Diana K. Davis, Edmund Burke, eds. Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa. Athens Ohio University Press, 2011.
Diana K. Davis, Edmund Burke, eds. Environmental Imaginaries of the
Middle East and North Africa. Athens
Ohio University Press, 2011.
xiv + 286 pp.
$59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8214-1974-8.
Reviewed by Dan Tamir (University of Zurich)
Published on H-Environment (January, 2013)
Commissioned by Dolly Jørgensen
Imaginaries are not made of words and thoughts only, but
out of very
practical, material things as well. As Edmund Burke III
argues in the
preface to this book, "What made environmental
orientalism and the
'rule of experts' possible were the new energetic
conditions of
modern times. The production of environmental imaginaries
(capitalism
and the modern state as well) grew out of this epochal
transformation
in human energy regimes" (p. xi). Energy
regimes--the old one, until
nineteenth century, which was based solely on the renewing
annual
cycle of the sun, and the new one, which brought into the
human
sphere the enormous wealth of fossil fuels--are the
unseen thread
running through human history. This is an excellent
beginning for
every history book.
Diana K. Davis continues the opening of the volume by
reminding us
that imperial environmental narratives shaped the
discipline of
ecology as it was forming during the late nineteenth and
early
twentieth centuries, not only in Europe's colonies but in
the
empires' cores too. Some of these narratives became so
deeply rooted
and embedded in the ecological science, that
environmental
orientalism in the Middle East and North Africa has
hardly been
investigated systematically for "the hidden
relations of power rooted
in its very specific forms of knowledge production"
(p. 4). Still,
this book shows a more complex and elaborate image than
the
"classical" (anti-)orientalistic paradigm
juxtaposing cruel cunning
"Occidentals" against helpless native
"Orientals."
The volume's first chapter, by Priya Satia, describes how
Arabia--a
term which during the early decades of the twentieth
century mostly
referred to today's Iraq--was imagined by British
colonial officers
as a country out of space and out of time and therefore
was
considered a perfect testing ground for new military
technologies
(Satia focuses mostly on the airplane). New technologies
were meant
to meet specific cultural needs of the modernizing
British society,
through "development" of the newly conquered
lands. Developmentalism,
therefore, was not a post-WWII invention implemented
primarily in
Africa, but was already present in the politics and the
administration of interwar Iraq. The restoration of the
cradle of
civilization in Iraq--which was perceived as a wild,
barren,
devastated land, declined from its historic
glory--provided the stage
for the birth of a British "new man," indeed a
whole new humanity (p.
33). Altogether, then, interwar Iraq can be seen as the
first in a
series of colonial modernization projects which were
undertaken in so
many places in Asia and Africa during the twentieth
century.
A somewhat different kind of restoration is presented by
Diana Davis
in her chapter about French settlers in North Africa. For
the French
living in Algeria, it took only a few decades during the
nineteenth
century to perceive the restoration of the allegedly
ruined
environment back to its ancient Roman prosperity and
fertility as a
key element in their collective colonial identity. This
environmental
mission was part of a wider narrative of the French
settlers, in
which they saw themselves as the legitimate heirs of the
Roman
Empire, and hence legitimate rulers of North Africa. This
narrative,
in turn, supported the French in dispossessing local
people in
Algeria (and later in Tunisia and Morocco, too) from
their property,
confiscating their forests and pastures, changing
centuries-old
agricultural methods and traditions. Altogether, Davis
argues,
looking to Roman examples and claiming Roman heritage
helped guide
the settlers in their war of conquest, in developing
agricultural
improvement plans, in forcing nomads to become sedentary,
and in
constructing their distinct colonial identity as
"Latin Africans" (p.
75). This special
feature made French colonialism in North Africa
unique: the belief that the "degraded"
environment there could
relatively easily be brought back to its former
productivity "sets
the French experience with nature there apart from the
vast majority
of European colonial experience with nature around the
globe" (p.
76). Rather than taming a new, wild environment, the
French in North
Africa saw themselves as heirs and restorers of an
ancient Roman
landscape.
Complementing this attitude to North Africa, George R.
Trumbull
argues that geographic and economic representations of
the
environment--especially water--operated as categories of
knowledge.
This knowledge "ultimately served to open up the
Sahara as a
reimagined, utilitarian space for new, technological
forms of
empire": road paving, drilling, extraction, and
irrigation. The
French colonists, however, "neither knew all, nor
encompassed all,
nor permeated all" in what concerns the vast deserts
of the region
(p. 88). While in more temperate regions misunderstanding
the
environment may cause surmountable problems in the long
run, in a
rocky desert such misunderstandings can become lethal
very quickly.
Therefore, the French who strove to colonize the Sahara
soon had to
deal with the great contradiction between the imagined desert
they
had in their minds ("a pack of lies," Trumbull
quotes Suzanne Normand
and Jean Acker's statement from 1957, p. 106) and the
real desert
they met.
Similar problems in such an arid climate also occurred in
Egypt. In
an article going back to records from the seventeenth
century, Alan
Mikhail shows how "controlling, sharing and using
water both
necessitated and fostered cooperation" between
peasants, local
bureaucrats, and the central government of Egypt (p.
116). While
peasant and imperial interests were not always similar,
the
"cooperative and contested negotiations over
environmental resource
management" shaped a kind of environmental imaginary
that included
"notions of community, responsibility, precedent and
resource
allocation" (p. 116).
Precedents, it seems, were central to the Ottoman system,
as "the
Ottoman state attempted to prevent environmental change
from
dictating its imperial rule" (p. 127). Such reliance
on tradition is
probably a central element in environmental systems
rooted in the old
energy regime. In this aspect, Mikhail's article is
unique, as it is
the only one in this volume investigating a society which
functioned
totally within the old energy regime, lacking any fossil
fuels.
This huge difference between the old, pre-fossil fuels
energy regime,
and the new one, which is based on the burning of fossils
with all
its benefits--becomes evident by reading the next
chapter, in which
Jennifer Derr tells the story of the first Aswan Dam,
built in 1902,
using novel techniques and new machinery, unavailable in
the
seventeenth century. The 1902 dam, Derr argues, was a
central element
in configuring Egypt as a British colony, shaping
Egyptian
agricultural geography. Building and maintaining this
great
technological structuret enabled the rulers to
shape--largely in
their imagination, but to a certain extent also
practically--an
agricultural geography "made of fixed and passive
crops, water usage
patterns and irrigation infrastructure," devoid of
any human actors.
Here is an early example of how people and their labor
become
redundant within the new energy regime. In a similar
vein, this
project, "intended as a demonstration of humankind's
ability to
harness science to manipulate the environment," (p.
151) makes an
excellent example of the way modern colonialism was
linked to new
methods of energy usage.
The 1902 Aswan dam was only the first in a series of
attempts at
irrigating the Egyptian desert. After the construction of
the much
larger Nasser dam in the mid-twentieth century, the
Mubarak regime
initiated yet another project meant to make the Egyptian
desert
bloom: the "New Valley" project. In her chapter
about this grandiose
initiative, Jeannie Sowers shows how three different
"story lines"
shape contemporary environmental discourse in Egypt: the
first
official story line is one of ecologic-demographic
crisis, seeing a
rapidly growing population in need of food and water
supply; a second
is one of experts who see water scarcity and water
pollution; and
last but not least is the fact that while the official
stories are
governmental ones, most of the recent land reclamation
was done by
private farmers and big agribusiness companies (pp.
160-161).
This is actually a particular case of a universal
phenomenon:
Egyptian reliance on large-scale infrastructure and
state-driven
development planning, Sowers argues, was based on the
faith in
modernist development schemes which were prevalent during
the
twentieth century across the world, including collective
projects in
Stalin's USSR and the Zionist projects of irrigation in
Israel (the
latter is discussed in one of the following
chapters).Taken together,
the three chapters about Egypt give a good diachronic
view of the
development of environmental perceptions in this country
fed by the
Nile over the past four centuries until today, after the
ousting of
Hosni Mubarak and the establishment of a new regime.
The environmental perceptions and the social impacts of
another large
irrigation project are examined in the chapter written by
Leila
Harris about the Harran plain in southeastern Turkey. In
this
chapter, Harris shows how different environmental
imaginaries do not
always diverge one from another, but may sometimes also
converge.
Environmental actors--whether citizens, states, NGOs, or
businesses--do not act in a void, but rather in a
changing, dynamic
sphere, influenced by various factors. Environmental
narratives,
therefore, also "need to be assessed, evaluated and
understood in
relation to key contextual issues," that is, not
only as stable,
unchanging positions, but as evolving and changing with
time (p.
194). Harris shows how both farmers' attitudes towards
the irrigation
projects and their actions changed over time, not always
contradicting the views of central planners but also
adopting parts
of it, in a "hybridized" manner (p. 204).
Harris thus breaks the
simplistic (and too frequent) habit of framing
agricultural-environmental changes within the pattern of
local
farmers versus a central government. Harris summarizes
her chapter
arguing in favor of "a contextual approach,
attentive to social,
cultural and economic processes as crucial for
interpreting the
complex mapping of narratives and imaginaries" (p.
208).
Back to the south, the Jordan river and its rift--as
Ze'eb Jabotinsky
justly claimed--is the axis and the connecting point of
Palestine,
and a central environmental feature in the geography of
the region.
Samer Alatout brings a comparative study of three plans
for the
development and the usage of the Jordan river from the
1950s. These
three plans--the U.S. Johnston plan, the "Arab"
plan, and the Israeli
plan--referred to more than merely irrigation. While officially
all
were dealing with the question of water allocation, the
three plans
were based on three different environmental perceptions.
Johnston's
initial plan, based on "natural" gravity of the
watershed, was aimed
at depoliticizing water management while granting
legitimacy to
regional cooperation between Jordan, Syria, and Israel.
The Arab plan
argued in favor of granting the right to use water
originating in
"Arab" territories to states which are part of
the primordial,
supraterritorial Arab nation--Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
The Israeli
plan, in contrast, emphasized the importance of the state
within its
international boundaries in distributing the waters
within its
borders.
The volume's last chapter, written by Shaul Cohen,
focuses on
national ideologies in the land west of the Jordan river.
Cohen
argues that unfortunately for both Israeli and
Palestinian
communities in this land, "there is only one
question, and that is
the national one" (p. 246). Environmentalism, therefore,
exists
publicly only within the particular national context.
This is not to
say that environmental voices are not heard, but that
they are
"measured against a metric of nationhood that can
make them
significant in symbolic ways, but politically lacking in
power" (pp.
246-247). As Palestinian and Israeli environmental
attitudes are
subjected to competing national narratives, they almost
automatically
become not only different but even contradictory. The
reason for
that? "Neither community," Cohen concludes,
"has attained the degree
of security necessary for there to be a meaningful
environmentalism,
that is, a movement that engages environmental challenges
without
defaulting to security or identity concerns along
parochial lines"
(p. 259). With a bit of a hope for the future, he opines
that perhaps
when concerns about security and identity are addressed
for both
national communities, a shared imaginary of the
environment can begin
to emerge.
"What is an environmental imaginary?," asks
Timothy Mitchell in the
volume's afterword (p. 267). Such imaginaries, he claims,
are
manifest not only by what people write or say, but by the
things they
do and the ways in which they act. The great contribution
of this
volume is probably exactly here, in examining not only
writings or
abstract ideas but practical projects through which human
perception
of the environment becomes manifest: irrigation systems,
forests,
airfields, court decisions, and manual labor. Imaginaries,
in this
sense, are very real.
Mitchell draws our attention to two important points.
First, that we
should remember that environmental imaginaries are not
stable things;
they can sometimes collapse quite suddenly, and give way
to different
and even rival visions. Second, Mitchell questions the
perceived
duality of "nature" versus "culture."
The human methods and practices
of dealing with the physical environment can, in his
opinion, be
referred to both as "natural construction" and
as "cultural
construction" (p. 271). In other words, taking into
account the
impact of humans on the environment, we should question
the mere
distinction between "natural" and
"cultural." A better question we
could ask is, what combination of human and nonhuman
forces, "of the
planned and the unintentional, of the freely imagined and
the
recalcitrant," makes the construction and
strengthening of our
knowledge about the common world possible (p. 272)? It is
therefore
not a coincidence that Mitchell chooses to conclude his
afterword by
referring to petroleum: the natural resource which
became, in the
hands of cultivated humans, the most important factor in
shaping our
planet during the past century.
Altogether, this well-edited volume can be helpful both
for scholars
who would like to focus on particular geographic areas of
the Middle
East and North Africa, and for those interested in a
wider view of
this region's history. By questioning dichotomies built
by
"orientalist" and "postcolonial"
scholars alike, the articles
gathered in this volume offer a fresh and unusual
perception of the
region and its history during the past two hundred years.
Taking into
account the fact that the environment is always a human
one, these
questions should be asked not only by environmental
historians, but
by sociologists, anthropologists, and--even more
important--political
activists in this region as well. It is essential for
understanding
what is going on there.
Citation: Dan Tamir. Review of Davis, Diana K.; Burke,
Edmund, eds.,
_Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North
Africa_.
H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. January, 2013.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United
States
License.