To consider in what ways incorporating the emerging field of environmental history into studies of the Middle East challenges our views of the past and/or present, it is necessary first to take stock of our mainstream notions of the environment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and how we think it has changed over the last several thousand years.Footnote ¹ The most common received wisdom about the environment in the MENA is that it is an arid, marginal environment, in many places a wasteland degraded by overgrazing and deforestation for hundreds if not thousands of years. The local populations, especially nomads and small farmers, are frequently blamed for the alleged environmental ruin. Born in large part of Western imperialism in the region, this environmental imaginary of the MENA has been uncritically adopted by the majority of postindependence ruling elites as well as development agencies.

The scientific evidence undermining this imperial Western view, however, continues to grow each year, providing a picture instead of a heterogeneous landscape that is, in many areas, robust, resilient, and coadapted with—thus resistant to—grazing and fire. Contemporary, well-documented studies reveal serious problems with many different kinds of pollution of the air, water, and soil; overuse of existing water supplies; and in several parts of the MENA, damage from plowing marginal land and significant overirrigation, resulting in waterlogging and salinization. Yet significant problems with overgrazing, deforestation, or desertification have not been well documented except in relatively few well-circumscribed places.Footnote ² The revolution in arid-lands ecology and pastoral studies has shown, rather, that extensive pastoralism is one of the best uses for the large swaths of the MENA environment that, due to the high interannual variability of scarce rainfall, represent nonequilibrium environments.Footnote ³

Some of the best work in environmental history of various regions over the last two decades has demonstrated that many of our most common environmental histories are legacies of the colonial period and that such narratives are highly questionable, often false, and frequently mobilized for political, social, and economic purposes.Footnote ⁴ Very little of this kind of research, however, has been conducted for the MENA. What do we have to learn, then, from this exciting new work in environmental history? For students of Middle East studies, it seems to me that, among other considerations, incorporating environmental history into our work brings both a ready benefit and a potential danger. We should give serious thought to both when conducting new research in this area.

The benefit is that by conducting carefully documented environmental histories of the region, we may be able to escape what I have tentatively termed elsewhere “environmental orientalism.”Footnote ⁵ By this I mean the problematic ways that various Anglo-European actors, from travelers to colonial bureaucrats to artists to scientists, perceived and represented the MENA environment over the last several centuries primarily as a degraded desert wasteland ruined by local land-use practices. This declensionist environmental narrative, although strongly undermined by contemporary ecological research, survived the colonial/Mandate period to be adopted widely both in the West and in the MENA region. A large majority of subsequent research, teaching, policy, and practice related to environment and development in the region has been based on this limited and incomplete understanding of arid lands. The results include many inappropriate projects across the region that have failed to achieve their goals to “restore the range,” “green the desert,” or alleviate poverty but have succeeded in disenfranchising various local groups and/or depriving them of their livelihoods.Footnote ⁶ The potential advantages of conducting environmental history research of the MENA therefore include not only stronger scholarship but also the very real benefits of helping to inform policy that may result in more appropriate environmental management and less social injustice.

A potential danger of a rush to include environmental history in our research, though, is that of environmental determinism. I hope we are unlikely to replicate the kind of crude environmental determinism and associated racist worldview of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A more subtle but equally pernicious kind of determinism, however, may be likely to appear in the form of an overreliance on, for example, historical climate change to explain certain aspects of the past in the MENA region.Footnote ⁷ Just as the work of classic environmental determinists such as Ellen Churchill Semple provided a “confident and scientific rationale for Euro-American dominance . . . by rendering colonial domination an environmental inevitability,” contemporary environmental determinism could have similar if more complicated effects.Footnote ⁸

Robert Kaplan's ahistorical “The Revenge of Geography,” for example, recently justified imperial interventions in the “shatter zones” of the Middle East with claims that the environment has determined everything from dictatorial rule in Iraq to the “worst nightmare” of Pakistan to the imperative of “containment” for Iran.Footnote ⁹ Given the popularity of this kind of thinking in certain seats of power (Kaplan was appointed to the Defense Policy Board, Department of Defense, in 2009), we need to be careful of the pitfalls and legacies of environmental determinism at this moment in history. Careful study of the environmental history of the MENA, then, is of growing importance with geopolitical and geoeconomic implications in addition to those for environment and development policies throughout the region.