Introduction

Camille Cole: Climate change is one of the most pressing issues of our time, globally. For the most part, the Middle East and North Africa have remained marginal to global conversations around climate. Where these conversations have engaged the region, they have often rejuvenated dangerous and reductive Orientalist tropes.

In the face of simplistic narratives about the Middle East as an exceptional site of environmental crisis, scholars and activists have begun to explore the complex histories and presents of environmental politics and the ecological dimensions of capitalism. This roundtable, drawing on a workshop held in October 2023, offers some new approaches – both methodological and analytical – to the intertwined problems of environment, politics, and capitalism.

Many of these questions begin with scale. After all, the “environment” is a global problem. This is certainly, and obviously, the case in thinking about climate change. Even beyond that, the very idea of the “global” as a scale of human action has been deeply shaped by environmental science and environmental activism. But as Brittany Cook shows, explicitly-global institutions like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which promises to save the world’s plant heritage for posterity, are premised upon specific histories of imperialism and capitalism. And as Marlaina Yost argues, nineteenth- and early-twentieth century imperial and capitalist projects in the Middle East often emphasized material and environmental transformation. They did so, moreover, using a language of race and social difference. Which people were suited to which plants, and which plants to which places? As a mode of thought and action, the global (environment) was born of lineages of capital and empire which are, fundamentally, racialized.

Scale, both spatial and temporal, is an equally thorny problem for an environmental politics of liberation. In discussing her work on Palestinian heirloom seeds, Gabi Kirk asks how the environment can fit into or challenge other forms of liberatory politics. In particular, seeds insist on a long time horizon. How does that fit into a present of annihilation – or into a present of revolution? Can it? Should it?

Often when we talk about scale, we draw distinctions between global and local, or universal and specific. But this roundtable makes clear not only the foundational role of specific histories in enabling the global, but also the difficulty of defining “local” or “specific.” After all, as Brittany Cook notes, pinpointing the origins of plant genetic material on a Cartesian grid doesn’t necessarily tell us much about the specific or the local. To understand both the global and the local, then, she suggests thinking about place as relational – and as human. It is striking but perhaps not surprising that all of the roundtable contributions in Part I focus on agricultural environments. After all, human histories – histories of politics and profit and power – have often focused on land and production. One of the challenges, both methodological and analytical, for environmental politics today, is thinking about the “specific” as something which can be multi-sited – something which might not be a clear foil to the “universal.” Together, the contributors pose the question: how do we understand the making of specific environments – and the making of the environment? How do difference and differentiation underpin the universal? And how do we imagine a politics of liberation that is both rooted in human and natural relationships and also global?

For the roundtable, we circulated five questions among the participants and asked each of them to respond to three. This is Part I; we will publish Part II with the responses of the rest of the workshop participants as soon as possible.

1. How does your research speak to the relationships between environment, capital, and politics?

Brittany Cook: My paper analyzes how the legacy of the Green Revolution has shaped the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a global depository for genebanks around the world. The vault is lauded for being an apolitical global safehouse for agricultural biodiversity, where genebanks deposit backup plant samples from their own collection, maintaining the sole right to withdraw those deposits. However, by tracing the biological and financial legacies of the Green Revolution through the vault, I want to challenge the neutrality of the vault in order to open critical conversations regarding the political, economic, and environmental dynamics shaping this collection.

I began this project interested in simply analyzing the geographic connections between where plant matter originated and who owns the accessions in the SGSV. However, I found that the spatial relationships were not as telling as the central role of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a research network of agricultural research centers that were largely established as part of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations’ Green Revolution projects. CGIAR banks are the owners of roughly 48% of the accessions in the vault. Each CGIAR center has historically focused on a selection of major food crops (such as wheat, rice, corn, and barley), with centers mostly holding local/regional plant material. Therefore, although a lot of the plant material currently stored in the SGSV is owned by a genebank in the same country of origin as the plant, the funding of these centers and their central missions are shaped by the complex history of agricultural “technology transfer” and international research collaborations, led by global development agencies. Therefore, I argue that the SGSV can be read as an archive of the ongoing legacy of the Green Revolution and a reflection of how particular plant material and places have been prioritized in efforts to support technological innovation to increase food security in global food systems.

The goal of pointing this out is not to say whether or not SGSV is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ development, but instead to challenge the neutrality of the collection and to demonstrate how the plant material is shaped by the priorities of the Green Revolution (intensification of major food crops – not really biodiversity). While it is true that the vault’s materials will continue to evolve as more diverse partners deposit materials, agencies that have been at the fore of the Green Revolution (new and old) are funders and contributors to the vault, shaping what materials are and are not kept in the vault. The vault cannot be completely apolitical; not because of any fault of its founders, but because it is a microcosm of global agricultural research networks. 

Gabi Kirk: My project asks how efforts to save and disseminate Palestinian heirloom seeds within Palestine and around the world is part of a popular sovereignty struggle for Palestinians and their allies. Popular sovereignty in Palestine and by Palestinians, asAmahl Bishara describes it, can “seem especially provisional, not resting on enforceable law or acknowledged rights, or even, in some cases, on bounded and spatialized collectivities, but rather on either insistent confrontation or quiet acts of caring for community in the face of abandonment.” My work on the past, present, and future of sustainable agriculture within historic Palestine, talks to those engaged in what Bishara terms a “quiet act of caring” for Palestinian heirloom seeds—with uncertain results. I spend time in the seed libraries of the West Bank whose existence is always precarious due to Israeli attacks on their infrastructure, staff, and lands. I also spoke to staff and growers of seed companies based in the US selling molokhiya, yakteen, and other vegetables, greens, and herbs central to Palestinian cuisine and culture. Finally I interviewed  Palestinian-American seed savers who save and distribute heirloom seeds to other Palestinians as well as to allies. For them, seed saving is part of a project of healing for themselves in exile, while they wrestle with the politics of growing Palestinian seeds on the stolen land of indigenous peoples of the Americas. 

This ethnography of seed saving as a form of popular sovereignty sits uneasily with the practice of seed selling. Political ecologists have raised rightful concern over the commodification of nature, and heirloom crop seeds offer important perspectives on this critique of green capitalism. Are these seeds commodified, or do the seed companies (as they would describe themselves) exist outside of the capitalist market? Is it possible to escape the commodity fetish which threatens to trap even the best-intentioned efforts? I argue that the sale and marketing of heirloom seeds has some important cautionary lessons for popular understandings of  “politics,” especially in the US. Doing politics is too often whittled down to individualized consumption: the performance of penance for consuming too much or the wrong items, and the emphasis on instead consuming (read: buying) the right ones. I am concerned about the rise of new boycott targets since October 7 which predominantly manifest as individual orders to buy or not buy certain things or on certain days without a concurrent emphasis on things like coordinated divestment efforts from war-mongering corporations. I think it takes multiple approaches, but I worry that capitalism is doing what it does best, absorbing and incorporating the methods of revolt. At the same time, that also means, of course, we can find within capitalism its means of destruction. Buying Palestinian heirloom seeds will not directly end Israel’s occupation and brutal assault on Palestinian lives and lands. But I’ve learned from speaking to those who grow these seeds that they feel their project keeps Palestine growing within and beyond historic Palestine, building relationships that can be mobilized for political and ecological futures beyond settler colonial capitalism.

Marlaina Yost: In 1904 Lord Cromer granted the first concession in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan to the American businessman Leigh Hunt for the cultivation of cotton at Zeidab. Hunt founded the Sudan Experimental Plantations Syndicate and established model farms near Atbara to limited success. In 1907 the SEPS became just the Sudan Plantation Syndicate, and by 1909 Hunt had stepped down as director of the syndicate. Now under the leadership of Donald McGillivray, the SPS turned its sight to developing the Gezira Plain between the Blue and White Niles. I began working on Zeidab with an interest in the cultivation of cotton alongside the construction of the Sennar Dam at the Gezira Scheme in Sudan between 1914 and 1925. As I started researching, however, I was drawn to earlier cultivation attempts, like Hunt’s, which predated the Gezira but have received less attention in the scholarship. I wanted to explore how the failures of these previous schemes might have shaped the Sudan Plantation Syndicate, the British company which first operated the Gezira Scheme, and its agricultural practices. While scholars like Eve Trout Powell have examined the layered colonialism of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, I was interested to find yet another layer - that of American involvement.

Some of what I am trying to parse out in this part of the project is the ways in which private capital interest and American colonial ambition are entwined at the Zeidab Concession. While British archival sources mostly mention Hunt as a failed businessman, American sources show that Hunt was in conversation with President Theodore Roosevelt, suggesting his entanglement in a broader American imperial venture. The Zeidab Concession was granted at the same time as American expansion beyond North America, the scramble for Africa, and the back-to-Africa movement. The US press ran a number of headlines on Hunt’s concession, including the Seattle Times which explicitly identified the scheme as a “colonization undertaking.” Yet Hunt—who worked first in university education and then turned to business enterprises including an American newspaper, a Korean gold mining concession, the Zeidab cotton concession, the damming of the American West, and finally real estate development in Las Vegas—seems to have been more interested in individual profit than in prolonged engagement with any single geography. The British saw Hunt’s operation at Zeidab as both a testing ground of colonial policy and a way to negotiate Nile water allocation between Egypt and Sudan. Beginning with Zeidab, amidst the economic and political negotiations of cotton growing for the global market, these schemes materially altered the path and patterns of the Nile and the soils and sounds of Sudan. After cultivation moved to Gezira, residual alkali remained in the degraded soil at Zeidab. The introduction of plantation agriculture catalyzed new practices of land management and new labor demands. And the proliferation of a water intensive cash crop inflamed water allocation negotiations. 

2. To what extent has race or other forms of social differentiation shaped these histories?

Brittany Cook: On their own, most seed samples do not tell a clear story of social differentiation or racial injustice. However, if we view the SGSV as an archive, then we can read the collection ‘against and along the grain’ by analyzing how the histories of racial capitalism, global development institutions, and the Green Revolution (critiqued for its racialized assumptions of who has ‘proper’ knowledge and techniques and ongoing negative environmental and social impacts) have shaped the vault and its collection. These histories of the vault and its depositors have shaped how the genebanks were set up; their approaches to different places and people as needing particular services or as having particular resources; and the particular solutions they may facilitate for global agriculture–present and future.

For example, the CGIAR genebanks create “improved cultivars” of globally traded food crops, bred to better meet challenges such as drought, disease, and yield. These crops are generally strategic on a national or regional level for trade and/or food security. Scientists in labs develop these seeds and then agricultural agents and farmers test them in fields. Then, material from successful cultivars is stored in genebanks. This strategy for increasing food security is based on creating a technofix instead of advocating for larger changes to the global food system. Such strategies are also often driven by the goals and priorities of international philanthropic agencies such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Scholars have critiqued how the power of these philanthropic actors to institute technology-driven solutions perpetuate racialized inequities by supporting corporate technology over agro-ecological knowledge.

By calling attention to this history of the Green Revolution and agricultural technofixes embedded in the SVSG, I hope that practitioners in agricultural development will be able to see how this seemingly neutral technology is not neutral. If genebanks are not neutral, then critiques and alternatives can be taken more seriously, providing more space for a food security built on food sovereignty.

Marlaina Yost: Cotton cultivation in Sudan in all of its iterations was dependent on several key inputs: land, water, capital, and labor. American capitalist Leigh Hunt dwells most extensively on the question of labor in his appeal to Lord Cromer for a concession. Earlier Ottoman cotton schemes in Sudan relied on military personnel as the main source of labor. Hunt however wanted his experiment to yield a new type of model farmer. The model farmers Hunt so vehemently argued would make Sudan productive were four graduates of the Tuskegee Institute, although he asserted that if successful upwards of 700,000 Black Americans might move to Sudan to populate his scheme.

American plantation agriculture had always relied on a racialized hierarchy of labor, and schemes supported by the British Cotton Growing Association in Togo and Nigeria concurrent with Zeidab similarly employed Tuskegee graduates and conceived of expertise along contemporary American ideas of race—as addressed by Angela Zimmerman, Jonathan Robins, Alden Young, and Sven Beckert. Hunt articulated a proposed labor structure using an ecological language of race—the transplanting of people, their climatic tolerances, and the comparative yields that different populations would produce. In addition to the climatic determinism and racial physiology of the day, Hunt read racialized labor as an agronomic question–evaluating what populations could be implanted at Zeidab and the possible impacts of their interactions to maximize crop efficiency and yield. He saw his model farmers as containing the capacity to cross-pollinate, like the cotton they would grow, which was a force that he could control to his advantage through the selection of desired traits. Hunt believed he could then ensure the crosspollination of expertise to the local Sudanese farmers by positioning them alongside Black American experts. Through the relational influence of inputs in the field, Hunt was trying to hybridize a laborer to preserve knowledge and tolerance of the fields without requiring additional inputs or support from the Sudan Experimental Plantations Syndicate. 

3. Talk a little bit about your methodological approach. What do you think scholars and organizers interested in environment and politics in the MENA can take away from this?

Gabi Kirk: This work is an ethnography of heirloom seeds, and I think a geographer’s approach to ethnography offers some interesting methodological opportunities and challenges we don’t typically think of when doing ethnography. First, multi-sited ethnography is an increasingly popular choice,often through comparative analysis. A comparative approach however runs the risk of theory being abstracted out and plunked down in each place, rather than an approach of grounded theory arising from the site of study. As a geographer, I take seriously the responsibility to be attentive to the specifics of the place each of my interlocutors sit. This means diving into the history of each site, even within Palestine–not taking the seed banks and libraries across the West Bank as a monolith, but instead drawing attention to the microclimates and specific histories and political economies where each is located.

I also do a lot of feminist discourse analysis, especially of marketing materials from seed companies. Social media posts, website descriptions of seed catalogs, and the seed packets themselves are all part of a political ecology of labeling that is laden with political meaning and shapes the political economy of heirloom crops. Symbols matter in the struggle for Palestinian sovereignty and liberation.I’m interested in the cultural geography and value assigned and taken from the words and images we use to talk about plants. A feminist political ecology method of discourse analysis understands materialism and discourses together. Analyzing the images used to sell the seeds alongside where they end up and how they are valued shows how narratives have material value, as well as where they exceed the value formulation. 

In my writing, the stories of the farmers who care for these seeds in Palestine and in diaspora are the most important, as the ones who are shepherding and spearheading the project of Palestinian agrobiodiversity protection. But I am a gardener, with both formal training in ethnobotany and agroecology and a personal love for plants. I purchased and grew some of the seeds chronicled in my work, with mixed results (I’m being generous, the results were poor). I plan to repeat this now that I have moved to another part of California with a different climate and a bit more room to grow in my yard. There’s something anxiety producing about growing these seeds—I feel a strong responsibility to any plant under my care, but especially these, and it was quite challenging to have them fail despite my best efforts. My autoethnography of growing Palestinian seeds is a feminist missive on how the personal is political and, in some ways, on the limits of the ambitious project of sending these seeds out to be grown anywhere in attempts to “save” them. 

Marlaina Yost: This project first emerged while I was taking a comparative literature seminar. I became interested in how Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North describes the transition from water-wheels to mechanical pumps to irrigate the banks of the Nile River. While the novel is set in an unnamed Sudanese village, the narration of technological transition mirrored the Gezira Scheme’s approach to irrigation—which I was also reading about at the time. Although Salih does not locate the novel within the Gezira Scheme explicitly, I was interested in how reading literature might open up new opportunities for historical inquiry. A recurring methodological question for historians is how to deal with the fact that documents and archives are themselves always acts of composition which privilege certain renderings and obfuscate others. Narration has also become a powerful tool that historians use to extend the limitations of the archive, for example Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation or Marisa Fuentes’s method of reading along the bias grain to write beyond the lines of an archive. In understanding that fictions are present, and indeed productive, in both the research and writing of history, I wonder if we can use literary fiction in the historical discipline as a primary source from which to interpret past events, or perhaps even as a secondary source where the author has crafted an argument about how to read the past. With this understanding of literature, I have returned to Season of Migration and the scenes alongside waterwheels and mechanical pumps. In each of these moments, sound is one of the most important descriptors. I read these soundscapes alongside the archival record  to capture a shifting rural landscape, changing communal dynamics, and a new relationship with the Nile–all triggered by the new cultivation of cotton. 

4. Space and time are really important to thinking about environment in the Middle East. How do you think about scale in your work?

Brittany Cook: I find the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) to be a particularly interesting way to examine global agricultural biotechnology development because it demonstrates the ways in which this field works across space and time. The global nature of the vault is emphasized in its name and the media coverage about it. Meanwhile, it functions as a backup for other genebanks, with a vast majority of its seed material coming from CGIAR genebanks. These, in turn, are situated within the history of the Green Revolution and so contain their own multi-scalar geographies. Meanwhile, the seed samples themselves originate in very specific environments legible through the  ‘Country of Origin’ in SGSV’s ‘Seed Portal’ database. It’s possible to find more specific data for some seed samples by cross referencing the accession number with the Genesys database (a global database of plant material in genebanks worldwide), which provides more details about the plants, including location of collection. However, even with this more specific data, the plants are still ex situ, displaced, material, linked only to their point of extraction through a typological understanding of place - a standardized list of climate characteristics, a timestamp, and an absolute location on a Cartesian grid, devoid of social context.

In this case, in addition to thinking about scale, I think about place as relational. As I mentioned before, the location of each genebank is not as significant as the global relationships that go into making it function as it does. People are simultaneously embedded in their local place, but also working within global networks of capital and research. Instead of thinking about the differences between global, regional, and local scales; a relational idea of place focuses on the connections across time and space that brought this seed material from a community of plants, animals, and humans to a bunker on a remote archipelago in Norway.

5. Why should we be studying this now?

Gabi Kirk: The urgency of analyzing the environmental injustice of the settler colonization of Palestine has never been clearer. As Israel’s genocidal actions against Palestinians in Gaza intensify, environmental organizations around the world have had a decidedly weak response. Some environmental justice organizations in the US have long spoken out on the environmental degradation caused by Israeli warfare. However, these organizations are fairly small, compared to the BINGOS (Big International Non-Governmental Organizations) in the environmental field that have either remained silent on Palestine or have endorsed Israeli greenwashing. Rumblings from within some of those organizations, such as organizing by the nascent Sierra Club staff union, is promising. But more work needs to be done to address the support for Israeli apartheid rampant in global environmentalism—including how this support is tied to the larger legacy of racism and colonialism within Western environmentalism that sees humans as inherently harmful to a separate nature, rather than understanding capitalism and colonialism as structural injustices perpetrating harm against people and their ecosystems together. 

Even when acknowledging the environmental damages wrought by Israel’s occupation, the struggle for Palestinian liberation is too often segmented out into the parts that deal with ecological issues and then the rest. The larger political struggle of Palestinians as a land-based struggle needs to be centrally addressed by scholars in environmental studies, geography, and related fields. It’s important to keep putting Palestine on syllabi even when the headlines of massacres fade, and to understand Palestine as a place that produces theory about environmental politics, not just a place to apply theories developed in the US and elsewhere. 

Sometimes, it feels difficult to be talking about seeds and visions of future sovereignty at a moment when Israeli violence against Palestinians is so starkly annihilatory. Seeds offer hope for a different timescale of liberatory politics than the one we are living through right now. Seeds suggest a kind of dormancy that can erupt at the right moment even after being tucked away for a long time. But I’m not sure if that timescale is the right political horizon for this moment, at least for those of us who wish to gum up the gears of imperial torture funded by our own government in the US. It feels important to hold both the present and the future together, as Munira Khayyat showed in her keynote, to think about the promise of the present politics and not just to wait for a better day. I think Palestinian seed saving has a lot to teach us about the need and struggle to always be cultivating a better world in the here and now while preparing for a new one yet to come.