Six thousand years ago, the arid Iraqi wastes over which U.S. tanks may soon roll flourished with amber waves of grain. Today, our government stands ready to launch an attack by the most advanced technological civilization ever against the ancient source of our species' first great historical trauma: humankind's original eviction from Eden.

The modern nation of Iraq is built upon the ruins of Sumer, the world's earliest civilization. Resourceful Mesopotamian city-states like Ur on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers invented writing, the wheel, sailboats, animal-drawn plows, metalwork, the potter's wheel, and mapmaking. They originated large professional armies, imperialism and bureaucracy. They were also the first to develop an urban lifestyle, inhabiting great cities like Ur, and temporarily insulating themselves from nature's harsh realities.

They made the desert bloom with "grainfields, date plantations, fishponds, and gardens of lettuce, onions, lentils, garlic and cress," says "Ecology of Eden" author and historian Evan Eisenberg. They created a human-made paradise on earth, a realm echoed in their mythology where we find the precursors of Eden: a paradise called Dilman, a holy land of palm trees and sweet waters blessed by the gods.

Also in Sumer, we find the first nation to track its economic progress through hard-nosed business records. It is partly through those ledgers that scientists learned why Sumer collapsed.

The Sumerians built impressive irrigation systems that produced a bountiful surplus, feeding a booming population and supporting an administrative, military and religious elite. While leaders sought greater riches through warfare, and priests guided those wars through astrological forecasts, environmental mismanagement caused Sumer's power to erode.

The grand irrigation system that made Sumer possible also destroyed it. The arid soil became waterlogged. Evaporating water left salt deposits behind. Records show that in southern Mesopotamia at about 3500 B.C., equal amounts of wheat and barley grew. Then salt-intolerant wheat began to be replaced by more salt-tolerant barley, until by 1700 B.C., wheat was abandoned entirely. As salinity worsened, crops failed. Fields turned to desert and the Sumerians abandoned their cities, writes Clive Ponting in "A Green History of the World."

In 1936, archeologist Leonard Woolley was stunned at the contrast between southern Iraq's past and present. He wrote that it was impossible to imagine that "the blank waste ever blossomed, [and] bore fruit for the sustenance of a busy world."

The Sumerians, distracted by human matters, had destroyed the natural basis of their wealth. They ignored the implications of failing harvests, though meticulously tracking the decline much as CNN follows the falling NASDAQ. Walled up in urban centers, busied with commerce and war, they never took action to sustain themselves.

As America girds for international conflict, our government, dominated by corporate interests and the religious right, seems about to make the same mistake. While able to wield the greatest war machine in history, we seem unable to squarely face the threat of climate change, to clean up deadly coal-burning power plants or nuclear waste that could contaminate the planet for millennia. We, like Sumer, seem ready to march off to war and ask for answers from the stars, while ignoring the sinking fortunes of our own fields and forests.

Sumerian leaders and the priests of Ur had little idea of the scientific mechanisms at work out at the edge of town, where the human-dominated realm ended and that of nature began. We are in similar peril, but can't plead ignorance as an excuse.

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