Around 3000 BCE, in the fertile land between the Tigris River and the Euphrates River, humans did something for the first time in history.
They decided not to wait for rain.
Instead, they cut canals and diverted rivers. They brought water to dry land and made crops grow where they otherwise would not. This was the birth of large-scale irrigation, and with it, the birth of what we now know as civilization in Mesopotamia.
It worked, almost immediately.
Food production increased. Settlements expanded. People stopped doing everything for themselves and began to specialize. Some farmed. Some built. Some traded. Some governed. Surplus made hierarchy possible. Hierarchy made cities possible.
From the outside, it looks like an unambiguous success story.
But from the inside, something else was happening.
The rivers that made Mesopotamia fertile also carried salt. When water evaporated from irrigated fields, salt remained behind in the soil. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, the land began to change.
Crop yields started falling.
Wheat, the preferred crop, suffered earliest. It could not tolerate increasing salinity. Farmers switched to barley, which was more resilient. For a while, that worked. Then barley yields began to drop too.
What’s interesting to know is that the Sumerians were well aware of what was happening.
Cuneiform tablets record declining yields. They record changes in crops. They record adjustments to land use. They understood, at least in practical terms, that the land was becoming less productive under the very system they relied on.
And yet, the canals kept expanding.
Not because people were foolish, but because irrigation had become more than a farming technique. It was the foundation of the entire social order.
The canals fed cities. Cities supported priests, administrators, soldiers, artisans, and traders. Power, religion, and governance all depended on agricultural surplus. To stop or reverse irrigation would have meant shrinking cities, dismantling hierarchies, and giving up accumulated advantages.
So the choice they faced was not between “sustainability” and “collapse” in the way we often frame it today.
It was between continuing a system they knew was flawed and abandoning a way of life they had already built.
They chose continuation.
The outcome was not dramatic and there was no sudden apocalypse. But, as you would expect, there was a slow shift. Southern Mesopotamian cities lost prominence. Power moved north, where salinity was less severe. Some regions declined. Others adapted. Civilization, in its entirety, did not disappear. Specific places did.
This distinction matters.
What failed was not knowledge. What failed was the ability to unwind a system once it had locked in livelihoods, status, and power.
This is an important lesson, because it suggests that awareness alone is rarely enough to change direction.
We like to believe that if people had known better, they would have acted differently. The Mesopotamian story complicates that belief. They knew enough to understand the problem. What they lacked was a socially acceptable way to step back.
Once a system begins to produce surplus, it also produces dependence. Jobs, identities, and institutions grow around it. Over time, the cost of stopping becomes higher than the cost of continuing, even when continuation is visibly damaging.
This pattern is not unique to ancient irrigation. It is a feature of human systems.
Which brings us, inevitably, to the present.
We often talk about modern problems as if they are failures of foresight. We all know the elephant in the earth-sized room - Cimate Change. The implication is that if only people understood the consequences better, behaviour would change.
But in many cases, we already understand the consequences.
We know which activities degrade ecosystems. We know which industries are extractive. We know which growth patterns are unsustainable. The data is not hidden. The models are not secret.
And yet, the systems continue.
Not because individuals are malicious, but because entire ways of life now depend on them. Cities are built around certain industries. Employment, pensions, national revenues, and political stability are tied to their continuation. Reversing course is not just a technical challenge; it is a social one.
Like the Mesopotamians, we face choices that are not binary. We can tweak, adapt, and delay. We can switch crops, improve efficiency, and hope for incremental fixes. But stepping back entirely feels unthinkable, not because we do not understand the risk, but because we understand the cost of change all too well.
There is something sobering about this continuity across five thousand years.
The first urban civilization did not fail because it was ignorant of its impact. It faltered because it was successful enough to make reversal painful.
Perhaps that is the more honest way to look at many modern dilemmas. Not as battles between good intentions and bad actors, but as struggles between long-term viability and short-term stability.
The Sumerians did not ruin their land out of carelessness. They did it while building something remarkable. In doing so, they revealed a trait that still defines us: once a system delivers prosperity, we find it extraordinarily hard to let go, even when we can see where it leads.
So here is a question worth sitting with.
If the world’s first civilization could recognize the damage its most important innovation was causing and still choose to continue, what makes us so confident that knowledge alone will save us now? And when we look at the systems we know are failing today, are we really waiting for better information, or are we waiting for the cost of stopping to become unavoidable?
Write to us at plainsight@wyzr.in with your thoughts. We will share the most compelling responses in a future edition.
What we’re reading this week
Collapse by Jared Diamond.
A careful, comparative study of societies that ran into ecological and structural limits, and how their responses were shaped less by ignorance and more by social and political constraints.
Until next week.
Best,
