WORLD'S END

Cultists and those who interpret various so called prophetic writings from Nostradamus, Mayan ruins and even including various books of the Bible have predicted the world will end on a specific date and EST time in 2012.

That is not the first time during man's existance on Earth nor will be the last that the doomsday prophets predict the end. But man himself may be doing his best.


BP and the USA are not the only villains in man's destruction of our planet. The Chinese has caused great ecological changes by their dams along the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers systems.In Brazil and Africa destruction of natural forest cover has created crop failures due to the loss of fertile soils. This Article from the New York Times illustrate one more man caused disaster in what was once known as the Fertile Crescent the source of human society development.

Vital Iraqi River
Is Withering
SIBA, Iraq — The Shatt al Arab,
the river that flows from the bib-
lical site of the Garden of Eden to
the Persian Gulf, has turned into
an environmental and economic
disaster that Iraq’s government
is almost powerless to fix.
Withered by decades of mis-
management and then neglect,
by drought and the thirst of Iraq’s
neighbors, the river formed by
the convergence of the Tigris and
the Euphrates no longer has the
strength the keep the sea at bay.
The salt water of the gulf now
pushes up the Faw peninsula. Last
year, it extended beyond Basra,
Iraq’s biggest port city, and even
Qurna, where the two rivers meet.
It has ravaged fisheries, livestock,
and date palms that once made the
area famous, forcing the migration
of tens of thousands of farmers.
Turkey, Syria and Iran have all
harnessed the headwaters that
flow into the Tigris and Euphrates
and ultimately into the Shatt al
Arab, leaving Iraqi officials with
little to do but plead for them to re-
lease more from their dams.
Iraq’s minister of water resourc-
es, Abdul Latif Jamal Rashid, said
that the problems were a legacy of
Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.
Hussein diverted the flow of
water into a trench during the war
with Iran and drained the marsh-
lands in the 1990s. His belligerence
toward Iraq’s neighbors also left
the country isolated when those
countries built their dams, siphon-
ing off what for millenniums flowed
through Mesopotamia. “Iraq was
in a position neither to reject nor to
cooperate with them,” Rashid said.
“They did what they wanted to do.”
STEVEN LEE MYERS