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Power, Knowledge, and Environmental History in the Middle East and North Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2010

Diana K. Davis
Diana K. Davis*
Affiliation:
History Department, University of California, Davis, Calif.; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

To consider in what ways incorporating the emerging field of environmental history into studies of the Middle East challenges our views of the past and/or present, it is necessary first to take stock of our mainstream notions of the environment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and how we think it has changed over the last several thousand years. The most common received wisdom about the environment in the MENA is that it is an arid, marginal environment, in many places a wasteland degraded by overgrazing and deforestation for hundreds if not thousands of years. The local populations, especially nomads and small farmers, are frequently blamed for the alleged environmental ruin. Born in large part of Western imperialism in the region, this environmental imaginary of the MENA has been uncritically adopted by the majority of postindependence ruling elites as well as development agencies.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , November 2010 , pp. 657 - 659
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

NOTES

1 I thank Omnia El Shakry, James Housefield, Ian Manners, and Jeannie Sowers for their insightful comments on this essay.

2 Davis, Diana K., “The Middle East,” in Encyclopedia of World Environmental History, ed. Krech, Shepard, McNeill, J. R., and Merchant, Carolyn (New York: Routledge, 2003), 840–44Google Scholar. See also idem, “Scorched Earth: The Problematic Environmental History That Defines the Middle East,” in Is There a Middle East? ed. Abbas Amanat, Michael Bonine, and Michael Gasper (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, forthcoming).

3 For a discussion of arid lands, pastoral ecology, and nonequilibrium environments, see Adams, William M., Green Development: Environment and Sustainability in a Developing World, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2009), chap. 8Google Scholar. See also Perevolotsky, Avi and Seligman, No'am, “Role of Grazing in Mediterranean Rangeland Ecosystems,” BioScience 48 (1998): 1007–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 For a few examples, see Leach, Melissa and Mearns, Robin, eds., The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment (London: The International African Institute, 1996)Google Scholar; Arnold, David, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)Google Scholar; Grove, A. T. (Dick) and Rackham, Oliver, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Showers, Kate B., Imperial Gullies: Soil Erosion and Conservation in Lesotho (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Davis, Diana K., Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; and Bassett, Thomas J. and Crummey, Donald, eds., African Savannas: Global Narratives & Local Knowledge of Environmental Change (Oxford: James Currey, 2003)Google Scholar.

5 Davis, Diana K., “Introduction,” in Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East: History, Policy, Power & Practice, ed. Davis, Diana K. and Burke, Edmund III (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, under review)Google Scholar.

6 For an overview of some of these projects, see Rae, Jon, “Pastoralists, Present and Future: Rangeland Development in West Asia and North Africa,” in Grasslands: Developments, Opportunities, Perspectives, ed. Reynolds, S. G. and Frame, J. (Enfield, N.H.: Science Publishers and UNFAO, 2005), 383–99Google Scholar. See also Davis, Resurrecting.

7 For one notoriously determinist example, see Wittfogel, Karl, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957)Google Scholar.

8 Robbins, Paul, Political Ecology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 19Google Scholar. For more details on environmental determinism and the “environmentalist” approach to history, see Arnold, The Problem of Nature. For an example of this genre, see Semple, Ellen Churchill, The Geography of the Mediterranean Region: Its Relation to Ancient History (New York: AMS Press, 1971 [1931])Google Scholar.

9 Kaplan, Robert, “The Revenge of Geography,” Foreign Policy 172 (2009): 96–105Google Scholar. This generated many outraged responses, including Morissey, John, Dalby, Simon, Kearns, Gerry, et al. , “Geography Writes Back: Response to Kaplan's The Revenge of Geography,” Human Geography 2 (2009): 33–51Google Scholar. See also Kearns, Gerry, “The Descent of Darwin,” Environment and Planning A 42 (2010): 257–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.