Lessons of Desert Oases for Eco-Resilient Transformation

Originally published on David Bollier's blog

To the Western mind, the presence of lush oases in the middle of deserts is a strange aberration, almost a dream. What moderns fail to appreciate is that oases are actually deliberate human creations, socio-ecological examples of commoning. Colonial powers may see oases as a miraculous fantasy, but locals realize that their cultures of interdependence over the course of millennia have made oases possible, enabling them to collect and sustain natural flows of water in arid climates.

Safouan Azouzi, a scholar of the commons, grew up in Gabès, Tunisia, where as a boy he lived within ancient traditions that sustain oases in the desert. "The idea is to maintain the moisture," said Azouzi, explaining that oases require three distinct layers of vegetation –  the palm tree layer, which produces shade for fruit trees, which in turn provide a layer of shade for growing vegetables.

With these mutually reinforcing layers of plants, oases are able to evolve into food forests to sustain human settlements. In modern terms, they embody the principles of permaculture. Oases are engineered systems in a sense, but not in the modern, mechanical sense of the term. They are instances of co-development and co-stewardship with nature itself – a collaboration that yields a rich, self-replenishing catchment area of moisture and luxuriant growth in the desert.

"The local Arabic word for moisture is richness," said Azouzi. We talk about an oasis effect. If it's 40° Celsius [104° F.] in the desert, it would be like 30° C. [86° F.] in the oasis….The idea behind oases is to grow as much as possible in the smallest area possible because of the scarcity of the water."

To Western scholars, oases as commons may sound like an arcane topic. But in this time of climate collapse and ecological crises, oases hold many important lessons about how societies can work with ecosystems and develop cultures that support that challenge. 

I explore this and many related topics in a conversation with Azouzi in the latest episode of my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #52). Azouzi has studied social design and commons with leading scholars in Italy and  and recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard University Center for Middle Eastern Studies. 

Understanding oases as an ancient form of commoning helps reveal how humanity might find its way back to ecological stewardship notwithstanding global capitalism's relentless destruction of natural environments in the Global South. This process began with colonialism and intensified as post-colonial nation-states in the South aligned themselves with capitalist investors and their vision of development. 

When multinational corporations arrived in Tunisia, they intensified the scale and productivity of extraction initiated in the colonial era. Disrupting more stable, eco-minded relationships with nature, companies introduced monoculture agriculture at industrial scales, energy-intensive irrigation and fertilization, powerful technologies of extraction, and indiscriminate forms of waste disposal.

The resulting "modern" systems of agriculture, fishing, and mining produced a certain kind of prosperity for elites, some of which irregularly trickled down to the masses. But it also locked entire nations into economies of private property and cultures of extraction that ravaged natural ecosystems 

One example: To boost the output of fruit production, companies created large farms of fruit trees and selected crops that could be transported, sold, and marketed in mass quantities. One intensively grown fruit is the Deglet Noor date, said Azouzi. "It was the easiest to stock and transport, which was important because the whole Tunisian economy became an export economy for the metropolis in France."

In short order, the industrialization of northern African fruit – and the "externalizing" of costs on to nature by disrupting natural cycles – supplanted ancient practices and traditions that had been brilliantly adapted to local landscapes.

After Tunisian independence, said Azouzi, "We were exporting our water in the form of fruits and dates. We lost the three layers [of the oases] and we had only monocultural varieties of fruit. So we had to use chemicals and fertilizers because we disrupted the whole system of moisture, maintenance, and resilience."

The disruption was not just ecological, but cultural. As an economic narrative replaced social traditions of stewarding oases, he continued, "The whole system around commoning was disrupted. All the mutual aid and social solidarity disappeared, or is disappearing. So a memory of the commons, a memory of the water, is no longer there."

The whole process of development and its social re-engineering can amount to "symbolic violence," said Azouzi, citing the book, The End of the Cognitive Empire and the Coming of the Age of Epistemologies of the South, by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. The West has imposed its ideas of development and capitalist modernity on the South, displacing such cultural traditions as Buen Vivir, Eco-Swaraj, Ubuntu, which it regards as backward and premodern.   

It's here, as a young scholar of the commons and participatory social design, that Safouan Azouzi reconnected more fully with oasis culture. His studies at Sapienza University of Rome exposed him to Elinor Ostrom's research on the commons, and to the renowned ecological and social designer Ezio Manzini at Politechnico di Milano. Azouzi's ethnographic fieldwork in Tunisia helped him understand  oasis culture in a larger geo-political, economic, and policy context.

Once obsessed with learning product design, Azouzi came to see how commons-oriented social design might provide Arab and Muslim countries with compelling alternatives to the West's vision of capitalist development -- a line of inquiry that he explored during his recent fellowship at Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies.  

"The people of the Global South are resisting the plundering of their resources and extractive capitalist processes, the destruction of their environment, to save their livelihoods," said Azouzi. "The social and the ecological and the political are all in the same ball, let's say." So when local Tunisians resist western development plans, he said, "they're just fighting to save their livelihoods. [Catalan economist] Joan Martinez-Alier calls this the 'environmentalism of the poor'."

Paradoxically enough, the 'environmentalism of the poor' has a lot to teach the moderns of the capitalist West, whose economic orthodoxies remain astonishingly disconnected from ecological realities and unable to understand them on their own relational terms. 

You can listen to the full podcast interview with Safouan Azouzi here. A transcript of the conversation can be found here.