Between Ruin and Restoration: An Environmental History of Israel

Chapter Two: The Environmental Legacy of the Fellaheen and the Bedouin in Palestine

29 THE DYNAMIC LANDSCAPE Human communities leave their imprint on the environment by erecting structures, changing topography, clearing forests or harvesting forest products, cultivating land, collecting desirable plants, hunting animals, and by the grazing of their domestic livestock. over the past ten thousand years, agriculture has enabled the human population on our planet to grow but has also modified, damaged, or destroyed the ecosystems on which it is practiced. even though the environment is at the receiving end of human actions, it is not a passive recipient of their impact. it is a dynamic system that interacts with the activities of people and with all the other components that constitute the environment. The organic elements—the plants, animals, and microorganisms —have complex responses to human disturbance. The inorganic elements —the geological substrate, the geomorphology, the soil, the water, the air—respond subject to the laws of physics and chemistry. The intensity of human impact covers a continuum from the relatively mild effects of grazing, through the more severe effects of deforestation and cultivation, and culminates in the devastating effects of construction that totally replaces unique elements in an existing landscape. The ability of a landscape to recover from the less violent aspects of human disturbance generally requires time, sometimes much longer than a human lifespan as in the case of CHAPTER TwO THE ENVIRONMENTAL LEgACY OF THE FELLAHEEN AND THE BEDOUIN IN PALESTINE No’am g. Seligman 30 NO’AM g. SELIgMAN soil erosion, sometimes much less as in some cases of vegetation restoration after grazing. This chapter reviews the role of traditional exploitation of the landscape resources on the quality of the environment in the region known for centuries as Palestine, the western extension of the fertile Crescent. The main actors are the cultivators, the fellaheen, and the pastoralists, the bedouin who, over the course of history, have functioned within a changing cultural, political , and administrative context that has influenced their relationship with the environment. “environmental quality” has an objective dimension—the state of the structures, the vegetation, the fauna, the soil, the water, the air—and a subjective dimension—the value judgment of the changes that have taken place at different times in the history of a region. The following discussion will concentrate on the objective dimension but will not be able to avoid some of its implications for current value judgments. for the purposes of this chapter, the working definition of “environment” will be limited to aspects of the rural landscape—the geomorphology, the soil, the vegetation, and the fauna. PREVALENT IMPRESSIONS impressions of the environment in Palestine are influenced by the strongly seasonal nature of its mediterranean climate, reflected in the dramatic contrast between the verdant, winter landscape often spangled with colorful flowers and the parched, yellow-brown landscape of summer. The vegetation on the hilly, rocky backbone of the region is particularly prone to the changes imposed by the alternating seasons. There the summer landscape can be stark, particularly when viewed by unsympathetic outsiders and especially before the twentieth century. mark twain’s judgment was unfairly harsh: “of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, i think Palestine must be the prince. . . . it is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land” (twain 1869). even in the twentieth century Dr. W. C. Lowdermilk, who was once assistant chief of the american soil Conservation service and well versed in land lore, commented: “casual visitors consider as normal the rocky, semi-arid, run down condition of much of Palestine . . . erosion has wasted the neglected lands . . . over three feet of soil have been swept from the uplands of Palestine since the breakdown of terrace agriculture . . . neglect, ignorance, suicidal agriculture has created man-made deserts” (Lowdermilk 1944). in line with this assessment is the review of agriculture in Palestine presented to the anglo-american Committee of inquiry (shaw 1946): a large oak forest clothed the hills south and south-west of Hebron until destroyed by over-cutting and over-grazing. most of the pine and oak forests on the Carmel have been lost over the past thirty years while the destruction of natural scrub forest in the Galilee is still progress- THE ENVIRONMENTAL LEgACy Of THE fELLAHEEN AND THE bEDOUIN 31 ing. The scattered groves of Zizyphus in the Jordan valley have mostly disappeared in very recent times; one result of this process has been the disastrous flooding on the slopes above tiberias. . . . Deforestation has resulted in wide...