It's not something restricted to regions in Romania. Almost all of Eastern Europe is affected at some degree. There are places like [1] in Ukraine or [2] in Central Hungary.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/%D0%A5%D...

[2] https://cdn.nwmgroups.hu/s/img/i/1801/20180108fulophazi-buck...

I always wondered if this happened in the middle east, with essentially the same cause. It seems hard for me to imagine that the "cradle" of civilization began in such an arid place, though it would be quite fitting if civilization transformed it.

1. The whole Sahara + mideast was a lot greener a few thousand years ago due to ice ages et al, not due to soil depletion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period

2. The Euphrates floodplain is still quite green, like the Nile's. It's not like the US midwest where you have thousands of square miles of grass, but you do have a strip of extremely reliably fertile land (and for civilization-building, reliable seasons are super important).

Until 8000 years ago most of the present Persian Gulf was fertile valley. It is a good bet that archaeological sites critically important to understanding the rise of civilization are under it now.

Deforestation is a common cause of desertification worldwide. Trees help to capture moisture from the air and bring it to ground. Cut them down, and the moist air blows past. Trees are commonly cleared for farmland, and then the farmland has to be abandoned when it gets too dry.

In the Amazon basin and along the northwest coast of North America, trees were the basis of productive agriculture, carefully chosen mixes of trees of different sizes and species. To this day the Amazon basin is dominated by tree species that were once cultivated throughout, supporting tens of millions until they were wiped out by smallpox and other pandemics. In North America, such tree gardens can still be found centuries after they were abandoned.

> Deforestation is a common cause of desertification worldwide. Trees help to capture moisture from the air and bring it to ground. Cut them down, and the moist air blows past. Trees are commonly cleared for farmland, and then the farmland has to be abandoned when it gets too dry.

Trees alone do not help. There are a lot of tree farms which do not capture moisture and are prone to forest fires. We need forests with good ecosystems not tree plantations.

Planting trees (particularly the wrong ones) might not help much, but cutting down trees seems to reliably do harm.

From everything I’ve read the Middle East used to be a kind of paradise. Maybe not as lush as Central Europe or Southern Asia but it was not as arid as it is now. The common reason is that early agriculture was not efficient, or understood, and sometime in the Bronze Age an equivalent of the Great Dust Bowl occurred as Early societies basically salted the Earth they depended on (completely on accident.)

Also certain places, e.g, Israel, were actual forests just 10-12,000 years ago.

I believe it had to do with the way they irrigated. They would flood their fields, which would leave sediment from the river as the water evaporated. The sediment contained salt, which slowly accumulated, and made the fields infertile.

the last ice age only ended about 12,000 years ago[0]. The fertile crescent and ancient egypt's golden age was half way from then to today & the climate was a lot cooler overall.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Period

But how does that square with things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period ?

This was thousands of years later (significantly closer to our time than it was to the ancient civilizations of the fertile crescent - remember that the pyramids were older to Cleopatra than she is to us). Climate isn't linear and that was one of several fluctuations, but 5000-6000 years ago it was cooler in that area than today.

I agree with the chronology. But what is your claim on the fertility of the region in classical antiquity? Remember that Egypt was considered a "breadbasket", and the eastern portion was the richer one in general.

I'm not an expert on the matter. I just read about the fertile crescent & how at its peak it wasn't a desert like it is today and that temperatures and sea-level were both lower than today. For example the persian gulf (today underwater) "was an extensive region of river valley and wetlands" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Gulf#History when the ancient civilisation of Sumar developed there.

I have no knowledge about the eastern portion of Egypt (Sinai?) being richer than the western one, afaik the wealth of Egypt was always centered around the nile and nile delta (even today). That's probably what the breadbasket refers to.

I first heard it in Short History of Progress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsPMaGdg_38

Wheat yields progressively fell as salt accumulated in the ground. They switched to barley until that crop failed too.

According to the book, almost all ancient agriculture was unsustainable. If not because of the irrigation, it was because plowing caused too much soil erosion. The only places that could get away with it long-term were Egypt and China, because of the flooding and lime replenished the soil.

That's the version told in the "Fall of Civilisations" podcast <https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/> (highly recommended).

I don't think middle-east climate change was man made, as there is evidence that the same thing happened in North Africa.

There is evidence of lush farms in what is now the Sahara desert and civilizations that existed there had significantly more resources.

Early Egyptians documented this as well. ...and the Carthaginians were likely the last holders of that fertile land before civilization moved north in the Roman Empire.

Global temperatures rose causing desertification along that entire latitude.

Yes Arabia was once a jungle and lush, not a dry desert like today. Same for much of the Sahara. There was a dramatic climate shift over the last few thousand years.

As an aside, I find it fascinating how we apparently randomly changed prepositions. "By accident" somehow became "on accident" and "wait for" someone became "wait on" someone (which used to be what waiters do).

Language is great.

That's why the Tigris/Euphrates was so important. Even to this day, despite recent mucking about with waterflow, there is still a fairly large series of swamplands/marshes in southern Iraq that most people don't imagine when they are asked to describe the geography of Iraq.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamian_Marshes

There are references in the bible to the "un-penetrable forests of Lebanon". That's on the order of 3K years ago.

I would think that the the cause is complex but humans removing trees until they are gone is probably part of the problem.

More than the Bible; the cedars of Lebanon were perhaps the single-most famous natural land feature in the ancient near east. You'll find references to them in virtually every ancient text of the area that has any length, including the Epic of Gilgamesh.

An ambitious project to regreen the Sinai desert, with John D. Liu, known for successfully greening the barren Loess Plateau: https://www.greenthesinai.com/home

Goats.

I'm Romanian and I had no idea parts of Oltenia look like this: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Sahara+Olteniei%22&t=ffcm&iar=i...

Better stock up on turbans because there's no chance we can fix anything.

Perhaps camels are going to save the day and help with transportation

And they can help also the economy. They could organize beauty contests for camels.

Having grown up in Romania, I remember the seasons and general climate being quite different just ~30 years ago, with much colder winters (and lots of snow) and much milder summer where the ~40C heat waves would last just a couple of days in the summer, not weeks on end.

Do you happen to have a link that points to recorded weather data for the last century that puts numbers alongside your undoubted anecdotal experience? As noted in other comments, here in Transylvania I've seen no such thing. Indeed hot weather seems to have been in increasingly short supply over the past decade or so.

I can attest winters were definitely colder in the Moldavian part.

I remember two meters of snow, digging tunnels through it and such.

And I remember four distinct seasons. Now it's more like a long summer, a long autumn, and short spring and winter.

Personal anecdotes are worthless. no offense intended.

Is that a fact or an opinion?

Some areas are less affected than others. I grew up in Banat, where I definitely noticed that trend. Every winter came with snow to swim in and 40+ summers were rare, now it's the opposite.

Anecdotally here in Pretoria South Africa I used to play on the frost before school as a child. Today we never see frost in the winter mornings here anymore.

Oh wow. I'm living happily in Transylvania now and had no idea. I thought the rest of Romania was all green.

Are bordering countries like Serbia and Bulgaria affected by this? This can't be the only country with unsustainable agricultural practices, right?

Ukraine has a desert [1] which is larger than the "Sahara of Oltenia" mentioned in the article. (which also has a link [2] to other deserts in Europe)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleshky_Sands (Ukrainian and Russian wiki articles have more details)

[2] https://www.travelhouseuk.co.uk/news/destinations/visit-the-...

Ukraine has largest everything simply because it’s biggest country in Europe.

Except Russia, of course (the European part).

Northern Bulgaria counties of Vidin and Montana are basically depopulated, shrubs are starting to grow and I've seen lots of animals on the road.

Interesting to get some context here on Oltenia. Coming from Transylvania, where water is good and plentiful (often coming straight down from the mountains), I was shocked at how parched many of the villages I cycled through were, and how bad the water from the wells they relied on often was.

To add insult to injury, we're also destroying the trees in the cities and along roads, and people are quite happy with that. I've literally had conversations that went like "Why do we need all these for? You have a drink or two, crash into a tree and die. They should cut all of them".

For some context, Romania has about the highest road fatalities per capita in the EU.

That sounds like a different issue.

They wanted to cut the trees along the roads in France too for similar. They wanted to remove the trees up to a certain distance which I can't remember.

The issue is that whole forests are being removed. If they weren't, removing a bunch of trees along the roads for safety wouldn't make that big of a difference.

But trees in cities is a different beast, though, and I think it's criminal to remove those, especially in Romania where, thanks communism, there aren't that many trees to begin with.

There was more illegal deforestation after '90 because the commies would have thrown perpetrators in jail without appeal. After the communist regime fell, new black market deals were struck with corrupt forest rangers, logging mafias were formed, forests in the country of Harghita and elsewhere were cut down. There was even one policitian named Attila Verestoy¹ who was nicknamed the chainsaw of god (a pun on Attila the hun's nickname) specifically because he was part of the Harghita logging mafia and has facilitated illegal deforestation. His and other logging kings' legacy lives on. There you have it.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attila_Verest%C3%B3y

I don't think the cities were in such a bad place before the Revolution, this is a more recent thing. They "prune" the trees by cutting pretty much every branch, then a couple of years down the road they cut them off because they've died. I've seen this happen many times.

You're right, of course, those in forests and those in the cities bring different benefits, but most people don't seem to care enough about either.

The 2050 version of this will be talking about the Great Plains of the US.

100000 hectares is 1000 square kilometers or 30 x 30 km. Not a geographically big area yet.

Sure - but it's a bit like seeing a desert in Maine or Quebec. Until Middle Ages, most of Europe used to be one huge forest.

Yes, but there was nothing like it before.

The local climate is temperate.

Also California's Central Valley with salination of soil.