‘The Middle East’s fabulous ecology now faces bombs, pollution and desertification’

Zozan Pehlivan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Speaking with Srijana Mitra Das at Times Evoke , she discusses the ecological past of the Middle East — and its future:
You write about grasslands in the Middle East — people normally associate deserts with this region, so could you please tell us more?

■ Until the 1960s, a large portion of Middle Eastern communities were actually nomadic pastoralists. This region, as I write in ‘The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century’ has large grasslands, stretching from Turkey to Syria, northern Iraq, Algeria, central to western Anatolia to Cilicia. There is remarkable diversity here — there are pastures, mountains, plains and major rivers, from the Nile that actually comes from high Ethiopian highlands to Egypt to the Tigris and Euphrates, the largest freshwater bodies in the Middle East. Besides these, there are many small streams that nomadic people and peasants would use for watering their animals or farmlands.

Most people don’t associate ‘grasslands’ with the Middle East because many connect the idea to the American West and an unending Prairies. The Middle East has a different form of grassland — some patches are large, some are small, some are very close to farms, villages or urban spaces. The environmental historian John McNeill discusses how the close proximity between agrarian and herding communities across the Middle East shows these people were very interdependent with each other. However, in times of environmental stress, that close proximity could become a disadvantage.

How have these grasslands changed?
■ Grasslands across the Middle East — and over the world — have experienced tremendous conquest. These were conquered by the modern state in the American West and in the Middle East, by developmental policies turning such lands into agricultural farms, large dams or mining areas. After the discovery of oil the late 19 th century onwards, particularly in Iran, Iraq, Syria and the Arabian Peninsula, these became areas to extract fossil fuels from. Grasslands became the victim of modern developmentalism and extensively changed. I was recently reading news from Turkey about a pastureland which peasants use to feed their animals, now intended as a site for solar farms. Such policies began in the 19 th century, aiming to turn grasslands into taxable lands. A modern state doesn’t see grasslands as productive because it’s not agricultural — it only provides food to animals. A modern state wants to make these lands arable — it also aims to change pastoral people, communities dependent on sheep, goats, camels or horses. These people move around, following seasonal migration routes between northern and southern pastures. For a modern state obsessed with controlling people, resources and taxes, such mobility doesn’t appeal. Such states consistently try to resettle nomadic pastoralists, often forcefully.
Is desertification impacting the Middle East today?
■ Yes, just like it is across the world. The more we deplete resources, the more we use chemicals and exhaust soil through heavy commercial agriculture, the more we increase desertification. Alongside, war is a critical factor too. We now have another war in the Middle East — the entire region is under fire. That will extensively contribute to desertification by destruction.

You find climate change played a role historically in sectarian tensions in the Middle East — could you tell us more?
■ It’s important to understand the basic livelihood of agrarian and herding communities in the Middle East, particularly in the context of Ottoman Kurdistan. Peasants rely on farms and agricultural productivity — pastoralists rely on herd animals like sheep and goats. Now, climatic anomalies happened in the late 19 th century, which I have shown to be part of an El Nino-Southern Oscillation. These anomalies, particularly after the 1870s, brought harvest failures and major losses of herd animals.

Agrarian and herding economies had different responses. An agrarian economy has more resistance to zoonotic disease targeting sheep and goats versus, say, a locust infestation. Also, as my research found, an agrarian household which had harvest failure for one year, if given support, could recover in two growing seasons — a pastoralist who lost 70% of their herd animals would take upto ten years to recover. I call this gap ‘ecological disequilibrium’, with differential impacts on wealth, survival and communities. My work shows how the Ottoman state first supported the peasantry by providing seed, postponing taxes and giving them loans at low interest. However, there was no such aid for nomadic groups. That further enlarged the gap of ecological and economic disequilibrium between these two communities.

Eventually, pastoralists started to steal peasants’ animals. This is what I call ‘slow violence’, borrowing Rob Nixon’s term. I show how this slow violence consistently increased in parallel with the environmental crisis and how mismanagement by the Ottomans contributed. Now, the majority of pastoralists were Kurdish-speaking Muslim herders while most peasants were Armenians. Animal theft by pastoralists really grew in the last two decades of the 19 th century and brought massive conflict. There were also other confrontations over natural resources, like clashes over grasslands, especially during drought. In fact, the first major anti-Armenian pogrom in Sassoun in 1894 goes back to an event of sharing — and un-sharing — pasture lands.

The Ottoman state then decided to recruit Kurdish pastoralists to a paramilitary militia group — thus, that slow violence became a form of statesponsored collective violence, with herders who had lost their animals accepting the state’s offer, using their indigenous geographical knowledge and skills against both Armenians and Kurdish-speaking people.

We are in the Anthropocene already — what are the likely impacts on ecological life in the Middle East of the militarised violence occurring now?
■ We will experience massive consequences in the forthcoming decades. These enormous explosions, bombs and ammunition will stay in the land — they will poison earth, air and underground water. War has multiple impacts — consider how, because of sanctions, the Iranians could not renovate oil refinery technologies and thus faced intense air pollution for decades. Similarly, the consistent bombing of Yemeni pasturelands means more desertification there, depletion of water, poisoning of soil — and dispossession and forced migration of many.

Can you tell us about war’s experiences for women in the Middle East?
■ Women and children always face the most terrifying conflict violence. We have all read about the attack on the girls’ school in Iran recently that killed over 100 children. Women experience harassment in conflicts, dispossession and starvation, struggling to keep their families together. Women become the subject of all these harms but they also try to resist these patriarchal forms of violence — by their very nature, they try to protect their children, their livelihoods, their animals and trees. I believe that women and children are the biggest victims of both war and environmental crisis — finally, it falls on women to feed the ones they love.
Views expressed are personal