The Middle East and North Africa are home to some of the world's largest deserts, and much of the terrain in the region could be characterized as dryland. Therefore, despite the wide overall diversity in Middle Eastern environments, it is only to be expected that this region of the world is often associated with arid landscapes. Yet this association becomes problematic when we consider the implications of common beliefs about deserts, their origins, and their potential uses, especially since those beliefs have largely been shaped by writers, scientists, and politicians hailing from the radically different environments of European states that possessed the military, political, and economic power to reshape Middle Eastern ecologies.
In The Arid Lands, Diana K. Davis dismantles the pernicious view that the desert is a wasteland produced by the detrimental practices of long-standing communities of the dryland. She traces the genealogy and impacts of European views of arid spaces with clarity and depth, offering a convincing narrative of the desert's cultural and political history. From antiquity to the present, the desert, once held as a natural geographical feature, became increasingly viewed in a negative light over the course of the early modern period, culminating in late 19th- and 20th- century attempts to combat “desertification” via afforestation and to increase the agricultural productivity of dryland environments outside of Europe.
The argument of The Arid Lands is bolstered by two fairly recent scholarly developments. First, in contrast with earlier views of desertification, new research shows that arid environments are more resilient than previously believed and that deserts are not growing at formerly predicted rates. And second, 20th-century experiences with technocratic dryland farming in particular have revealed that some of the most severe forms of soil degradation have been driven not by “traditional” uses of land but rather by large-scale government and commercial projects. Davis takes the conversation in a bold direction, arguing that the expansion and contraction of the desert is primarily a function of climate and rainfall, thereby calling into question European ideas about deserts that have justified centuries of ecological intervention throughout the world.
Davis charts thinking about the desert from Herodotus, early Christianity, and medieval Europe into the period of the Columbian Exchange (1450–1900) and up to the present. As Davis demonstrates, the period of the Columbian Exchange saw a major shift in Western understandings of the desert. Desiccation theory, which accompanied the rise of capitalism and colonialism, forged “tenacious bonds between forests and deserts” in the European imagination (p. 49). Europeans saw arid land as deforested (whether it actually was or not) and imagined the best solution to be restoration of old forests. These conceptual links buttressed the argument that populations of arid regions had therefore contributed to deforestation and the formation of deserts through practices such as swiddening and nomadic pastoralism. In colonial settings on every continent, stigmatization of local forms of land use justified the usurpation of land and the introduction of what sometimes turned out to be ecologically destructive policies. In a discussion of the desiccation “blame game” in Chapter 4, Davis gives special attention to the British Empire and French colonialism in North Africa. She shows that Edenic conceptions of lush idealized environments formulated in Europe had significant effects not only on environments of the colonial world but also on the rationale of postcolonial nation-states that took the prevailing science as a point of departure in formulating agrarian policy. Chapter 5 brings the history of desert imaginaries full circle with the globalization of ecology during the period of decolonization and the framing of desertification as an international problem under UNESCO.
In addition to providing a vivid account of how environments are culturally constructed, The Arid Lands also deploys a political ecology perspective that asks “who wins and who loses when an environmental story is told a certain way” (p. 174). Whereas the recent history of the desert has sidelined the ecological autonomy of local actors, Davis encourages us to take local knowledge seriously, not for the sake of “romanticizing it or nostalgically turning back the clock to a ‘better,’ more natural period in the past,” but instead to reenfranchize the marginalized inhabitants of the dryland in the quest for alternative solutions to questions of contemporary land use (p. 170). One of the achievements of this work is its synthesis of primary and secondary literature concerning deserts throughout the world and its demonstration of global connections between arid environments bound together by the policies of modern states and networks of scientific knowledge. A most interesting example occurs in Chapter 3 with the Landes de Gascogne in southwestern France. After the invasion of Algeria, this region came to be called the “Sahara of France” and was subjected to a sustained and lasting afforestation project, the impact of which seemed in turn to demonstrate the efficacy of afforestation policies that would be employed in Algeria and elsewhere.
Building on Davis's earlier work on environment and empire in French Algeria entitled Resurrecting the Granary of Rome (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2007), The Arid Lands is an especially valuable contribution to the study of the Middle East and its environmental history. This work exemplifies the importance of the cultural history of environment within the historiography of the Middle East and should serve as a starting point for studying environmental policies of the states of the Middle East and North Africa today. This being said, the narrative of the The Arid Lands focuses on the genealogy of European ideas, and thus, Davis has left some work to be done regarding the specifics of views of the desert from non-Western contexts. Classical Arabic poetry or medieval Islamic geographies and compendia may provide complements or counterexamples to the Greek, Roman, early Christian, and medieval European views of the desert discussed in The Arid Lands. Similarly, we are left wondering about possible divergence, convergence, or cross-pollination between non-European agrarian empires of the early modern period during the Columbian Exchange. There are some enticing examples in The Arid Lands, such as the possible influence of Chinese cartography on early modern European depictions of the desert. But it is unclear if the imperial forerunners to British and French colonialism—the Ottomans and Mughals—differed in their conceptions of the arid regions over which they ruled or if they too experienced a transformation in these conceptions over time. It is unfair to decry this omission since it is perhaps beyond its scope and the extant historiography does not offer a wealth of clues. However, with regard to the Ottoman case, researchers will find it worthwhile to study Ottoman understandings of geography and the legal category of mevat or “dead” land, and they should expect to encounter 19th-century transformations that can be compared and contrasted with the desiccation theory of European colonialism.
The Arid Lands offers a resounding critique of European knowledge-power and its lasting impact on the environments of postcolonial states written in a style that is highly accessible to the uninitiated reader. It is essential reading not just for environmental historians of the Middle East but also for students of global policy and development, in which many of the fraught understandings of deserts and local ecological practices persist. The ecological follies of European empires should be especially relevant in an era of increased concern about anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation during which the arid environments of the Middle East may prove both ecologically and politically vulnerable.
