Diana K. Davis

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Diana K. Davis | Potential Forests: degradation narratives, Science, and Environmental Policy in Protectorate Morocco, 1912–1956 | Environmental History, 10.2 | The History Cooperative

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.¹	1
To date, an astonishingly small amount of this kind of research has 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.²	2
Most environmental policy in colonial Morocco outside of urban and agricultural areas was developed in or strongly influenced by a single key sector: forestry. That is, most land not under cultivation or built upon came under the purview of the forestry department (Service des Eaux et Forêts) or was strongly affected by this department. The forestry department was developed by one man who directed it for decades. The influence of this man, Paul Boudy (1874–1957), and his conviction that Morocco was severely deforested, cannot be overestimated. Boudy, deeply imbued with the conventional environmental narrative of North Africa, identified traditional livestock grazing as the most significant cause of deforestation and environmental degradation in the protectorate. He presided over the creation of the Moroccan forest code and several amendments to it, as well as the development of new laws and policies, all of which restricted and regulated grazing in forested areas. Under his leadership, even non-arboreal areas, such as the immense alfa grass pastures in eastern Morocco, were brought under the control of the forestry department.	3
The forestry department worked closely with the livestock and range management department (Service de l'Élevage). Forest laws and policies greatly affected the work of the livestock department which likewise was staffed by men trained in the conventional environmental narrative of North Africa. Thus much of their work, too, focused on restoring what they saw as a degraded environment by intensifying livestock raising for commodity production and by promoting sedentarization. Because unforested land not under cultivation or built up in cities and villages was used largely for grazing, the policies of the livestock department extended the use and impact of this declensionist environmental narrative to most of the rest of Morocco. In helping to shape so many policies, the environmental narrative favored imperial interests over indigenous interests. Further, it facilitated the dispossession of Moroccans from their lands and the destruction of their traditional livelihoods.	. . .

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