Abstract
Over the past centuries, intermittent droughts in the central plateau of Iran played a crucial role in social and cultural dynamics. The local communities responded to climate change with three different strategies, proportional to the magnitude of water scarcity. During a wet period, they expanded the area of their cultivated lands with a variety of crops and they let less lands lie fallow. When a year turned dry, they shrank the area of farmlands and let more lands lie fallow and resorted to a cropping pattern with lower water demand, and eventually modified their water division systems. With more environmental pressure, they put more focus on local industries, which could supplement their fickle agricultural economy. During the two former stages, population could be still fed and sustained by a mixed economy swaying between agriculture, local industries and trading. However, there was a third stage when aridness crossed the tolerance line of the society, and then even the offset economy did not help. In this case, part of the population began to overflow and migrate to the more favorable regions, spreading their skills already evolved under environmental strains. When a wet period followed the drought, the remaining population gradually returned to agriculture that brought about more food, and as a result population grew again. But the next drought came around and this cycle continued. This cycle can be called “drought pump” whose environmental and cultural mechanism will be examined in this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
Bichāre kasi ke shahr-e Yazdash vatan ast
Bichāre-tar ānk-e naghsh-bandish fan ast
Zin har do batar har ānke ahl-e sokhan ast
Nāchār kasi ke har se dārad cho man ast
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Labbaf Khaneiki, M. (2020). Drought Pump. In: Cultural Dynamics of Water in Iranian Civilization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58900-4_5
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