Sustainable development, the process whereby the human race can meet its needs without diminishing the capacity for future generations to meet theirs, is said to be a process whose time has come, and not a moment too soon. The Green Revolution has given way to the revolution of the “Greens.” Yet sustainable development must have seemed a normal, natural, everyday condition in the lives of the pre-dynastic Egyptians. After all, they lived within a world whose boundaries were clearly defined—a strip of green that was in stark contrast with the desert, arid hills, and dry mountains on either side. Their Egypt was an isolated land, cut off in the south by cataracts and in the north by a maze of marshlands, tributaries, pools, lagoons, and islands that made up the delta. They were reminded every day of the finite nature of their world. They had no choice but to live within their ecological means.
By all accounts they rose to the challenge. They were a relaxed, tolerant group of people filled with an appetite for life and capable of realizing their good luck, and they treated their natural resources with respect.
Visitors in later years would marvel at the inundation in Egypt. Many of these visitors came from Greece, where the thin, rocky soils meant backbreaking work to till a small field. The layer of silt that the Nile left behind on a wet floodplain must have seemed heaven-sent. Under those conditions the visitors probably thought any fool could reap a bumper crop, that farming in Egypt was labor-free, similar to what one expected in the Golden Age, “where the rich earth, unforced and without stint, bore fruit abundantly.” But, as Naphtali Lewis has pointed out, the Egyptian farmer still had his work cut out for him clearing the land, then plowing, hoeing, and cultivating it in order to keep it productive and weed-free. And the work later done on irrigation ditches, sluiceways, and drains would try any man’s body and soul.
Prof. Butzer tells us that from 17,000 to 8000 B.C., a wetter climate prevailed. During this period the Nile would swell each summer, becoming a roaring torrent perhaps resembling the Congo in flood. That river comes raging out of the Congo River Valley and into the southern Atlantic with a mighty rush. At any time of the year flying over the mouth of the Congo, you can see the plume of soil and sediment spreading out on the ocean surface before it disappears into the depths of an underwater canyon. Its sediment load is simply carried far out and deposited in an abyssal plain deep inside the ocean. The Congo has no delta because its mouth is so deep—300 feet—like the primeval Nile of six million years ago.
Just as the Congo is a classic example of a river without a delta, the Nile is a classic example of a river with a delta. So classic that in fact the term “delta” was coined by Herodotus just for the Nile because the formation so resembled the Greek letter Δ.
Dr. Jean-Daniel Stanley, Senior Scientist Emeritus and Director of the Deltas-Global Change Program at the Smithsonian Institute, has made sediment profiles of the Nile Delta that provide us with a general picture of its evolution. The modern form evolved from around 6500 B.C., when the Nile at the apex of the delta had separated into five branches and, since the sea was still about 30ft lower than the land, the water must have cascaded down the branches onto the delta, which at that time consisted mostly of sand and gravel.
Typically in deltas, the river water cuts its way through previous material and drops heavier sediments, such as gravel and sand, close to shore. The water spilling over the delta also carries silt that spreads out over the alluvial fan, while the fine-particled clay travels in suspension quite far out to sea. There it reacts with salt water and is deposited as alluvial material.
The saying “Nature abhors a vacuum” applies to ecosystems as well as to natural and contrived experiments. At some point, the sand and gravel were replaced by silt and bare mud as the Nile Delta appeared above low water. This new mud was a “vacuum” that would have been quickly colonized by plants and animals. Prior to that time, when only sand and gravel were present, few plants could survive.
The species that first appear on wet mud are appropriately called “pioneers” because their life is a tough one, requiring all sorts of adaptations in order to persist and survive. The largest factor would be the summer flooding since, once rooted, a plant has to just sit and take the deluge. The alternatives are to be ripped out by the roots by the force of the floodwater, or to be left in place to drown. Thus a pioneer plant would have to adapt to extreme water levels and its seeds would have to germinate and grow fast, so that inside of twelve months—by the time the next flood arrived—the plants would be ready to take advantage of their new habitat and take root. They must also be species capable of warding off competition from an increasing array of plants that will attempt to establish a foothold within this newly created ecosystem.
In the earliest days of the delta, when the sediments first appeared above the low-water mark, the water was still fresh—salt water was kept at bay in prehistoric times by shoreline features such as bars and shoals—so the first vascular plants to appear would probably have been riverine grasses and sedges, including papyrus.
Papyrus would have landed there easily enough, as there would have been floating islands of papyrus coming down from the backswamps of the floodplain. Papyrus can also establish itself from windblown seed which germinates and grows quickly on wet mud. In any event, it was a prime candidate for the Nile Delta because it can tolerate flooding, unlike many other plant species. The amazing thing about papyrus is that even though it has stems that grow to 15–20ft tall, they are lightweight. The plant is interlaced with air spaces so that it floats and accommodates itself to the water level. Shortly after papyrus established itself, swamp grasses, reed grasses, and bulrushes followed, species that are common to seasonal swamps. These species can root in mud and wet soil, and grow well in places where the soil occasionally dries out, but they are not as versatile as papyrus.
The first papyrus plants that grew in the delta probably appeared at the very neck of the delta, the place where the Nile first branches out; this is a pattern seen today in the Okavango Swamp in Botswana. The Okavango is an inland delta where the Okavango River empties into a natural inland formation rather than the sea. Papyrus in the Okavango is considered a keystone species in that it grows quickly over any small water body and into flowing water along the edges of the channels, eventually blocking the channels like a dam. It then produces floating islands that break off and travel further downstream, creating havoc as they block more and more channels.1
Relief comes in the form of a second keystone species, the hippopotamus, an animal large enough to break through these blockages and release the river water which is otherwise dammed up. If the hippos are hunted down or poached, the blockages get worse, since papyrus is relentless in its advance across perennial shallow water. In the ancient Nile Delta, hippos must have been common enough; in fact, in Merimda, one of the oldest settlement towns close to the apex of the delta, a hippo tibia was found used as a front doorstep.2 Still, papyrus had its way and was instrumental in slowing the flow of Nile water across the delta and filtering sediment, preventing erosion and the rich delta soil being lost to the sea.
Today one can stand on the banks of the Congo River and see what it must have been like on the early Nile when large and small clumps of vegetation go sailing by on a river unhindered by dams or barrages. Whole trees, logs, detritus, stumps, and weeds wash by on their way to the Congo mouth; and most conspicuous of all are hundreds of islands of papyrus that drift by, with tall stems and feathery plumes acting as sails—yet another clever evolutionary development that allows the plant to find new places to grow and spread its seed.
In the delta, papyrus swamps, grass swamps, and other wetlands would thrive as more silt became available. The ancient delta expanded to become a large formation: 8,500 square miles of freshwater habitats, including ponds, islands, and swamps, that would expand from the apex down to the sea. At the sea edge, salt marshes would soon replace the freshwater wetlands along the coast.
From about 5000 B.C. onwards, the first farming communities were busy in the Nile Valley draining swamps, cutting back thickets, and irrigating the floodplains. Though Butzer placed one center of population growth in the Nile floodplain near the apex or beginning of the delta above Faiyum, he felt that the vast wastes of the delta would remain thinly settled during the Dynastic era until around 2700 B.C., when Egyptians would turn to taming what he calls the “Deltaic Wilds.”
In the ancient delta, Prof. Hassan notes, conditions were different from today, since between 10,500 and 2500 B.C. the northern parts of the delta supported far more extensive marshlands and swamps. And so more and more plant and animal species persisted, and a succession proceeded from barren mudflats to a thick growth of riverine vegetation. Thousands of years later, perhaps woodlands or maybe a tropical forest would have appeared, depending on the local weather and the continued accretion of silt and soil. But this normal progression from wetlands to forest didn’t happen in the delta. It was stopped and then reversed because of the intervention of man.
Once intensive cultivation began in the delta, more people moved to it; by Roman times, the land cultivated exceeded that of the valley floodplain. Then came canalization of the water supply, clearance and drainage of plots, and finally the complete cessation of flooding and alluvium in 1965 when the Aswan High Dam was closed. The history of the delta from that time is similar to that of Louisiana, where the silt from the Mississippi is held back. Both deltas formerly grew as silt was deposited by either the Nile or the Mississippi, but now they have both stopped growing. They are losing land from erosion, from incursion by the sea, and they are sinking because of extraction of water, oil, and natural gas. This is referred to as “subsidence” or “the destructive phase,” since during this phase coastal features such as islands, river banks, and shoals are liable to disappear as the water overtops the land. In Louisiana, this disappearance is often remarked on because it happens within a person’s lifetime.
Subsidence in the Nile Delta was best illustrated in the early days by the disappearance of the branches of the Nile. Pliny the Elder identified seven branches. By 700–1000 A.D., the land in the northeastern part of the delta had lowered to such a degree that three of the most eastern branches had disappeared. In addition, large saline ponds, lakes, and lagoons were formed as the sea encroached more and more, turning freshwater regions brackish and then to salt water. The advance of the sea in the eastern side brought about the destruction of Tanis, a major delta town. Hassan tells us that “by the time of the Arab conquest in 635 A.D., Tanis was no more than a ghost town of reed huts.”
Before all of that happened, however, as Michael Herb and Philippe Derchain, Egyptologists from the Universities of Cologne and Brussels, tell us in their Landscapes of Ancient Egypt, the delta swamps (which were then still freshwater) were intensively used in the Old Kingdom (2600–2180 B.C.) for cattle-keeping, fishing, bird-catching, and plant-collecting. These economic activities were described in pictures and texts from the time of King Sneferu (2614 B.C. and later). They also make a point about the quality of the soil increasing as one goes north along the river, with the best alluvium dropping out as the Nile approaches the maze of canals, natural levees, and blockages in the swamps of the delta.
The first papyrus swamps forming in the delta during that era would become the forerunners of the papyrus swamps that would feed the papyrus paper and rope-making industries in the time of the Ptolemys. Later, during the time of the Romans, the delta marshes and swamps would also provide fuel for the baths in Alexandria, as well as an expanded paper business.
It was almost as if a modern planner had sat down with the delta residents and set out a plan for sustainable development of the region between 3000 and 500 B.C. As agriculture flourished with time, the delta wetlands were used to graze cattle while the perennial swamps, cultivated plots, and farms existed side by side in a balanced cycle, each producing what was needed as civilization began and flourished.
This period is reflected in the sediment cores of Dr. Stanley, who told me that the large (15ft deep) layer of marsh peat laid down in the northwest somewhere around 2000 B.C. was perhaps indicative of the papyrus swamps. Subsequently, this is followed by a layer of lagoon mud and then beach sand from the First Millennium A.D. This perhaps follows the clearance of the papyrus, which marks the end of sustainable development in the delta—but not the end of the plant that made so much of it happen.
How useful was papyrus during these early days in the delta? Could the Egyptian farmer have gotten by without it? As the early observers could see, the famous Nile flood and the deposit of silt were physical processes, events that would go on anyway even in the absence of wetlands or cultivated crops. But the danger of erosion was always present, especially if dry weather followed a flood year. And in ancient Egypt there were some very famous seven-year droughts and famines. During dry conditions, alluvium not covered by crops or swamp vegetation would be subjected to erosion. It doesn’t rain that much in Egypt, but when it does it can be heavy. Severe erosion could be caused by the rare rainstorm; but more important, wind erosion was also a serious threat, and still is today. Because of the flat, exposed landscape of the delta, wind sweeps across the terrain unhindered. It has been put to good use in recent years—two large wind farms generating 500 megawatts (MW) have recently been put into operation on the Gulf of Suez.3 During all those years, the great mass of peat, roots, and rhizomes produced by papyrus stopped a great deal of alluvium from being lost to the sea.
Silt and sediment were also trapped by other wetland species in the delta, and obviously, because of the sheer volume of water that passed through, quite a bit of sediment still ended up in the ocean. But papyrus did a major job of carrying the brunt of filtration, as it does in places like the Okavango, where observers comment on the clarity of flood water after it passes through the papyrus swamps: “. . . the very effective filtration action of the dense reed beds and papyrus groves, results in water of almost startling clarity.”4
Another action of papyrus swamps and other wetlands is the conservation of water. This is not of much consequence when the whole valley and the delta are inundated, but later, when man developed means of tapping the aquifer by digging wells and boreholes, such water made all the difference in success or failure of a crop during dry years. The role of wetlands became crucial in helping to recharge the fresh water underground, since that same water also slowed or prevented salt water from intruding. Dr. Stanley and his colleague Andrew Warne, from the Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg, Mississippi, point out that though papyrus swamps had disappeared, wetlands were still widespread in the northern part of the delta in the 19th century. Their removal and the subsequent construction of levees and drains meant less and less water conservation and recharge. More and more salinization and subsidence went on, and more and more often boreholes brought up unusable water. The result was that farmers walked away from land that had been in production since the time of the pharaohs.
From 10,000 B.C., when papyrus thrived in the delta, until 900 A.D., when the plant disappeared from Egypt, everyone who farmed the delta benefited, everyone who made paper or rope benefited, and the bird hunters and fishermen and craftspeople saw nothing but good from this arrangement. In the early days, the delta was a model of the right sort of development.
When the first Egyptian started clearing papyrus swamps, he had none of the machinery and drainage technology of later years. Large drainage projects would come along late in the Dynastic era, but for many years small areas of swamp were drained and cleared locally. These smaller efforts were perhaps the most efficient way to use swamp resources, since the peat from the swamp, as well as any accrued sediment and silt, could be put to good use as soil amendments. And because the drainage was done on a small scale, enough swamp was left behind to support the established lifestyle of the residents, a lifestyle not seen in other hydraulic cultures of the world. It was a lifestyle that generated export earnings and nourished the local fauna, as well as providing local material for boats, houses, and crafts, with enough left over to provide the dry reeds that were used to fire the baths of Alexandria, an absolute must on the part of Romans who had settled in that city. Without warm baths, life for them would have been intolerable.
What evolved was not simply a riverine ecosystem in the delta, but a whole way of life based on a relationship between a plant and man. Herodotus tells us that Egypt was a gift of the Nile, but there was as well a second gift—the wetlands of the delta, in which papyrus played a large part.
In the present day, the sacred sedge and many acres of the original wetlands are no longer there to slow the course of the river. Their place has been taken by the modern cultivated and developed landscape. Dams and barrages have canceled the flood regime, captured the alluvium, and now generate hydropower that must be used almost exclusively to manufacture commercial fertilizers needed to replace the natural alluvium. These are the same fertilizers that are poisoning the soil with trace-element buildup.
The final insult comes from the many industrial drains and sewage outfalls that are emptied into the delta lagoons, converting them into sewage ponds. In place of the balanced renewable system of old, we have a system in which delta land is fast subsiding as salt water is intruding and pollution is spreading throughout—and the whole thing exacerbated by the effects of global climate changes. It is also now a system that is not meeting the needs of the people, who are dependent on importing almost half their food, causing prices to rise in a country where political, social, and economic stability has given way to violence and unrest.
With a population of 16.8 million spread over 175 square miles, Greater Cairo is the largest metropolitan area in Africa. As expected, the levels of pollution that result from the “Mother of the World” are gargantuan. Realizing that Cairo takes most of its water from intake points in the middle of the Nile River, how can it be that the quality of tap water in Cairo satisfies most Egyptian and international water-quality standards?
The answer is dilution and diversion.
Prior to the closure of the Aswan High Dam, the dilution factor was huge. The annual flow was then 45 billion gallons per day (62km3 per year in 1964, according to Said & Radwan, 2009). Now the annual flow is reduced to 3 billion gallons per day, but that should still wash out an awful lot of bad stuff in the drinking water.
Diversion also helps, in that the half dozen wastewater-treatment plants serving the Greater Cairo area, as well as the toxic chemical and organic discharge of 329 major factories (which amounts to as much as 660 million gallons per day of untreated effluent), are routed well north of the city by agricultural drains and canals.
This doesn’t mean that Egypt gets away scot-free. Cairo’s industrial wastewater has made some of the industrial zones inhospitable, and since the wastewater is routed into the Northern Lakes of the delta and the Mediterranean Sea, it has damaged Egypt’s shores, coastal fishing, and tourism in this region. Also, the city’s water managers must treat drinking water to remove heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, and copper that comes from industrial pollution, a costly process that doesn’t get at the root of the problem.
The most worrisome future trouble lies between the Aswan High Dam and Cairo, where 43 towns with populations exceeding 50,000 and approximately 1,500 villages discharge their waste into the Nile.
Programs to reduce Nile pollution are being implemented, but the task is huge and the cost prohibitive. It has not escaped the attention of the planners that filter swamps are a good low- or no-cost solution. There has even been an attempt to use papyrus as one of the component plants in such a scheme. Swamps that are encouraged to grow in polluted water are called filter swamps because they act in just that way. Just like a filter, the water stops moving once it enters a swamp. At that point, sediment and other heavy pollutants settle to the bottom. Swamps are thus ideal for holding back sediment and preventing erosion. Slowing the water also allows papyrus and other plants in a filter swamp to take up and use nutrients. Nutrients and metals can attach to the sediments that settle out of the water. In this case, who knows—the sacred sedge may someday save Egypt from the hand of man.
Meanwhile, there are parts of the delta where pollution seriously affects people’s health. In 2005 Dr. Amr Soliman, of the University of Michigan School of Public Health, identified a high incident rate of pancreatic cancer in the northeast Nile Delta region. The culprit was traced to the high levels of cadmium from industrial waste showing up in the local soil, water, and fish. This area has one of the highest levels of pollution in Egypt.
Over time, cadmium accumulates in the body because there are no specific mechanisms for its removal. Its half-life in the body ranges from 10 to 30 years, with an average of 15 years. The serum cadmium levels of residents in the northeast delta region were almost 10 times higher than those of residents from cadmium-polluted areas in Cairo, and 32 times higher than reference levels for healthy populations in the United States. This indicates that the water treatment for heavy metals in Egypt is sporadic and that there is an immediate need for cadmium-reduction measures to be put in place. It also calls into question the numbers of people adequately served by treated water. One study, quoted by Susanna Myllylä, a lecturer in Environment at the University of Tampere in Finland, said the official numbers are overestimated and that at least 23% of Cairenes lack access to safe and adequate water supplies.
In the case of water, the alternatives hinted at by Dr. Hassanein were voiced in a report commissioned by the Habi Center for Environmental Rights, which stated that every year some 17,000 children die from gastroenteritis caused by polluted water.5 The report also indicated that kidney failure, likely caused by the same polluted drinking water, is four times higher in Egypt than in the rest of the world. Heavy-metal poisoning from polluted water over the long term is already taking its toll in the delta. The danger posed to people eating contaminated fish and drinking contaminated local water was spelled out in 1994 in an assessment carried out by a team from George Washington University and the Smithsonian Institute. They advised that until potentially toxic metals in the drain water and sediments were removed or drastically reduced, fishermen should refrain from raising or catching fish in Lake Manzala, and also advised a prohibition on farming any reclaimed bottomland along the lake edge, both things increasing Egypt’s already heavy dependence on imported foodstuffs.
In the future, cadmium and other heavy metals may be on the rise in the Nile due to yet another new pollution threat upstream: oil drilling. Significant discoveries have been made in Sudan amounting to almost 7 billion barrels, in addition to 6 billion in Uganda. Both discoveries could have long-term effects on Nile water since cadmium is one of the heavy metals found in what is called “found water,” or “produced formation water,” deep groundwater that comes from wells during the process of drilling.
One concern is Block 5A in Sudan, a concession that straddles the swamps of the White Nile. Also worrisome are the Ugandan oil fields that are located in and around Lake Albert, one of the sources of the White Nile.
Although papyrus is absent today from the Egyptian Nile, Egypt is fortunate that millions of acres of papyrus swamp are still acting as one of the largest filter swamps in the world upriver in the Sudd. The wetlands there take up significant amounts of nutrients and act as a buffer to pollution well before the water reaches the main Nile at Malakal. It was therefore a disappointment to hear that, with Egypt’s support, plans have been made to dry out these swamps. Egypt wants the water to be diverted directly into the Nile rather than to stay in the wetlands, wetlands that many local people depend on for their living. That way, Egypt increases the water available in the Nile for its use, but at the expense of the people living in and around the swamps—who, by the way, were very upset by the idea. It did not come as any surprise to find out that this wholesale diversion of water was one of the causes of a war in the Sudan, a war in which papyrus once again found itself in the middle.