Review of The Arid Lands. History, Power, Knowledge by Diana K. Davis

Drylands cover 40 to 45% of the earth’s land surface and harbour about 38% of people on the planet. The UN has claimed that up to 70% of drylands suffer from desertification, affecting 168 countries globally. This has led to desertification becoming the first globally defined environmental issue. Much has been written about problems with the idea of desertification and how it became such a powerful global narrative, despite lack of scientific support. While the colonial roots of this narrative have been acknowledged, often this literature has focused primarily on the last few decades. The great achievement in this book by Diana Davis is that not only is the history of the desertification narrative summarised and contrasted to the current research frontier but this history is also told with more detail and within a longer time perspective than we have seen before. Such a historical approach helps us to further clarify and follow more carefully the interests of the powerful colonial actors behind the establishment of the narrative. The author is trained as both a geographer and veterinarian and holds a position as a Professor of History at the University of California at Davis. She has, in particular, studied and written about the drylands of the Afghanistan to Pakistan border areas as well as those of Morocco and Algeria. She uses a historical political ecology approach, where power relations that form environmental governance are investigated from a historical perspective. In addition, this is a political ecology that takes ecology seriously, reflecting the insights from non-equilibrium ecology that have been so important for the recent development of range science and for our general understanding of the dynamics of arid environments. The book is relatively concise not only with 175 pages divided into six chapters but also with an extensive addition of 85 pages of notes including references. While other scholars who have written about the history of desertification have also traced this idea to the colonial period, Davis goes all the way back to the ancient Greek and Roman writers who reflected an image of deserts not as degraded environments but as exotic places with strange people who were variously depicted as rich in livestock, as fierce warriors, or simply as bandits. It was only with European colonisation and the expansion of capitalism that the view emerged that dryland peoples are themselves responsible for creating deserts. There was a growing need to portray native land uses as destructive in order to justify dispossession of these peoples and to prepare for other land uses such as settler agriculture, state-led irrigation schemes or large-scale forest exploitation. Earlier in the colonial period, however, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when colonisation had been less intense, the causes of environmental degradation had still often been seen to be linked to colonial activities such as plantation and logging. But with the intensification of colonialism during the nineteenth century, there was a shift in thinking towards blaming native land management practices for what the colonial gaze depicted as degraded landscapes. Increasingly, colonial officials, military officers, missionaries, and scientists accused the indigenous colonial Correspondence: [email protected] Department of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric), Norwegian University of Life Sciences, PO Box 5003, 1432 Ås, Norway Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice