Once upon a time there was a small harbour on the edge of a great desert. The people lived happily, worshiped Allah, caught fish and raided passing mariners. British galleons came to stop the piracy. Later, the infidels discovered oil and water lurking far beneath the desert sands – and pumped them up. The small harbour grew to be a great city. Allah made the people rich, but he disliked the western ways.
Then an oil well blew out in the Gulf of Mexico. It too was run by the British and it made the seas filthy. Everybody hated this. So the Americans, the Chinese the Europeans and the Australians (who foresaw a comparable fate) hurled resources into energy research. In the first decade of the 21st century the Americans had spent more money on pet food than on energy research. In the second decade, the money spent on energy research towered over that spent by Russia and America on Atom Bombs, Ballistic Missiles and Moon Landings. Europe decided that the Romans and been geographically correct, so they invited North Africa to join the EU and then carpeted half the Sahara Desert with solar cells. Solar energy became so cheap that 75% of the world’s oil wells were shut down.
The great city on the Arabian Gulf spent its last tourism and oil revenues on solar-powered desalination, but global warming had made the region so hot that no one wanted to be there, even in winter, and the fossil water resources were all gone. So the great city which had been a small port, called Dubai, was abandonned like the Roman towns in North Africa.
The last woman to leave was heard to say: ‘Sheik Yamani, peace be upon him, was right “The Stone Age did not come to an end because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age did not come to an end because we had a lack of oil”‘
The last man to leave turned out the lights and muttered: ‘Allah be praised, Allah be delighted, blessed be the name of Allah to all Eternity’.

Policy implications of desertification
So the question is: what should be done to prepare for desertification? My belief is that instead of beeing looted as it is vacated, which is the usual fate of abandonned cities, Dubai should be carefully buried in sand for the benefit of future archaeologists. As at Pompeii, everything should be left, including furnishings, computers, books, booze, gold taps and porno videos (if present). The strongest argument for this approach is safety. A near-empty city could be more dangerous than Afghanistan. To make the deserted desert city safe, I imagine the best policy would be to explode a perimeter ring of buildings and add in other debris (eg cars) to make a barrier which would cause blown sand to accumulate. Wind tunnel tests should be put in hand to see if there are any urban design and planning measures which could assist the accumulation. Previous work on coastal sand dune stabilization would be useful.

Image note: the left part of the image is from a NASA photograph of Dubai; the right part of the image is of Devonian sandstone laid down under desert conditions near the Equator and then moved to Scotland by continental drift. The ‘lumps’ are breccia which became incorporated in the sandstone at the lower horizon of the sedimenary deposition. In geological time, everything changes.

Sustainable landscape farming: happy cows in Laxton Medieval Village

Many scientists argue that ‘we’ should accept genetically modified (GM) foods – for a whole range of scientific and economic reasons. Though sceptical of the scientific logic I do not know enough about genetic modification to take issue with them. But on the economic issue I am convinced they are wrong in the specific case of the UK. So I was delighted to read that Professor Robert Watson, (chief scientist at the World Bank and also chief scientist of UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) said: “Are transgenics the simple answer to hunger and poverty? I would argue, no.” A fortiori GM foods are not the answer for the UK. The benighted officials at the DEFFRA do not seem to appreciate the significance of the fact that England, Scotland and Wales are an island, or that our landscape is very productive and very beautiful. These geographical facts provide an amazing economic opportunity: Britain can become a niche supplier of the highest quality foods in the temperate world. If they are foolish enough, let everyone else go for low-cost, low-quality foods. It will not be possible to stop GM foods spreading across land borders. Island nations, like Britain and Australia, have the opportunity to become producers of exceptionally high quality foods. The UK should only produce organic foods. GM crops should be utterly banished. Everyone should know that buying British foods is a guarantee of quality. The benighted officials at DEFFRA should take note of the fact that in almost every market the producers who deliver the highest quality can charge the highest prices and, usually, generate the highest profits.
I love the English landscape and would be delighted to see photographs of wonderful crops and animals used, in beautiful surroundings, as marketing devices for The World’s Best Food.
PS Personally, I support the precautionary principle and have no wish to eat GM-produced Frankenstein Foods. But this is not my present argument.
Note: beyond the happy cattle in the above photograph one can see the remains of the last village in England which still uses the medieval system of land tenure. It is Laxton. I love it and the photograph was taken this week. Wouldn’t you rather your beef came from here than from a factory farm, awash with antibiotics? I was vegetarian between the ages of (about) 6 and 16. My father, who was a doctor, ridiculed me. But he went to visit a slaughterhouse about 40 years later and was revolted to see them cutting the abcesses out of factory-farmed cows and then sending the ‘good bits’ to the supermarkets. He then became a vegetarian.