Our most common conception of deserts and arid lands is that they are ruined wastelands with little value, aberrations that need to be repaired and improved. [...] This problematic notion of the drylands — which constitute about 40 percent of the earth’s landmass — informs both knowledge about, and policies in, desert regions. [...] While global concern about desertification is most commonly dated to the 1970s when the Sahelian drought and famine hit that region [...], fear of invading deserts has driven global dryland policy for much longer [...].
Indeed, before the word “desertification” was coined in the 1920s by a French colonial forester, western imperial powers had executed many different programs to try to curtail the perceived spread of deserts and also to try to “restore” the drylands to productivity. Underlying these attempts was a complex, long-standing, and primarily Anglo-European understanding of deserts which equated them with ruined forests much of the time.
The assumption [...] has led, since the colonial period, to programs and policies that have often systematically damaged dryland environments and marginalized large numbers of indigenous peoples, many of whom had been using the land sustainably. The most significant environmental problems that have resulted from the drive to repair drylands and to extract value include salinization from overirrigation, inappropriate “reforestation,” the extension of agriculture into marginal lands, and failed range “improvement.” Although these forms of dryland degradation became problems early in the colonial period, they all persist and continue to pose significant problems today.
Of the relatively few contemporary cases of serious dryland degradation, the vast majority are found in places with strong political economic forces shaping development, such as capitalist expansion [...]. These cases are also directly tied to the devaluing and suppression of indigenous production systems and the local knowledge of dryland populations [...]. Human-induced salinization created serious problems for crop productivity and public health in parts of India during British colonization. [...] Egypt’s mammoth Aswan High Dam and the associated increase in perennial irrigation also spawned grave problems with salinization, the spread of the debilitating parasite schistosomiasis, and the erosion of the Nile Delta due to silt deprivation. [...] Reforestation/afforestation has been promoted for decades [...]. This approach, too, is at least as old as the colonial period and has a long and checkered track record. Many afforestation projects fail because they are attempted where trees have not grown previously [...]. [D]reams of “green dams” to hold back the desert have been operationalized since at least the 19th-century French colonial administration of Algeria. [...] The nomads through whose traditional territory the green dam was planted were forced to relocate and sedentarize. [...]
This is not to deny that degradation has occurred in the drylands; it has in certain places for particular reasons [...]. Without an understanding of the environment and ecological systems in arid lands, it is all too easy to conceive of deserts as deforested seas of sand perpetually on the move. [...] These ways of thinking about deserts generated during the period of western imperialism traveled with colonial bureaucrats to postcolonial international institutions [...]. By working to understand the complex and long-standing relations of power imbricated in environmental stories such as that of desertification, we can begin to understand [...].
All text above by: Diana K. Davis. "Of Deserts and Decolonization: Dispelling Myths About Drylands." MIT Press Reader. 24 August 2020. Article online at: https :// thereader.mitpress.mit. edu/dispelling-myths-about-drylands/ [Article adapted from her book The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge. In this post, some paragraph breaks and contractions were added by me for accessibility. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]
