by Bonine, Michael E. ; Amanat, Abbas; Gasper, Michael Ezekiel
Figure 8.1. Camel bones in southern Morocco. Photo by the author.
Recent scientific research has questioned the rate and extent of deforestation and desertification in the region as well as the assumed destructiveness of grazing. This new research argues that much of the arid environment of the Middle East is remarkably resilient rather than fragile, as it has been portrayed for a long time.1 The extensive grazing systems of nomadic pastoralists, in fact, have been shown to be the most environmentally appropriate and sustainable land uses for large areas of the Middle East. Despite this new evidence, the conventional environmental history of a desertified landscape persists, in large part because it is frequently politically expedient. Such environmental crisis narratives are very useful to raise international funds, to justify the control of local populations (the sedentarization of nomads, for example), and to help shape national development plans.2 This chapter provides an overview of several of the mainstream environmental histories of the Middle East and explores the primary documentation on which they are based. It argues that such conventional environmental narratives were constructed and used by colonial powers in large part to dominate many states in the Middle East, to justify the appropriation and extraction of resources (especially land), and to control local populations. The continued use of this environmental narrative by Western and Middle Eastern powers today raises interesting geopolitical and geoeconomic questions.
Before the technology was developed in the mid-twentieth century to scientifically reconstruct past vegetation through the analysis of proxy data such as fossil pollen, environmental history relied primarily on the written word. It was very common, therefore, for Europeans in foreign lands, especially in the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East, to compare what they saw in the landscape with what they had read about in the works of the ancient authors of the classical world and in holy books or to what they had seen rendered in paintings and sketches (Figure 8.2). They incorrectly interpreted widespread and often splendid ruins from earlier times as proof that larger populations had enjoyed a much more fertile and productive environment in the past. They then assumed that destructive practices of local populations had ruined the environment.
Figure 8.2. Fords of the Jordan by A. W. Calcott. Horne, Landscape Illustrations of the Bible: Consisting of the Most Remarkable Places Mentioned in the Old and New Testaments, 1836, p. 17.
The fact that the idea of geologic time, spanning millions of years, was not widespread until the mid- to late nineteenth century meant that past climate changes were grossly misunderstood. The Sahara desert, for example, we know now was indeed much wetter between 6500 B.C.E. and 4500 B.C.E., during which time it supported a great deal of savanna woodland vegetation, many lakes, and large mammals such as hippopotami. After this period, however, a drying trend occurred, and the Sahara gradually transformed into the great desert it is today by about 1500 B.C.E.3 In a worldview constrained by the conception of biblical time, however, these huge shifts in climate appeared to have taken place in only a few thousand, or a few hundred, years because the world was believed to be only about six thousand years old. The publication of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in 1830 and then Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, of course, helped to change this conception of time, making it possible to consider a significantly longer history of the planet by the end of the nineteenth century.
The framework for the conventional environmental narrative of ruin and decay in the region had already been formed by the mid-nineteenth century, though, and it was not much changed by this new knowledge and these important intellectual innovations. Thus, in 1909, it is not surprising that T. E. Lawrence could write to his mother from Palestine that “it is such a comfort to know that the country was not a bit like this in the time of our Lord. The Renaissance painters were right who drew him and his disciples feasting in a pillared hall, or sunning themselves on marble staircases: everywhere one finds the remains of splendid Roman roads and houses and public buildings.... [T]he country was well-peopled, and well-watered ... [and] ... they did not come upon dirty, dilapidated Bedouin tents.... Palestine was a decent country then, and so could easily be made so again.”4 (See Figure 8.3.)
The idea that the Mediterranean region and the Middle East were ruined landscapes in need of resurrection became very popular among Europeans in the nineteenth century. By constructing the environmental history of an environment degraded by centuries or millennia of neglect and abuse, European powers also frequently concocted justifications for colonial policies and laws in many of these lands. What I call here a declensionist environmental narrative, that is, an environmental history of degradation, was one of the central leitmotifs in the discourse of European imperialism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cyprus, for example, came under the control of the British in 1878 in part because the British claimed they could manage the island better than the Cypriots and, in particular, save the forests.5
Figure 8.3. Bedouin tents. Elmendorf, A Camera Crusade Through the Holy Land, 1912, plate lxiv.
Most of the arguments for a ruined, deforested, and desertified landscape in the Middle East rested on the assumption that about two thousand to three thousand years ago the region was substantially more forested, and therefore more fertile, and less eroded. What the paleoecological evidence shows, however, is that the most significant changes in vegetation, especially arboreal vegetation, took place six thousand to ten thousand years ago, millennia before the period most commonly identified as the one during which the local peoples destroyed the land.
In the Levant, for example, existing evidence shows that the most significant changes in vegetation took place between eight thousand and twelve thousand years ago as the climate warmed.6 In this part of the Middle East, tree cover declined abruptly after the end of the last ice age and then fluctuated, sometimes greatly, for the next several thousand years. Some species, such as deciduous oak, appear to have declined fairly consistently, whereas others, such as evergreen oak and pine, have experienced large increases and decreases periodically and an overall increase in the last couple of thousand years. Cedar, however, declined dramatically at the end of the Pleistocene and never recovered, leading some to argue that it is a relict species from the last glacial period. And yet the presumed destruction of cedar forests has provoked some of the most woeful lamentations and vitriolic condemnations of local peoples in discussions of environmental history in the Levant since the nineteenth century.7
Some of these changes in tree species may have been influenced by human activity to a certain degree, but they were also certainly influenced by changes in climate over the last ten thousand years. The climate in the Mediterranean basin has experienced a slow warming and drying trend since the last ice age, but it has also experienced several significant wet periods during this time. The overall pattern was of oscillating humid and dry conditions until about 1000 B.C.E. or 1500 B.C.E. when it is widely agreed that the climate and most vegetation conditions stabilized in the more arid pattern still found today (see Figure 8.4).8 The changes in vegetation over the last two thousand to three thousand years, therefore, are not nearly as significant as they were believed to have been during the colonial period.
In the Maghreb, where more paleoecological evidence is available, pollen core analysis shows that the significant changes in vegetation occurred about eight thousand years ago when trees and some shrubs increased dramatically after the end of the last ice age.9 Although there have been declines and increases in various species over the last several thousand years, the evidence does not support the widespread belief, as commonly claimed during the French colonial period, that between 50 percent and 80 percent of North Africa’s original forest cover has been deforested since the Roman era.
DESERT WASTES OF THE MAGHREB
One of the earliest examples of the construction and utilization of a declen-sionist environmental narrative to justify and facilitate colonial rule is found in French No
rth Africa. Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco were well known to many in France and the rest of Europe as fertile lands long before the 1830 conquest of Algiers inaugurated the French colonial project in North Africa. Until the mid-1830s, the most common environmental narrative of North Africa was a benign one of a lapsed fertility blamed on local negligence and Ottoman ineptitude rather than a narrative of willful destruction by local peoples. By the time the French had conquered Algeria and incorporated it as a province of France in 1848, however, this narrative began to change to one of environmental destruction, and subsequent desiccation, by the “natives,” especially by the nomadic pastoralists who formed the majority of the population in the early nineteenth century. This declensionist narrative was refined over the course of the nineteenth century and used widely, not only in Algeria but also in Tunisia and Morocco as they were occupied by the French, to execute many imperial goals.10
Figure 8.4. Fossil pollen diagram from a core taken in the Middle Atlas, Morocco, showing the changing levels of plant pollen over the last 14,000 years. Diagram by the author after Lamb, Eicher, and Switsur, “An 18,000-Year Record of Vegetation” (1989), 65–74.
Both the precolonial and the colonial narratives commonly assumed that in the past North Africa had been “the most fertile region of the world,” a belief instilled primarily by familiar French readings of classical sources.11Many authors claimed that North Africa had been the granary of Rome. Partisans supported this interpretation by arguing that the numerous Roman ruins found in North Africa proved that large populations had thrived in a more fertile environment (Figure 8.5).12 Such a view was given official sanction and became very widespread by its repeated iteration in such official government publications as, among many others, the monumental and highly influential Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie. In 1847, for instance, one of the contributing authors to this compendium, a physician, wrote that “this land, once the object of intensive cultivation, was neither deforested nor depopulated as today.... [I]t was the abundant granary of Rome.”13 This particular quote also reveals some of the key negative changes that began to be made to the narrative early in the colonial period.
The colonial environmental narrative, by the 1860s, had evolved to place the blame for the assumed deforestation and desertification of North Africa on the “hordes” of Arab nomads and their ravenous herds. From mid-century onward, the most common version of the colonial narrative attributed the onset of environmental destruction to the “Arab invasions” of the seventh and eleventh centuries. The Hillalian “tribal invasion” of the eleventh century was especially condemned for the presumed destruction it wreaked on cities and the natural environment alike. The French drew selectively on medieval Arab historians for their evidence of the devastation of North Africa’s environment by Arab nomads and their flocks over the previous eight centuries. Carefully chosen parts of the writings of Ibn Khaldun, in particular, were used to portray negatively Arab nomads and their “destruction,” despite the fact that Ibn Khaldun actually wrote about nomads in a very complex way, praising them as well as condemning them. As a result, Ibn Khaldun was widely and frequently cited as proof that, in the words of the influential geographer Augustin Bernard, “the Arabs have been fatal... by their way of life and their habits; it is their sheep, their camels, their goats that have ruined North Africa.”14
The contemporary pastoralists that the French encountered when they occupied North Africa were assumed to be the direct descendants of these eleventh-century “invaders,” and their “destructive habits” were said to have been passed down with each generation, further damaging the environment during the intervening centuries. This narrative became ubiquitous and very powerful in Algeria by 1870 and was applied liberally in both Tunisia and Morocco, as they were occupied in 1881 and 1912, respectively. The narrative remained influential into the independence period of the mid-twentieth century. During the centennial celebrations of France’s victory over Algeria, for example, a government publication on the history of Tunisia proclaimed that “the profound convulsions that since the Roman era have upset the country: the passage of the Arab armies and later the Hillalian tribal invasion ... have
Figure 8.5. Photo of Roman ruins at Cuicul, Djemila, Algeria. The original caption reads, “Numerous monumental arches mark the ruins of the ancient Cuicul, Djemila, magnificent evidence of Roman power in Africa. In the midst of a country then wooded, it was a vacation and summer holiday town.” Alzonne, Clément L’Algérie, 1937, p. 6. Courtesy of the author. made of this country a desert strewn with ruins which, however, attest to its ancient prosperity.”15
Just as historical research has shown that the land in North Africa produced no more, and in fact less, grain during the Roman period than it did during the colonial period, contemporary research in arid lands ecology and pastoral studies highlights the fact that traditional land uses, particularly extensive grazing, are not inherently destructive.16 Many experts have concluded, contrary to colonial claims, that Roman overcultivation was followed by “a phase of relative soil conservation and vegetative regeneration with the more nomadic land use system of the Arabs.”17 Equally important, paleo-ecological studies have not provided evidence of massive deforestation over the last two millennia, as was commonly claimed during the colonial period.18Rather, the majority of deforestation that has been documented in fact resulted from European activities during the colonial period itself, especially from 1880 to 1930 when the colonial narrative was at its apogee.
This declensionist environmental narrative was constructed slowly beginning in the early part of the colonial period primarily to facilitate particular colonial objectives such as the acquisition of land and resources as well as to control the local populations. As the pastoralists and their herds were increasingly blamed for irrationally destroying forests and for creating deserts, it became easier for the administration and colonists to justify the confiscation of much of their land, including forests, in the name of environmental protection or increased productivity. One of the most important and effective ways this was accomplished was through the passage of new forestry, land use, and land tenure laws.
As early as 1838, for example, new laws were passed in Algeria that outlawed, for environmental reasons, the burning of any trees or scrub. By 1846 this law was expanded to include the burning of any agricultural land, and the fines and penalties were raised steeply.19 Criminalizing these ecologically appropriate land uses severely curtailed the livelihoods of many Algerians who depended on the traditional technique of burning in and near forests to prepare agricultural land as well as to create better pastures for livestock. Increasingly draconian forest laws, justified with the declensionist narrative, were passed in 1874 and 1885 that criminalized nearly all indigenous uses of the forests. The colonial environmental narrative itself was actually incorporated into the 1903 Algerian Forest Law, the earliest and most comprehensive of the French colonial forest laws.20 Similarly wide-ranging and socially detrimental laws invoking the declensionist narrative were passed in the name of environmental protection in all of the Maghreb territories until the end of the colonial period.
Land tenure laws also depended heavily on the colonial environmental narrative for their justification and passage. One of the most infamous of these laws was the 1873 Warnier Law, although earlier laws had also invoked all or part of the narrative, including the 1851 land law. The Warnier Law utilized the declensionist narrative for much of its justification, claiming that nomads (and all those who held collective property) wreaked environmental destruction wherever they went. This law provided the mechanism that allowed collective property of the nomadic pastoralists and others to be transformed into private property and thereby made into a commodity to be easily sold.21 As a result of this law, most of what remained of “collective tribal land” in Algeria was dismembered. Much of this land was sold to settlers, but a substantial amount was also confiscated by the state on the grounds that it was being “wasted.” This law provid
ed the precedent for several subsequent land tenure laws in Algeria, and as a result of these laws, the Algerians lost about 75 percent of the best agricultural land to European colonists and the state by the end of the colonial period. Very similar laws, using the same justifications based on the declensionist narrative, that were passed in Tunisia and Morocco had comparable effects. These laws, and others that invoked the environmental narrative, also led to the pauperization and immiseration of a large portion of the North African population, profoundly disrupting their traditional livelihoods and resulting in their proletarianization.22
This colonial environmental narrative of the Maghreb became deeply entrenched in many official publications written during the colonial period, including forestry and agricultural manuals, histories, and botanical treatises, not only in Algeria but also in Tunisia and Morocco. By the 1930s and 1940s, the declensionist narrative had been formalized, quantified, and institutionalized in the science of plant ecology across the Maghreb.23 These publications ensured the long legacy of the colonial narrative because much subsequent education, research, and policy formulation relied heavily on these ecological and historical works imbued with the declensionist narrative, including, for example, inaccurate deforestation statistics. The resulting environmental history was widely accepted by the postcolonial governments of North Africa and has become the dominant environmental history of the region still in widespread use today.
