Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Ecology & History) Paperback – June 15, 2007

Having just completed  The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl , a book about farmers in the Dust Bowl, I found this to be a refreshing counterpoint. Dr. Davis' thesis in RtGoR is that the French colonists created a narrative in which Algeria was once a vast green sea of forests and grain, but that the nomads (read: barbaric Arabs) ruined it with their primitive farming and especially herding methods. This "declensionist narrative" was used to justify the result: the French were morally obligated to re-civilise Algeria and restore the region to its former glory.The trouble was that it wasn't true.There were several topics in the book that intrigued me. Dr. Davis discusses various types of property recognized by the indigenous Algerians, including communal property used to rotate grazing animals to allow some land to remain fallow. She also briefly explores the interrelationship between deforestation and dessicationist theories that instructed 19th century environmentalism and their foundation in Christian mythology. An important theme in the book is the idea of environmentalism as a means of social control (colonists over natives). Finally, she describes how the declensionist narrative worked its way into early 20th century botanical science, resulting in continuing negative consequences for the region.The discussion of property interests me as an example of alternative social organization. Among other varieties of property, Davis describes briefly the concepts of melk, achaba, habous, and arsh: private property, "pasture contract" exchanging grazing rights for labor, land reserved for religious institutions, and communal property, respectively. Arsh (mostly pasture but some cultivation) is curious: if the system was stable, it challenges the Tragedy of the Commons meme. Under some circumstances -- perhaps only those of small, nomadic, strictly religious tribes -- communal property may be sustainable and productive.At university, I had an environmentalist friend who preached that North America had once been entirely covered in forest. It's awfully hard to believe Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, Iowa, Kansas, etc. were "covered" in forest. On another occasion, I ran into a co-worker who believed the mirror image, that England had recently been completely barren of trees. It would have been awfully difficult to build half-timbered houses, hide in the Sherwood forest, build the world's most fearsome navy in the 19th century, or any number of other things if there were no trees on the island.Indeed, both ideas are born of the same myth, the idea that the world was once covered in forests (Eden), but since man's fall from grace, the forest has gradually given way to deserts. In part, this narrative was used to demonize and justify the French treatment of the Algerian natives who used fire as an agricultural tool (North Americans did the same with our natives). Call them reservations, cantonments, or concentration camps, colonists claim that nomadic peoples must be controlled, "attached" to the land, and turned into farmers if possible and imprisoned if not. In Algeria, they also forced them to use money by forcing them to pay taxes in cash rather than in kind. Having deprived them of their traditional, nomadic, pastoral ways, and having also forced them out of barter and into the cash system, many had no choice but to enter the workforce as a laborer for the new French masters.Algeria went from a land of traditional herding and farming to a colony of small farmers to a corporation-dominated extension of France. Likewise, the American Plains transitioned from the land of the buffalo to a land of small land-grant farmers to ADM's central production facility. Both changes happened under cover of conservationist narratives - as it happens, those providing moral cover with a Christian-fall-from-Eden myth were almost literally Baptists to the corporate-colonial Bootleggers. The temptation to force such narratives onto history is strong; Jared Diamond made similar claims about Rapa Nui (Easter Island) that have since been debunked, and for similar reasons (European colonial policies).Other areas of interest included a review of art and literature of the 19th century. Dr. Davis shows how the narrative was created and propagated through various social, academic, political, and popular avenues.The book concludes much stronger than it begins. The description of the route by which the declensionist narrative entered botanical science and thereby continues to influence policy is frightening. We think of science as being rational and above politics, but Dr. Davis shows persuasively -- in this case at least -- that the accepted science is built on an artificial, racist, state-capitalist scam. She notes that the UN and several North African countries have spent millions on misguided attempts to restore a forest that never existed. Can we think of other "science-based" environmental programs on which politicians are proposing to force social change and expend scarce resources on a massive scale? Just how sure of the science are we?

This is a polemical work, it alleges, with considerable fairness that North African Environmental History is based upon a self serving colonial narrative. However, it never escapes its polemical tone. It is a history of environmental historical theory almost devoid of science. It's scientific sources are both scarce and poorly chosen, and it places this in one of the crudest of all postcolonial narratives of French history.In this work, the nomads and pastoralists are all good, Algerian indigenous agriculturalists, both Arab and Berber are only here as victims (especially the Arab as the Kabyle are pronounced to be favored) and the pied noirs are all les grand colons, with huge estates, when in fact the vast portion of European settlers lived in considerable poverty at what could be charitably described as a petit bourgeouis level.. The very long and tortured history of the various North African forestry services is a rendered into a manichean fight between pro and anti native, and even this is reduced to acceptance of a narrative of desertification. Those who believe that Algeria can be made more agriculturally productive are the villains while those who believe that marginal semi nomadic stock raising is the best use of the land are the angels. This combine with a dramatic conflation of the Mahgreb's many ecological regions into one in polemic, no matter how carefully they are seperated in the authors geographical essay, and one gets a grossly distorted view.An excellent example of this is that the Algerian Forest Service and those involved in the reforestation campaign were often in long drawn out conflicts with the Grand Colons, both private and corporate throughout the entire period. A situation only barely hinted at in the text. Similar things can be seen with the treatment of eucalyptus, whose widespread planting across the Mediteranean and role in malaria control is completely elided. The author spends a considerable amount of time condemming "Capitalist Production" and the monetary economy, and obliquely attacking the modern post colonial states for their continuation if these policies, but in the more fertile areas this just means an opposition to modernity itself.But of all my objections, the one that I feel most strongly is her very confused discussion of the effects of forestation on water. Admittedly my background in in hydrogeology, but to claim that forest do not reduce runoff and flooding in one passage and then claim that reduce the water table and dry out wells in another is both incoherent and crude. Cork Oak are not Eucalyptus, and these are controversial matters that can not be understood from one or two heavily politicized sources, as Davis does. Devotion to tree planting and forestry are hardly unique to European culture, and the subject is quite complicated, a fact that has been recognized since the 19th century, particularily in France.But if I feel so strongly about these defects, why give the boom four stars? Well it is because in spite of all of the above the author makes a very compelling argument about how environmental rhetoric is used in an Imperialist context to dispossess the poorest and most disadvanteged, how many of our environmental theories, especially those related to land use, are based on the most naked predjudice, not just the predjudice of racism but also of class. And she gives a compelling suggestion that in light of what we now know about concepts such as climax forests, that the entire basis for our mediterranean climate may be fundamentally flawed. Of course others have addressed these issues before, but not in English. As a final aside, I would point out that much of Southern Europe has a climate and environment quite similar to that of the more fertile regions of the Maghreb, and this includes parts of he south of France. The French foresters and botanist who tried to reconconstruct paleloandscapes were not so ignorant as she suggests, and the classical sources, if read carefully have often been confirmed by modern work, in Northrn Algeria in particular.m

Die Autorin räumt am Beispiel Algeriens fundiert mit dem Vorurteil auf, Nomaden trügen die Schuld an der Wüstenbildung und hätten einstmals fruchtbare Landstriche mit ihren Herden ruiniert. Sie weist nach, dass Kolonialpropaganda gern Fakten ignorierte und Mythenbildung über eine goldene Vergangenheit betrieb, die sie durch Fakten entkräftet, die das Gegenteil belegen und dass koloniale "Entwicklungsmaßnahmen" häufig sogar hauptursächlich für eine Degradation der Böden waren.

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