Agriculture and Environmental History

There is a lesson to be learned by studying this arch-encounter between humans and deserts, an encounter that "seems to highlight the worst and the best in human history." (15) We can, [Brian Griffith] suggests, expect repetition of desert peoples' social patterns as desertification persists, and we must therefore learn to "lower our defenses" against nature, along with making our settled areas more "nature-friendly." (343) These are exhortations with which I am very sympathetic. I think it is fair for Griffith to question the value of sequestering "wilderness" away from humans under the guise of its protection -- a process I refer to as "canned land." All the same, for Griffith to pose the problem as one of humans' response to nature, however well meaning he may be in doing so, is to establish an immediate bias against studying anthropogenic forces in natural destruction. The particular role humans play in contemporary environmental destruction clearly affects how they will 'respond' to the same, and it is extremely doubtful that a one-directional interpretation can be made relevant for contemporary purposes. In other words, Griffith's admittedly laudable exhortations are not ones whose anxious pursuit should permit a sacrifice of methodological rigour. Meanwhile, some puzzling contradictions emerge from Griffith's attempt to forge a connection between deserts and cultural degradation. For example, he argues, I think accurately, that desert conditions often lead to the decline of women's productive importance. Although he provides little direct evidence, Griffith opines, "women were increasingly treated as a sexual resource and little else." (27) Interestingly, according to Griffith, Islam did not abide this suppression of women's rights: "like early Christians, many early Muslims took pride in their egalitarian spirit." (31) In fact, it was not the "visionaries of Islam, Christianity or Judaism who reduced women to a primarily sexual identity, but the overriding conditions of life in the desolate plains." (35) I am not saying he is wrong in any primary sense, but this distinction left me very confused: if desert conditions uniformly lead to the suspension of women's perceived productive value, and therefore their rights, then, a fortiori, we should expect Islam to have adopted negative views of women -- it being a desert tradition as much (more, as he suggests elsewhere) as any other. How can Islam be considered apart from the "conditions of life in the