Environmental imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa

Resource Information

The work Environmental imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in European University Institute Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Environmental imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa

Statement of responsibility

edited by Diana K. Davis and Edmund Burke III ; with an afterword by Timothy Mitchell

Creator

• Davis, Diana K

Subject

• Environmental policy
• Global issues
• Human ecology -- Africa, North -- History
• Human ecology -- Middle East -- History
• Middle East -- Environmental conditions
• Africa, North -- Environmental conditions

Language

eng

Summary

The landscapes of the Middle East have captured our imaginations throughout history. Images of endless golden dunes, camel caravans, isolated desert oases, and rivers lined with palm trees have often framed written and visual representations of the region. Embedded in these portrayals is the common belief that the environment, in most places, has been deforested and desertified by centuries of misuse. It is precisely such orientalist environmental imaginaries, increasingly undermined by contemporary ecological data, that the eleven authors in this volume question. This is the first volume to critically examine culturally constructed views of the environmental history of the Middle East and suggest that they have often benefitted elites at the expense of the ecologies and the peoples of the region. The contributors expose many of the questionable policies and practices born of these environmental imaginaries and related histories that have been utilized in the region since the colonial period. They further reveal how power, in the form of development programs, notions of nationalism, and hydrological maps, for instance, relates to environmental knowledge production.--

Member of

• Ohio University Press series in ecology and history

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Cataloging source

YDXCP

Dewey number

304.20956

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Series in ecology and history