Many. Completely abandoned towns and villages dot the US. A lot of Europeans struggle with just how enormous the US is; if a town grows up around some resource, and then that resource dries up, the people in the town can simply pack up and walk away.
That’s what happened to Bodie, a gold mining town in the California desert settled in the 1800s, then abandoned when the gold ran out.
Bodie is high in the mountains (about 8,000 feet elevation). It’s brutally hot in the summer and completely buried by snow in the winter. There’s no reason to be here if there’s no gold to mine.
Today, Bodie is a little eerie. The dry weather has preserved the place, so it’s just quietly crumbling away.
When the gold ran out, people left, often without packing. Getting stuff up and down the mountain was difficult and expensive.
All the gold mining equipment was left behind. It was far too heavy to be worth hauling back down the mountain, and was only worth its weight in scrap, so they left it. It had already made back its money in the gold it extracted, so there was no point in keeping it.
Even personal effects were left behind, because it was too expensive and too much work to haul it all back.
(All photos mine)
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This is what the Netherlands looked like during the middle-late Bronze Age.
As you can see large parts are covered by Peat which means those areas were nigh uninhabitable. Neither cereal cultivation nor grazing of cattle is feasible on those grounds, wearing special shoes a man might walk on top of this hoogveen or raised bog to do some gathering and hunting but it is effectively wasteland.
Concentrations of settlements are found along rivers, dunes and tidal flats. The predominant soil there being river clay, sea clay and sand.
Hoogveen, not unlike the dead marshes of Tolkien
During the days of the Charlemagne the picture had changed considerably, there is still some debate with regards to the soil types so there are two maps below to give a rough indication.
Rivers deposited more river clay, dunes continued growing, peat invaded some places but most important of all was frequent flooding which washed away large swaths of raised bog. The tiny lake in the middle of the peat bog during the bronze age transformed into an inland sea thanks to repeated flooding.
Map showing the places where the Frisians lived. On the tidal flats they built their houses on raised platforms called Terpen. Elsewhere they resided on the dunes or along the banks of Rivers
Settlement on a Terp
Dorestad on the Rhine/Vecht
It is perhaps no surprise that the first English missionaries to arrive thought the Frisians lived like fish.
In a land so prone to flooding, it might seem paradoxical that the inhabitants mostly lived in low lying areas prone to flooding. However, the raised bog itself could actually sit several meters above sea level.
It was around the 10th and 11th century that farmers moved in to colonise the raised bogs. Since they were raised considerably above the surrounding land, cutting a channel in one would cause it to drain due to gravity. Usually farmers would dig a single long channel in a straight line with almost perpendicular ‘side channels’ so as to drain a large area.
The main drainage channels all drained into the major and minor rivers of the Netherlands, eventually carrying the drained water to the sea. After cutting the drainage ditches, the peat could be grazed by cattle for a couple of years before it was suitable for cereal agriculture.
There were however, two unforeseen consequences.
Peat or raised bogs are formed by certain mosses which don’t decompose due to the acidic nature of the water, so they can actually grow meters above the surrounding landscape given enough time. If drained of water, this biomass will start to oxidise/shrink and the drained bog will slowly sink. Sitting considerably above the surrounding landscape this sinking at a rate of a centimeter a year could hardly have been a concern initially but it would eventually reduce the drained land to just above sea level and then later below.
Another concern was that the drainage channels drained their water into rivers. This was great if the bog sat above the level of the rivers, but when the drained land sank sufficiently or when the rivers flooded, all this water would flow back and drown the drained land and its people.
The only solution the people could come up with was to build dykes around the rivers and having the drainage ditches of the peat landscape dammed off. These dams would then have a sluice installed that would only open when the water level in the river was lower than the drained land.
By the 13th century virtually every bit of land in the Netherlands was surrounded by dykes meant to keep the water out of the now lower lying land.
Dark green is land kept dry by dikes, large parts of the coastal Netherlands turned into patches of pasture surrounded by drainage ditches.
Unfortunately, the land continued to sink eventually requiring wind operated pumps rather than gravity-fed channels to drain the low lands. In an effort to prevent sinking at high rates, the land was only drained to the point that the water level was a few feet below the top soil. This was sufficiently dry for pasture which fed cows but rendered the land unsuitable for cereal agriculture.
Even more unfortunate was that the move to build dykes did not save the land everywhere. Several large medieval floods turned some areas of the Netherlands into lakes.
In 1404, 1421 and 1424 three floods hit the Netherlands. All of them are called the St. Elizabethsflood because they all occurred on or about the 19th of November.
The result was that the coastal provinces of Holland and Zeeland turned into lake rich districts.
In the course of the 17th century, these flooded lands were reclaimed by building dykes around them and pumping them dry, with the emphasis being on reclaimed because these areas had been dry land before.
Fundamentally then your question isn’t correct
Why did the Dutch always cling so hard to this artificial land that was supposed to naturally become a sea basin so long ago?
The holocene landscape of the coastal Netherlands was an extensive peat landscape protected by sand dunes. Only when distant ancestors made the decision to drain said peat did it start to sink below sea level. Luckily for me, less distant ancestors then made sure to protect the land from the worst effects of this.
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He works at a logistics agency in Nanjing, China. He also spends his free time saving other people’s lives. Let me tell you his story.
In 2003, a very close relative of Chen’s committed suicide after watching his sons argue over who would take care of him. The incident was deeply traumatizing. Having to lose someone he held so dear to his heart just because his sons didn’t seem to show enough respect and compassion for him. Chen also read in the local newspaper that the Nanjing-Yangtze River Bridge was a major suicide hotspot — in fact, by 2006, about 2,000 people were estimated to have killed themselves by jumping off the bridge since the year it was constructed (1968). He then became greatly determined to devote the rest of his life saving those of others trapped in hopelessness by foiling suicide attempts.
In response, Chen began to patrol the Nanjing-Yangtze bridge either on his motorbike or on foot, continuously on the lookout for people willing to jump from it. He has been there almost every day, even on holidays and weekends, regardless of the weather. He has kept a lookout for signs of depression, for example, in the way some of them walk, which Chen describes as “passive with no spirit or direction”.
Chen also keeps a diary documenting the people he has encountered and the reasons why they wanted to kill themselves. Some had been greatly shamed for not being successful enough in school. Some had broken up with their boyfriend or girlfriend. Some had wasted away their money on needless things. There was also, for example, a migrant worker who was drowning in debt because he couldn’t pay off the $15,000 bill for his daughter’s leukemia treatments. Chen also gives out suicide prevention pamphlets to potential jumpers, detailing emergency contacts.
And not only does he simply pull people off the bridge. In fact, he has spent 10,000 yuan ($1,457 in dollars) renting a two-room house not far from the site, which he calls “a station for the soul to rest in”. He sits with people and lets them share all their suffering in their stories, which in a way ignites friendship, trust, and newfound confidence. Chen also occasionally brings victims back to the bridge as volunteers, helping others see a way forward in life.
Throughout his time engaging in this, Chen has stopped over 300 people from ending their lives. That is an example of being a hero without having to fight. An example of generosity and compassion at work without the necessity for bloodshed. Sometimes the best heroes simply dedicate themselves to lending a hand to people who feel like they’ve got nothing left for them. Chen Si isn’t called the “Angel of Nanjing” for nothing.
“Not all heroes wear capes”, they say. That is most definitely true.
A red Solo cup will last centuries in a landfill. Most ancient equivalents don’t hold up as well.
In colonial America clay pipes were cheap and plentiful, the stems were long to keep the heat away from the lips. They were also somewhat fragile and frequently broke.
Baskets were used to carry and store almost everything used in ancient times.
When baskets wore out, they were thrown away, or thrown in the fire to get a little warmth out of it. Just like the twigs, grass, and reeds they were made from, they rot away, unless preserved under low oxygen conditions, or very dry conditions.
Wooden crates were used to ship cargo all over the world.
This is one of the remaining tea chests from the Boston Tea Party. Only two survive, out of hundreds thrown in the harbor. When a wooden crate had served its purpose, the wood was used for other purposes, or thrown in the fireplace to get a little heat out of it. If it was discarded, it would eventually rot away.
In Rome, there is a hill composed of the broken remains of amphorae.
Monte Testaccio, is an ancient disposal area for olive oil containers. They were broken up and piled there for centuries. Amphorae were the ancient world’s primary shipping container, so this is basically the ancient equivalent of a pile of plastic totes.
Most of the everyday, useful things in the ancient world were made from the materials that surrounded the people every day of their lives. Things made of the earth, tend to return to it.
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Contemporary American liberal thought is dominated by race, gender, religion, sexuality, and socio-economic class issues. Conservatives call this “identity politics,” but lately liberals have begun to push back against that label. Whatever you want to call it, it is the lens through which liberals see the world.
And there’s no getting around it when it comes to the Founding Fathers:
They were rich, white men, most of whom were Christian, and many of whom owned slaves. Presumably, they were also all straight. If any of them weren’t straight, they kept it to themselves.
And, for many liberals these days, those facts about their identities must be considered before any discussion of their actions can take place.
Here’s an op-ed piece from the New York Times from earlier this year about the Founding Fathers:
It’s behind a paywall, but here are the opening two paragraphs:
That sort of “beginning with the negative identity politics” caveat is omnipresent in contemporary liberal thought when it comes to discussing anyone from history, including the Founding Fathers. They struggle to say anything positive without first pointing out the negative.
Identity politics is, for them, what government bureaucratic waste and ineptitude is for conservatives.
“Before I say anything positive about this government bureaucracy,” the conservative says, “I just want to point out how wasteful it is, and how it often fails in its mission….”
Switch the political perspective of the person speaking, and the order in which facts appear also switch. That is, if a conservative were writing about the Founding Fathers, they likely wouldn’t begin with the identity politics negatives. They’d know about them, they just wouldn’t think it relevant enough to lead off with. Those would go near the end, or be excluded completely.
And if a liberal were to talk about some government bureaucracy, they’d be more likely to lead off with the positives, and save the negatives for the end, if included at all.
Neither person would be wrong. They’re just both giving priority to the facts that they think are important.
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