The Cedars

-Rania Masri
November 1995

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(This is a transcript of a talk presented at the Cedars Awareness and Salvation Effort seminar on the environment in Lebanon, held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nov. 9, 1995.)Introduction: The Effects of Deforestation
The first procurement and subsequent deforestation originates from the site where civilization first emerged, the Fertile Crescent. I would like to share with you an episode from the Epic of Gilgamesh known as the Forest Journey. Through this story lies the understanding of ecological processes and the consequences of human action.
Approximately 4700 years ago in Uruk, a city-kingdom in southern Mesopotamia, Uruk's ruler Gilgamesh
 sought to ensure his immortality through the material greatness of his city. He wanted large amounts of timber to accomplish his plans, and he set his sight on the cedars of Lebanon. Extending before Gilgamesh lay an area of land so large its exact size was not known. An almost unbroken forest flourished near southern Mesopotamia, in the hills and mountains surrounding the Fertile Crescent. The forest was so dense that the sun's light barely penetrated through its foliage.
The chief Sumerian deity Enlil protected these glorious forests by entrusting the ferocious demigod Humbaba to protect the interests of nature against the desires of civilization. Enlil understood the unlimited appetite of civilization, and predicted that once humans would enter the forest, they would remove all the gods' beautiful garden of trees; they would destroy the divine beauty where "the cedars raise aloft their luxuriance.
After a moment of enjoying the glory and awe of the magnificent, virgin cedar forest, Gilgamesh and his lumberjack companions began destroying the "abode of the gods." They cut the cedars, chopped their branches and trunks into transportable sizes. A fight erupted between the intruders and the mighty forest demigod... the greed of civilization won; the forest's guardian lost his head; and the cedars wailed with fear now that Gilgamesh was master of the forest. The trees were correct to cry, for the men stripped the "mountains of their cover," leaving bare rock . When Enlil, who forever must watch over the well-being of the earth, learned of the destruction of the cedar forest, he sent down a series of ecological curses on the offenders: "May the food you eat be eaten by fire; may the water you drink be drunk by fire.
So ended the tale, lamenting the soon-to-be sorry state of southern Mesopotamia...and the many other civilizations bent on destroying their forests. Gilgamesh's war against the forest - a war in which there are only losers - has been repeated for generations in every corner of the globe to satisfy civilization's ever increasing appetite formaterial growth

Gilgamesh was succeeded by numerous other rulers in southern Mesopotamia, each striving to accumulate more material wealth than their own predecessor. The savage deforestation that ensued resulting in the decline of the Sumerian Civilization. Once large quantities of trees were felled near the banks of the upper courses of the Euphrates, Tigris, and Karun rivers and tributaries, salt and silt as well as timber filled the waters, and threatened to clog up the irrigation canals. Deforestation also exposed salt-rich sedimentary rocks of the northern mountains to erosion. After 1,500 years of successful farming, a serious salinity problem suddenly developed. Declining food product ion due to increased salinity was one of the factors that contributed to the fall of the Sumerian civilization. The building schemes that sought to strengthen this great empire brought on the very destruction of the civilization