Critical environmental scholars of the Middle East and North Africa have been rightly skeptical about narratives of crisis. These narratives have been used to justify colonial expropriation of resources and the repression of peoples whose livelihoods and lifeways threaten state power.Footnote ¹ As those narratives folded into international development agendas and post-independence policies, they have continued to support dispossession and the displacement of blame for environmental degradation onto marginalized peoples. Diana Davis has played a key role in unraveling the historical uses and abuses of environmental crisis narratives in the region.Footnote ² Most recently, she has detailed the spurious science and political underpinnings of desertification narratives that have had such an impact on those living in and around the Sahara.Footnote ³ Her work—and that of other critical environmental historians and political ecologists—provides a critical framework for considering the financing facilities, development programs, and dominant discourses coalescing around climate change. We need to ask who wins and who loses when climate change is used to defend policies whose cost is disproportionately borne by those least responsible for environmental degradation.

At the same time, I agree with the increasing number of scholars, activists, and popular writers who have begun to talk of climate “crisis” rather than climate change. We have likely reached the point where catastrophic global impacts are irreversible; the distribution of those impacts tracks gaping income inequalities that seem to be getting worse at the same pace as our carbon emissions. But what—and whose—crisis? Those of us who contribute most to climate change are also the ones who will literally or metaphorically ramp up the air conditioning in response to higher temperatures (among other impacts). Though this image is satisfying for crystallizing anger at collective inaction within the major emitting countries, the way it individualizes behaviors can also obscure the systemic, institutional, and infrastructural dead weight that locks us into a way of life predicated on burning carbon. Timothy Mitchell follows this infrastructure as an assemblage of social relations and pipelines, but we also need to think beyond the high-level geopolitical relations that tie the Middle East into climate change as one of the first major oil producing regions.Footnote ⁴ Everyday patterns of consumption associated with the “ecology of the forces of capital” naturalize the capitalist power at the heart of climate change.Footnote ⁵ These processes use discursive formations inherited from Euro-American colonialism to displace the crisis onto those groups and spaces most vulnerable to climate change yet consistently blamed for causing, or tasked with remediating, climate change's effects.

Political ecology, critical energy geographies, and the anthropology of energy—though working primarily in other regions—have pointed to how we might trace these capitalist ecologies in the Middle East and North Africa beyond the “big” world of foreign policy and the global military industrial complex.Footnote ⁶ For example, scholars and activists have critiqued how a large-scale solar power installation in southeastern Morocco repurposed historic systems for rural dispossession to impose a putatively progressive, renewable energy agenda.Footnote ⁷ This kind of “green grabbing”—placing the burden for environmental remediation on marginalized peoples by enclosing or otherwise acquiring their land, water, and other resources—does not challenge and, in fact, can buttress the capital accumulation and extractivism at the root of the climate crisis.Footnote ⁸ Moroccans in the chronically drought prone southeast are now exporting water in the form of solar energy that consumes large quantities of scarce water to clean mirrors and cool turbines. Climate change is lived experience, and the way crisis narratives can reproduce inherited relations of power in the service of “saving the planet” underscores the need for a careful, engaged scholarship that not only addresses but also practices politics.

How do we capture climate change as lived experience? In the Mgoun Valley of southeastern Morocco where I have conducted fieldwork since 2010, I heard several people rue the annual influx of “climate refugees” (the term one acquaintance used) from Zagora, part of the Draa oasis further south. In the late 2000s, friends told me, people from the Draa Valley who had enough money began renting apartments in the market town of Kelaa Mgouna for the summer to escape the worsening heat of Zagora. Apparently, they were driving up rents and were an otherwise resented presence in town. I suspect the fact that many were Arabs coming to an Amazigh area and wealthier than the average local resident had much to do with their reception. I was also struck by people's ready integration of climate change discourse into their understanding of the everyday—and by the limits of climate change as a direct object of ethnographic inquiry. Narrating quotidian experiences of climate change is perhaps less about identifying direct causality—the summer vacationers as evidence of global warming—which can be notoriously difficult to do, especially for cultural anthropologists or humanists not versed in the science or collaborating with environmental scientists. Rather, I see a scholarship of climate change as lived experience aspiring to three (and undoubtedly, more) goals: 1) bearing witness to how people understand large sweeps of change and integrate these understandings into their own repertoire of socio-ecological practices; 2) narrating contemporary capitalism as an ecological project that creates and encounters “friction” with people's emplaced experiences;Footnote ⁹ and 3) capturing the affective dimensions of change and loss as people's lives are constrained not simply by environmental impacts but also by the deepening extractivism that seems to bring even climate change remediation efforts into its orbit. In my environmentally informed teaching and research about Appalachia and extraction (as part of comparative work on similar processes in North Africa), I have learned how environmental humanities scholars, poets, and other culture workers are grappling with the affective dimensions of climate change as more than an aesthetic quandary—it is an existential question of tracing how, for example, the small movements of insects or the act of fishing in a landscape transformed by surface mining might inform our experience of what many now know as the Anthropocene.

There are, of course, many ways to grapple with climate change, as witnessed by the environmental scientists in and from the MENA region whose empirical work does not simply rehearse inherited crisis narratives. As I was conducting fieldwork, I met a team of hydrologists, climate modelers, and social scientists traversing the same terrain to assess regional climate patterns in southeastern Moroccan watersheds. I have had a hard time understanding their work, but I have tried to learn the science from my layperson's perspective. In meeting them, I also saw their sense of urgency in documenting environmental processes and extending beyond their own epistemological comfort zones to engage with different kinds of socio-ecological knowledge. Anthropologists often feel like a third wheel on team environmental research projects required to have a social science component for funders. Critical social science—not to mention more humanist approaches—can be dismissed by natural scientists. I have also seen, however, that these epistemological breaks can be less about dismissal than the need for mutual, cross-disciplinary learning about the various ways we see the world. We also need to move beyond the “rule of experts” by including more people in discussions about how to confront the structural roots of the climate crisis.Footnote ¹⁰ Rural peoples in the Middle East and North Africa are not, as regressive crisis narratives hold, the cause of large-scale environmental degradation; nor are they simply the victims. Rami Zurayk's work on multifunctional landscapes and food sovereignty in Lebanon, for example, has shown that despite the immense obstacles Middle Eastern farmers face, their long experience of working with ecological, economic, and political uncertainty puts them in a strong position to participate in global conversations about how to develop sustainable agro-ecological systems.Footnote ¹¹ Their enskilled and embodied knowledges may point a way forward through narratives—and real experiences—of crisis.