purposes.” The dams, conduits, “great reservoirs or artificial lakes,” tunnels “boring through mountains” in his Palestine plan—all would demonstrate how “modern engineering” and “scientific agriculture” could “transform waste lands into fields, orchards, and gardens supporting populous and thriving communities.”
Lowdermilk’s ideas had been anticipated years before by Zionist dreamers like Theodore Herzl, Levi Eshkol, Aaron Aaronson, and Simcha Blass. But Palestine: Land of Promise drew widespread support for them in Western nations—the book supposedly lay open on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s desk when he died, in the spring of 1945. Nonetheless, Britain rejected the Lowdermilk plan as too costly and impossible to administer. After becoming a nation, Israel built it. The nation’s leaders believed they had no choice—three-quarters of a million refugees had come to Israel in its first five years. Debates about absorptive capacity had been rendered irrelevant. First came a kind of practice pipeline from Tel Aviv along the Mediterranean coast to the Negev, near the Sinai Peninsula. In 1956 Israel committed to building a Lowdermilk-style, north-to-south project: the National Water Carrier.
The National Water Carrier was and is a Wizardly demonstration of technological prowess. Thousands of workers carved an underground pumping station 250 feet long and 60 feet high at the edge of the Sea of Galilee. Working twenty-four hours a day, its three huge pumps push millions of tons of water almost a thousand feet through the surrounding hills to the newly constructed Jordan Canal. Ten feet deep and forty feet wide and about ten miles long, the canal conducts the water through a series of reservoirs, canals, and pumps into a nine-foot pipe that runs for more than fifty miles to southern Israel, where the water is spread through a specially built irrigation network. The cost was enormous: on a real per-capita basis, the nation spent more on the National Water Carrier than the United States did to build the Panama Canal.
Lowdermilk was invited to its inauguration in 1964. He ended up spending six years in Israel. He was sure that more and greater projects would come. Israeli water technology would transform the Fertile Crescent. Already Israel was talking about using nuclear power to pump water from the Red Sea to replenish the Dead Sea. Monitored by advanced sensors and controlled by computers, a region-wide network of dams, reservoirs, canals, pipelines, desalination plants, and pumping stations would transfer huge quantities of water from areas of surplus to areas of want. The high-tech water web would bind neighboring states together, calming political conflicts.
The Israeli National Water Carrier Credit 48
It didn’t happen that way. Counterforces emerged.
Water in the Garden City
Justus von Liebig’s connection to Israeli sewage-treatment policies is insufficiently appreciated. The great chemist became famous for portraying agriculture as, at bottom, a process of funneling chemicals—nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and so on—to plants. But Liebig also observed that farmers effectively transferred the applied chemicals to the city in the form of harvested grain, vegetables, and fruit. Urbanites excreted the nutrients, which then accumulated as pollution or were dumped into rivers. To return those chemicals to the soil, Liebig wrote, “all the proprietors of the soil in every great country, should form a society for the establishment of reservoirs where the excreta of men and animals might be collected.”
One of Liebig’s more attentive readers was Karl Marx. Liebig’s shipment of nutrients from country to city, Marx said, amounted to nothing less than a “rift” between people and the land, causing urbanites to live in toxic filth while robbing farm landscapes of their fertility. City and country must become one! Marx said. Agriculture and industry must join to preserve the soil! Marx blamed capitalism for the rift, rather than seeing it as a side effect of industrialization. Nevertheless, he was on to something. His interpretation of Liebig was taken up by writers like the designer-activist William Morris, the anarchist geographer Peter Kropotkin, and the socialist science-fictioneer Edward Bellamy, who in turn passed them to a young English clerk named Ebenezer Howard.
The son of a baker, Howard (no relation to Albert Howard, the organic campaigner) immigrated to the United States, failed as a farmer in Nebraska, and returned to Britain five years after leaving. He became a parliamentary clerk in London and spent his off-hours with anarchists, socialists, and other freethinkers. Gradually Howard became convinced that reknitting the seams between city and country was key to improving the human condition. In 1898 he released To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. It was his first published work. Four years later a revised edition came out under a new title: Garden Cities of To-Morrow.
The To-Morrow books transformed the idea of the city. They were to urban planning what Road to Survival was to environmentalism—a summation and extension of others’ thoughts that created a movement. Like William Vogt, Ebenezer Howard put together a complex of beliefs now so conventional that it is surprising to discover that it had an origin. And, like Vogt, Howard has mostly been forgotten, even by the urban planners whose visual language of open spaces and connectivity was largely his creation.
Distilling Liebig, Marx, and their successors into a few succinct pages, Howard’s books offered concrete plans for integrating urban and rural life, simultaneously preserving and balancing human relationships with society and nature. No longer would the landscape be divided between crowded, dirty, culturally rich cities and the depopulated, lonely, intellectually barren countryside. Instead both would be woven together in a mesh of communities—the garden cities of his title—with green belts between. People could live in open countryside, small towns, or big cities, and all would be close at hand. “Town and country must be married,” he wrote in excited italics, “and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.” Connoisseurs of irony will note that this proto-environmentalist laid the intellectual underpinnings for what his successors would lambaste as “suburban sprawl.”
In Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities, stormwater and wastewater are collected in reservoirs and pumped with windmills into canals that run through the city, where they can be used for fountains, parks, and agriculture. Credit 49
European cities’ water problems, Howard believed, were evidence of an “essential mistake at the very root of our social life.” Accordingly, his garden cities
would use water efficiently, cheaply, and cleanly. They would have three parallel water systems: one for carrying potable water from nearby springs; a second for collecting stormwater and wastewater and pumping them with windmills into reservoirs for reuse by agriculture and public works; and a third for gathering sewage for recycling, as Liebig had wanted. The idea of separate water systems was not new—the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus built a special aqueduct to transport non-potable water for watering gardens and filling a big artificial pond on which he staged mock naval battles for entertainment. Rome’s parallel water network was intended to avoid drawing down the supply of good water for the frivolous purpose of watching fake wars. Taking the idea further, Howard sought to harness wastewater to improve society.
Howard created an association to bring his vision to fruition. It quickly discovered that building brand-new cities was expensive. Moreover, few places had the right combination of idealistic beliefs and platoons of new inhabitants without housing. Among them was Jaffa, on the Mediterranean shore, one of the first destinations for Jews migrating to Palestine. An ancient port, Jaffa had been inhabited for at least seven thousand years. Its long history was manifest in its tangle of dark, narrow streets and open sewers. The newcomers had not come all the way from Europe to live in the squalor of the past. They wanted to create a homeland that was clean and modern, filled with sunlight and healthful air. Zionist leaders in Germany supported this ambition. They sent Garden Cities of To-Morrow.
Half a dozen new Jewish settlements around Jaffa were modeled on Howard’s ideas. Over the years so many Jews moved to them that what had originally been suburban villages swelled into the city of Tel Aviv, which swallowed Jaffa. All the while, other new Jewish settlements were built according to Howard’s precepts. And in 1956, the municipalities that made up greater Tel Aviv committed to recycling wastewater and sewage water, much as Howard had proposed.