OK, I have nothing bad to say about acequias or irrigation. Having grown up with a big orchad at home I enjoyed watching all those water inventions. Not sure about "Moorish". More like "muslim era" heritage?
"Making life possible in one of Europe's driest regions" is misleading though.
Eastwards Sierra Nevada you find Almería, where all the Spaghetti Westerns were filmed. It's indeed a desertic zone, just not a very big extension.
The hyperbolic headline somehow implies a scale that's not real. In any other direction from Sierra Nevada, there's plenty of rain, water and woods. That system just provides the same for some villages on the drier zones.
Edit: OK, people disagree... so be it, but before downvoting, why don't you take a look at Google Earth and see for yourself?
You are simply wrong and are touching a sensitive point.
I grew up in Córdoba (which is west from Sierra Nevada). It gets to 49 centigrades in the summer. It’s not officially considered “a desert”… but it will soon. Temperature has been going up and rain went down. Fewer plants survive each summer.
This is a pattern that you see through all the Spanish south. Desertification is a big, visible problem that should not be minimized. I recommend that you apply your own advice to yourself.
New Mexico, one of the beneficaries of the acqueia system, is even more of a "true" desert than Almeria, and yet it would still not be wrong to say that the system helped make life possible here. The population density just before the Spanish arrived was not high, but it was lower than it was since they bought this water management technique to the area.
Just because such a region does not have a city like Madrid or even Albuquerque does not mean that people do not live there, nor that they are not reliant to some extent on acqueias.
Also, Europe is desertifying like crazy due to climate change. Spanish farmers can't get the irrigation water they need, and have to go out of business or move in order to open greehouse farms in other actual desert areas. It's horrible because the planet is becoming so inhospitable that a nearly global desert is what we have to look forward to, if not Venus.
Living in a desert is a great idea. Living in a desert and expecting that everyone can use water as if they live in the northeast or northwest U.S. isn't such a great idea.
There is the opposite problem, which for me is way more serious: The desert growing. In Spain it grows each year in the South East.
But Spain's desert is small compared to Sahara's, that is as big as Europe. Its dunes are as big as buildings, with pictures you can't really grasp the enormity of this dessert. When Sahara grows each year it literally engulfs entire villages.
In Egypt and center of Africa there are cities that were prosperous in the past that were engulfed by dessert and disappeared.
Honestly I would not shed a tear for big parts of the big dessert going away. When solar energy and desalination becomes cheaper I expect Sahara to be one of the most fertile places on Earth.
You can probably preserve the biodiversity freezing eggs and sperm of the creatures that live there. There are not so much. I believe that with pesticides and herbicides we have destroyed way more biodiversity of our world(not the desert but our forest) and nobody has complained.
People living in the desert put in wells like everywhere else that's rural, at least those who can afford it do.
In my experience the desert isn't particularly unsuitable for human occupation. Barren wasteland deserts of endless dunes from the movies like the Sahara are not the normal. Certainly not in the USA.
What I find is the desert tends to be relatively undesirable land so it's very affordable and abundant. This has the effect of selecting for poor residents who want land of their own but can't afford anything better than desert property, and often can't afford to install a well once they've bought the land. What usually happens is their water gets hauled either by themselves or by a commercial service from the nearest city water supply, it's mostly an inconvenience.
Having a system that can directly take atmospheric air and solar energy to produce drinking water on-site for substantially less cost than installing a well would be life-changing for many of these folks. At the very least it would improve their water security since relying on an automobile for your only source of potable water isn't exactly ideal. Presumably one doesn't even need a permit from the county to start extracting water from the air with a device the size of a microwave. This is a huge difference in barrier to entry, especially for the poor.
I'm guessing you have no desert experience based on your comment. I live in the Mojave and it's actually quite nice for most of the year. There's such an abundant aquifer near me that Cadiz, Inc. is embroiled in controversy over plans to bottle and sell its water. [0]
Here's some food for thought: It's often claimed that mosquitoes have killed more than half the people who have ever lived. Guess what isn't a problem in the desert? Mosquitoes. I recently visited northern MN and frankly find my desert land far more suitable to human occupation than that mosquito infested swamp.
Being close to a city isn't sufficient. You still need reliable access to cooling water or else the efficiency is quite bad. Not much water in most deserts, although there are a few with rivers running through.
> where are all the state-sponsored projects to green the Sahara and the Arabian peninsula?
Saudi Arabia actually had a number of projects for this kind of thing, but they were focused on dairy and grain intensive farming propped up by "fossil water" that was either extracted from wells or from oil-fuelled desalinisation. It didn't last long.
This article is about countries bordering on the Sahara using trees to help nurture back desert no good for growing anything back to healthy farm land. There's a notion there of too much sun light preventing growth because it dries out the land and kills off what remains of the soil turning all of it into desert unable to retain any water; UV radiation is not great for microbial life. Using trees to restore water balance and regulate temperatures, seems like it works.
We have similar processes going on in industrial farming in North America and Europe where we have been slowly depleting and giving up on what used to be healthy farm land. E.g. large parts of Spain are very arid but that wasn't always the case. Likewise parts of Italy and France are drying out because of intensive farming. It's less of an issue in more Northern parts of Europe but even there, decades of monoculture have created problems.
The message here is simple: it's a revertible process and it's a relatively quick process that doesn't necessarily involve much more than a bit of pruning, nurturing, and being mindful of the way nature works locally. It seems most of the complexity and cost is related to creating the right incentives, removing bureaucratic obstacles, and educating people a bit. Scaling this up seems like it's worthwhile. In most places where this could work, people have very little left to lose and a lot to gain.
If Africans in the middle of nowhere, far away from modern infrastructure can pull this off in some of the harshest environments in the world with little or no means, others can do that too. E.g. the Mid west and Texas come to mind in the US. Or the plains of Spain, which used to have forest and now looks more like the Sahara.
That's fair; I'm mainly looking at this from a western European perspective. If you're from a more southernly country with large unused deserts... that tends to help.
>Noor spreads across some 12 square miles of desert and requires more than 2,000 acre-feet of scarce desert water each year.
That's the smaller existing project, where is all the water for this project going to come from? You put a big batch of mirrors and or solar panels in the desert, you have to clean them periodically.
"Making life possible in one of Europe's driest regions" is misleading though.
Eastwards Sierra Nevada you find Almería, where all the Spaghetti Westerns were filmed. It's indeed a desertic zone, just not a very big extension.
The hyperbolic headline somehow implies a scale that's not real. In any other direction from Sierra Nevada, there's plenty of rain, water and woods. That system just provides the same for some villages on the drier zones.
Edit: OK, people disagree... so be it, but before downvoting, why don't you take a look at Google Earth and see for yourself?
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