Diana K. Davis - The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge

The Arid Lands

History for a Sustainable Future

Michael Egan, series editor; Peter S. Alagona, Benjamin R.

Cohen, and Adam M. Sowards, associate editors

Derek Wall, The Commons in History: Culture, Conflict, and Ecology Frank Uektter, The Greenest Nation? A New History of GermanEnvironmentalism

Brett Bennett, Plantations and Protected Areas: A Global History ofForest Management

Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge

The Arid Lands

History, Power, Knowledge

Diana K. Davis

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Davis, Diana K.

Title: The arid lands : history, power, knowledge / Diana K. Davis.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, [2015] | Series: History for a sustainable future | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015039696 | ISBN 9780262034524 (hardcover : alk.

paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Deserts. | DesertsHistory. | Arid regions. | Desert ecology. |

Desert resources development.

Classification: LCC QH88 .D384 2015 | DDC 577.54dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039696

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

I dedicate this book to JEH, MBDH, and CADH. Always and forever. Also to my parents, Jan and David Davis, and to the

memory of David Hooson, wise mentor and friend.

Very little rain falls in the land of Assyria [Iraq]. Of all the lands that we know, this is far the most fertile for Demeters crop [grains].

Herodotus, c. 440 BCE

Present wastelands and sandy deserts were fertile lands in former ages

[and] the condition might be reversed.

George Hakewill, 1627

A single forest [planted in Arabia] in the middle of these burning deserts would be adequate to temper them, by leading rain to them.

Buffon, 1778

Before him lay original nature in her wild and sublime beauty. Behind him he leaves a desert, a deformed and ruined land.

Schleiden, 1848

Desertification is purely artificial. It [is] caused uniquely by human action.

Lavauden, 1927

The United Nations could be considered to have created desertification, the institutional myth.

Thomas and Middleton, 1994

Let deserts be.

El-Baz, 2008

Ergs are like waves in the desert and the desert is like the beach without the sea.

Max and Corbin, 2015

Illustrations

Figures

1.1 UNEP/UNCOD global desertification map 3

1.2 Failed reforestation in Morocco 6

1.3 Global Deserts and Drylands Map 11

1.4 Drylands Variability Map 16

2.1 Herodotuss world map 26

2.2 Macrobiuss zonal map 32

2.3 Detail of Ptolemys world map 46

3.1 Varenius, Geographia generalis , title page 58

3.2 Desert dot symbol, Ricci map 60

3.3 le-de-France, Vue de la Montagne de Pieter Bot 66

3.4 Rauch, Harmonie hydro-vgtale et mtorologique, frontispiece 68

3.5 Dunes and wastes of the Born region 77

4.1 Another view of Lake Valencia 83

4.2 A nomad tent 96

4.3 The Sahara 101

4.4 Moffats House at Kuruman 103

x Illustrations

4.5 Rajasthan pastoralists 111

5.1 A Desert Tree 120

5.2 Point Reached by the Sahara 3 miles north of

Maradi 129

5.3 Alcove Lands and Bad Lands south of the Uinta

Mountains 138

5.4 Men against the Desert 150

6.1 Nomads near Lake Faguibine, Mali 157

6.2 Cartoon of Mohamed Kassas holding back the

desert 159

6.3 Pastoralists in Mali near Timbuktu 165

Color plates

1 Afghan nomad boy with camels in eastern Afghanistan

2 Singing Mountain in the Gobi Desert, China

3 Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden

4 Dr. Isaac Fanous, Saint Anthony the Great

5 Jean-Lon Grme, Napolon devant le Sphinx

6 Aspects of Nature in Different Latitudes

7 The Land that Became a Desert

8 Oulad Rachid pastoralists in the region of Gura, Chad

Foreword

Michael Egan

We creatures of reason, we dont live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you.

Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund: A Novel

Did you have a good Pleistocene? The Australian polymath

George Seddon asked this question as part of his geological

history of Australia.

It has long seemed to me that when the continents are being handed out, the question one should press hard is Did you have a good Pleistocene?, because glaciers and continental ice-sheets are among the great soil-makers, grinding up fresh rock full of nutrients most plants need. The Pleistocene gave America the Great Plains, China its fertile loess, and much of central Europe its good soils. Glaciers, with their deep V-shaped valleys, also provide good dam sites and, when they meet the sea, deep harbours. 1

In some sense, Diana Daviss book examines the relatively

recent history of the regions of the world that had a bad

Pleistocene: those places where good earth and ample waters

have always been scarce. But her history of deserts, desertification, and arid lands is no deterministic account of deserts on the march or landscapes on the brink. Rather than compare

and bemoan a series of satellite images of receding lakes and

seas the world over, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge offers a much more nuanced interpretation. Inasmuch as

xii Foreword

deserts are a natural feature of our planets ecosphere, humans are responsible for the modern idea of desertification. The simple assumption would be to point to anthropogenic climate

change, but Davis advocates the importance of place and of

reconceiving colonial narratives.

Davis, who has lived and worked in the arid lands most of

her life, wishes to complicate our common understanding of

deserts as wastelands. Just as we do not have a universal quantification for arid, desertification has no agreed-upon definition. Dry and more dry are relative terms. But we can

take this a step further and acknowledge that this language is loaded. In her recent work on the history of wastelands, Vittoria Di Palma reflects on the synchronous and intertwined

etymologies of desert, wilderness, and wasteland. In the biblical texts, she writes, wilderness tends to signify a land that is and has always been barren. In contrast, wasteland is more often used in contexts where a place is barren and desolate as the result of an act of destruction. 2 In the western vocabulary, these are traditionally synonyms for inhospitable, undesirable landscapes lacking in value. They are the opposite of the Edenic ideal, and devoid of the natural capital offered by timber. Indeed, much of our antipathy toward deserts stems

from failed attempts to turn them into improved and pro

ductive landscapes. From the European perspective, deserts

have typically been judged by what they dont have: trees and/

or fertile soils. Drawing on this idea, colonial foresters often viewed deserts as failed forests, mismanaged and in need of