Potential forests : degradation narratives, science, and environmental policy in protectorate Morocco, 1912-1956

The complex ways in which degradation narratives inform and affect environmental policies in Africa and other regions have received growing scholarly attention over the last decade. Researchers are increasingly questioning the received wisdom of conventional environmental narratives, many of which were written during the colonial period. Much of this work points out exaggerations and errors in the data or the interpretations of data upon which these environmental narratives, and many environmental histories, are based. A substantial portion of this recent research highlights the political and economic purposes to which these questionable environmental narratives were, and are, frequently put. To date, an astonishingly small amount of this kind of research ha s been conducted on environmental narratives that concern the Middle East and North Africa. This is even more surprising given that the arid landscapes of this region often are described and defined as deforested and overgrazed environments that have been subjected to centuries of abuse by local peoples. This article examines how the dominant environmental history of North Africa informed the development of environmental policy in Morocco during the colonial period, 1912-1956, and analyzes some of the major effects of these policies. The conventional environmental history of North Africa, still ubiquitous today, was conceived primarily during the French colonial occupation of Algeria, dating from 1830. It is an environmental narrative of decline, of the ruin of a previously fertile landscape by centuries of deforestation and overgrazing by Arab nomads and their livestock herds. Recent paleoecological studies, however, have questioned rates of deforestation described in this narrative as well as the extent of historical forest cover in North Africa, particularly in Morocco. Contemporary research in arid lands ecology and pastoral studies likewise has questioned the destructiveness of traditional land uses assumed in this declensionist narrative. This article elucidates how an inaccurate nineteenth-century narrative based largely on classical literary sources shaped environmental policy formulation in Morocco during the colonial period. It is the first work to detail how such a narrative was itself refined and quantified during the colonial period. The essay explains how the narrative both informed, and later was justified by, developments in plant ecology and the construction of potential vegetation maps, to become institutionalized as the dominant environmental history of Morocco. In doing so, it argues that this environmental narrative formed a fundamentally important part of the context in which many environmental laws and policies were developed and thus challenges much previous scholarship on environmental history and environmental policy in Morocco.