Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa

Preface

Preface Edmund Burke III The modernist fables that underlie the developmentalist states of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have only recently begun to attract the attention of scholars in their own right. As French and British colonial fantasies of recovering the supposed agricultural productivity of Roman North Africa have given way to the similarly delusional dreams of experts who have sought to modernize postcolonial states in the region, the subject of their underlying environmental imaginaries has come to the fore.1 It is the considerable merit of the studies in this volume to document the continuities in the environmental imaginaries that have shaped the modernization projects of both colonial and postcolonial states over the past two centuries. Colonial writers believed that the Middle Eastern environment suffered irreversible degradation after classical antiquity. Different authors ascribed the alleged decline to different causes, including the goat, the Bedouin, and Islam. The real culprit, according to Theodore Wertime, may well have been ancient metallurgy, which was enormously inefficient.2 Archeological evidence from around the Mediterranean tends to support this finding.According to a major European Union–funded study,the principal wave of deforestation in the Mediterranean coincided with the onset of the Bronze Age.3 The same study finds that the Mediterranean environment was essentially stable (with oscillations) from the Roman period until the nineteenth century. Colonial understandings of the environmental history of the MENA region were distorted by orientalist assumptions. It is the aim of the essays in this book to explore just how and why they mattered. Having said this, it is important to recognize that human-induced environmental change was not the monopoly of modern actors. The Middle Eastern environment itself was shaped and reshaped by long-term historical processes. Neither the huge canal systems in the Tigris/Euphrates valley nor the artificial x | Edmund Burke III oases in the deserts and plateaus were necessary for human survival. Rulers made choices. The environmental costs, as always, were borne by later generations. Thus the question: Are modern engineers and technocrats the heirs of the pharaohs? Or is there something that distinguishes them from ancient technologists?4 Here we need to see the imperial dreams of Cromer and Lyautey (proconsuls of empire in Egypt and Morocco respectively) and those of postcolonial experts as the products of their world historical context: the age of fossil fuels (1800 ce–present).5 The age of fossil fuels reflected the enormous multiplication of the quantity of energy available to humans with the coming of steam power and electricity. In this respect the material realities that shaped modern dreams of power differed fundamentally from those that shaped the world of the engineers and statebuilders of classical antiquity and the Islamic empires that followed them. Premodern people operated under the constraints of the solar energy regime (to 1800 ce) in which human and animal power constituted the principal sources of energy, along with wood energy. (Water and wind power in this period generated a small percentage of the total energy then available.) In an effort to dramatize the huge difference between the energy available in classical antiquity and that available in modern times, consider this thought experiment. According to Vaclav Smil, the total energy expended by the tens of thousands of slaves who constructed the Great Pyramid is roughly equivalent to energy expended by a single moderate-sized bulldozer.6 This is not to belittle the achievements of classical engineers in any respect. It is simply to point out the energetic limits of the world in which they existed. The rerouting of rivers in ancient Mesopotamia and the construction of the pyramids still command our awe. The environmental orientalism of the planners and engineers of the colonial and postcolonial era thus reflects the fundamentally different energetic context of modern times (even if the energetic equations of the colonial and postcolonial eras were themselves significantly different). The colonial period largely coincided with the age of coal (1750–1950), whereas the postcolonial period (1950–present) was shaped by petroleum and natural gas. However, colonial engineers and experts were still somewhat constrained by the energy dynamics of the solar energy age. Whereas the Suez Canal (1869) and the first Aswan dam (1902) were constructed by corvée labor, the Nasser High Dam was constructed by modern earthmoving equipment. Dreams of empire were enabled by the changing energetic contexts. If energy regimes shaped what engineers and experts could accomplish , they also distanced them from understanding the consequences of [3.144.233...