Change Everything No 30: Deserts are 'geological, biological and cultural keystones’

'It is not a desert where a grandmother sits' - Nubian scholar Menna Agha

Book news

I am thinking about - although not sure when I am going to find time to make it happen - an audio book of Change Everything. Can anyone recommend someone who could edit a recording and get it posted as a book?

There is no such thing as an ‘empty desert’

Myy next book is about the persistence and continuing power of 19^th and 20^th-century imperialist, colonial thinking, in science, history and many other fields, as well as raw politics. What do we need to replace it with? A vastly more diversely based, historically ranging, place-appropriate, thinking and value systems – and that needs to be drawn particularly from the long-term thinking of indigenous people, including the indigenous thinking of Europe (more on that in a future Substack).

So when I was browsing around the wonderful Lighthouse Bookshop in Edinburgh, I lighted on a book called Deserts Are Not Empty, edited by Samia Henni, even thought it was wrapped in plastic and I could not browse its pages, I had a feeling it would be a good choice. And it didn’t disappoint, starting with a reminder that language is so much more than description of things, but holds deep and significant meanings and understandings.

“While English and French definitions of the word ‘desert’ insist on emptiness and inhabitability; the Arabic origin of the term does not point to emptiness at all; rather it emphasizes an interaction between different elements. So, the desert is not really deserted (khalin/khaliyya). It is a locus for the millennial production and transmission of knowledge, traditions and know-how.” (p. 31)

The Western approach produces what Brahim El Guabli describes as “Saharanism.

“A universalizing imaginary and discursive practice about deserts, [that] perceives desert spaces as empty, dead and inherently dangerous. It transforms deserts into death traps for immigrants, into sites in needs of policing, and legitimizes all forms of destruction, from the material and the immaterial extraction of resources and knowledge to the testing of lethal military equipment and the dumping of waste. Rooted in Greek, Arab and Western racializing encounters with desert spaces, Saharanism has the perverse effect of creating global desert imaginaries, which erase the morphological richness, ecological liveliness and millennia-old human-nature relations that have sustained the fine balance between life and death within deserts… a powerful extractive ideology that manifests in a range of ways, from the most mundane activities, like taking pictures with camels and sand dunes to complicated extractive enterprises, such as oil drilling.” (p. 32)

Photo by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash

Jill Jarvis notes that the this approach to deserts is useful, or even central, to the colonising projects “which seem to need spaces that can be mapped out as wasteland in order to function and extract as they do…. Continues to generate and sustain ideas about what does and does not count as life worth living and protecting”. (p. 39) She suggests the book and its authors are “taking on a kind of resignifying practice, in the hope that we can contribute to fundamentally changing perceptions about what ‘desert’ means, how deserts mean, and cultivate sustained attention to how those who live in deserts contest their own erasure and create meaning. (p. 38)

One of the lovely things about this book is hearing directly many different desert voices. The Tohono O’odham poet and linguist Ofelia Zepeda is quoted (p. 41)

As O’odham, we know that the desert is a place of wilderness. It is a place of dreams for those who must dream those kind of dreams, and it is the place of songs for those who must sing those kind of songs. But it is a place where nightmares hide, nightmares so fierce that once can believe one has seen a guardian angel. For the O’odham, the desert is certainly a place of power. Because we know this essence of the desert, although sometimes we do not fully understand it, we are able to live in it.

The Nubian writer Menna Agha, in a wonderfully titled chapter “It is not a desert where a grandmother sits,” makes me reflect with regret on my visit, 25 years ago as a tourist, to the Abu Simbel Temple, rescued by UNESCO from beneath and Egyptian dam. There was focus on the rescue of the ancient past, but no information that I recall about the people, the communities, displaced for it. As Agha says “Nubian peoplehood, unlike monuments, were not regarded as worthy subjects of these international institutionalized rescue campaigns.” (p. 55) So on her account, it was women, who had been left behind in their villages when men were forced to migrate for work, who have provided a focus for campaigns of return and reparations, in return for a century of dispossession by successive dam projects;. She was born and raised in the Kom Ombo Valley, where 100,000 people were resettled, “New Nubia” according to the Egyptian state, “but we call it Tahgeer, meaning the site of displacement.” (p. 59)

Danika Cooper argues that the commodification of deserts, particularly in the United States, is part of the broader commodification of nature itself. Sometimes the desert is empty and worthless, other times brimming with economic potential. (This very much reminds me of Australia – see the multiple disasters of the Ord River Scheme, and Rio Tinto’s destruction of a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site for an iron ore mine.) Maps showing “empty land” “have undergirded the United States’ historic and contemporary imperial practices of territorial occupation and acquisition that have encourage land dispossession, resource estraction, unequitable land use and zoning practices.” See also the Australian genocidal, colonial doctrine of terra nullius, overturned, finally, in the Mabo ruling.

That the most unlikely places could be treated as deserts is made clear by Paulo Tavares, looking at the “auto-colonization” of Brazil. After the US-backed coup of March 1964, Operation Amazonia was launched, “a maneuver for the integration of the national territory… guaranteeing the inviolability of the depopulated interior by closing all possible channels of penetration … [that would] under the protection of advanced frontier outposts inundate the Amazon with civilization.” (p. 188) We know how that has gone, with one fifth of the Amazon rainforest lost to deforestation.

The alliances of the colonial projects stretch across political boundaries. ZqSu writes about the Chinese Belt and Road project – initiated by the US tech conglomerate Hewlett-Packard that traverses the growing deserts of Inner Mongolia and what the Chinese call “Xinjiang”. (In itself a colonial term meaning “new frontier”.) It has 500 kilometers of windproof walls to shielf the train against the Gobi’s gales, but little can be done when the dust storms hit, as they do every year. As the writer notes, “Each grain of dust carries the potential to travel thousands of kilometers, with the storm, riding air currents sometimes as far as California, unbound by jurisdictions.” A long way from China’s self-described project of “ecological civilisation”.

Yet the coloniser’s desire is to tame the desert, to make it apparently disappear. Dalai Musaed Alsayer writes about the oil company Aramcon, dividing its employees into carefully racialised categories, sought to put Western families in desert camps into “suburban homes with their green lawns along the quaint streets of Chahran, in a place akin to The Truman Show (1998). Dhahran was in reality Anywhere, USA. The desert was a mere background, rendered flat, replaceable, changeable. For Anywhere, USA, was indeed anywhere, somewhere and nowhere at the same time.” (p. 312)

Deserts Are Not Empty reminds me of a run of maritime history books that I read – prompted by the New Books Network – a few years ago focused on maritime history. One of the hallmarks of 19^th- and 20^th-century Western thinking, and that of our late neoliberal age, is that individual nation states, and continents, major cities and networks of settlement are marked as the units of central meaning (be it citizenship, economic understandings or geopolitics). That’s a product of the canal, railway and airway ages, when the spaces “in between”, oceans and deserts, became things to be crossed over, emptinesses, blank in time and space. Yet that’s very much an artefact of our time and technology. For most of human history, deserts and oceans were the routes through which, with the right knowledge and technology, and often the cooperation of non-human animals like camels, humans could progress far faster than in other areas of the globe, both on their own and when carrying goods. That was the foundation of two of the world’s great cities, Petra and Palmyra.

The editor of this book comes – interestingly – out of an architectural background. Which clearly influences its approach. What it lacked was a chapter I’d been hoping for from a biological/ecological perspective was a chapter on biofilms. (Any reading recommendations on that subject?)

Picks of the week

Reading

Over the parliamentary conference recess I’ve been dipping back into the brilliant feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham’s Dreamers of a New Day, which I originally reviewed when it came out back in 2010, covering radical women from the 1880s to the 1920s coming up with solutions for issues facing women that kept being suggested again and again through the following century, and to which we have still not found solutions. Although we have made some progress: “at Owens College Manchester, the female students were barred from the library: they had to send their maids to collect books.”

Listening

The idea that woman were not powerful agents in the past remains far too embedded in popular understandings of history. The tale of French widow Renée Chevalier, responsible for the prosecution of the military captain Mathurin Delacanche for multiple rapes and pillage of her community during the wars of religion in France is a powerful antidote to that, as told on the New Books Network by Tom Hamilton. Yes, she had wealth and privilege to help her, but she gave voice to humble female (and male) victims of the captain. And while of course I’m not in favour of capital punishment (spoiler alert) - that the captain, who was clearly a vicious brute, went to the gallows yelling at the chief judge - who had kinship ties to him - for failing to pardon him at the last minute is a nice touch.

Thinking

Systems thinking, it would be a good idea: so they cleaned up the air emerging from ship’s funnels while they burned filthy fuel, by installing scrubbers that are now sending a stream of heavy metals and other poisons into sea water. Please folks, can we grasp that there is no such place as “away”. All the poisons we are creating and concentrating have to go somewhere.

Pollution, sea or air? Photo by Miikka Luotio on Unsplash

Researching

Of the many horrendous misuses of antibiotics in agriculture, the blanketting of citrus trees in the US with antibiotics to combat citrus green disease is one of the most egregious. It likely does not even work. But finally some researchers are taking an agroecological approach, finding in the microbiome of trees on an organic citrus farm compounds that can combat the disease. That, and ending the giant expanses of industrial monoculture that just say to pests and disease “feast here” are clearly the way forward.

Still healthy limes. Photo by Arya Dubey on Unsplash

Almost the end

A little advert for a piece I jointly wrote with European friends on Yorkshire Bylines, from the postgrowth perspective, arguing that the depletion of ecosystems and the exploitation of farmers, workers and communities, in Europe and globally, are both rooted in the same economic narrative. At the heart of our current range of crises is the relentless pursuit of economic growth, which has benefited the few to the cost of the many.

What did you think?

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