Desert and Peace

Desert and Peace

For decades, planet Earth has been undergoing a rapid process of desertification. Deserts, arid regions, and steppes are expanding worldwide—each year by an area roughly the size of Germany. While deserts have always existed due to climatic or geological factors, since the twentieth century, they have increasingly been created by humans. Through soil degradation and subsequent erosion, overgrazing, deforestation of rainforests, and the flight of impoverished populations, whether northward, for example to Europe, or to the megacities within their own countries, which emerge alongside the desertification of abandoned land. According to UN statistics, around one-third of global agricultural land has been lost to soil erosion in recent decades. Now, half of the Earth's land surface is threatened. The EU Commission claims that this figure could exceed eighty percent by 2050. According to the United Nations, more than 1.7 billion people already live in desert regions, many of which are former agricultural landscapes devastated by desertification.

When desert regions reach gigantic proportions, as they have today, their impact on wind and weather also poses a threat to those living outside of them. One of the major environmental disasters of our time is occurring in China, where rapid industrialization, dramatic migration of the rural population to megacities, neglect of agriculture, and deforestation have triggered a nationwide process of land degradation. Desertification contributes significantly to climate change, which in the West is unilaterally attributed to CO2 emissions. However, the process of desertification has long since reached Europe. In Spain, for example, as the London newspaper The Guardian noted back in 2005, “a third of the country is threatened with being turned into desert (…) If things continue this way, we won’t have to travel to Africa to enjoy the peace and quiet of the desert anymore; we can simply go to the Canary Islands or Valencia.”

Against this backdrop, the revitalization of desert regions is gaining ever greater importance. Ultimately, it is also the only effective way to stem the mass migration of people from the Sahel and other devastated areas to Europe. Israel is among the most successful countries in reclaiming desert. The small country consists predominantly of desert, so its inhabitants had to adapt to this landscape for the sake of survival. Israel’s economic boom, its remarkable demographics, and its high, still-rising standard of living prove that desert regions can be transformed into comfortable places to live for people in a relatively short time.

I have lived in the Negev Desert in southern Israel for almost 30 years and have witnessed an almost unbelievable revival of once-deserted areas. David Ben-Gurion saw the settlement of the Negev Desert as the litmus test for Israel's future. He himself moved from comfortable Tel Aviv to the desert kibbutz of Sde Boqer, where he initiated the establishment of a desert research campus of the University of Beer Sheva. The ancient desert town Beer Sheva, early mentioned in the Mosaic Books, for centuries a sleepy caravanserai under Ottoman Muslim rule, had transformed within a few decades into a modern metropolis and an internationally renowned high-tech center. In the time since I have lived here, the city's population has tripled.

Since Israel's overall population is growing rapidly—from 5 to 10 million in the 30 years since our arrival—the government and the Jewish National Fund Keren Kayemet plan to settle another million people in the Negev Desert by 2040, creating jobs and „green sustainable communities“ for housing. It reads like a fairy tale, but I can assure you that here, in the heart of what Mark Twain (in his famous travel book The Innocents Abroad) described as „hopeless,“ I truly live surrounded by greenery and harvest baskets full of lemons, pomegranates, and figs from my garden. My children have found well-paid jobs here, at universities and high-tech companies, and my grandchildren are receiving the best possible education. Our quality of life is high, even by Western standards. To avoid monstrous cities, the uncontrolled sprawl of concrete, and slum structures, the focus is on developing self-sufficient small towns with detached houses. Already, enticed by the construction of a railway and a new highway, tens of thousands of families from the relocated center of the country are building new homes in this green setting.

The use of the desert as a habitat and agricultural area is also a concern for desert researchers in wealthy, developed Arab states such as Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. The oil-rich metropolis of Abu Dhabi on the Persian Gulf is planning a gradual phase-out of its dependence on oil with the help of algae farms and other crops, starting with a desert city, Masdar, powered entirely by renewable energy—a model for the future „when the oil eventually runs out.“ In Dubai, scientists from the Desert Control project are attempting to create „a network of water and nutrients that nourishes plants“ by enriching the desert sand with bacteria and fungi, thereby making their emirate, 75% of which is desert, agriculturally usable.

Larger countries could also benefit from such pilot projects, for example Egypt, where 85% of the population is crammed into a few monstrous urban agglomerations (the megacity of Cairo alone has 20 million inhabitants), while 90% of the country's land area remains almost uninhabited and unused. Saudi Arabia is attempting to establish a series of large settlements in the middle of the desert with its Neom project, including the port city of Oxagon, conceived as a „modern, clean industrial ecosystem,“ and the seemingly utopian desert metropolis „The Line,“ also an eco-project, whose location on the Gulf of Aqaba already reveals the larger geostrategic concept: a new trade route between India and the Mediterranean, which is intended to lead via Eilat and Israeli highways to the Mediterranean ports of Ashdod, Ashkelon, or Haifa.

For decades, Israeli and Arab scientists have cooperated in the field of desert research. Behind this cooperation lie tangible political and business interests. For all countries in the Middle East, regardless of religion or form of government, the future is at stake, a matter of survival under extreme conditions. The developement of the Middle Eastern deserts into human settlement areas requires peace. No country in the region can afford to leave these landscapes fallow indefinitely. “The Gulf States know what deserts are,” wrote the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 2022. “The Arabs have money, and the Israelis ideas they are happy to sell.”

This long-standing cooperation was formalized in 2020 by the Abraham Accords (between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco), which are proving resilient even now during the ongoing war with Iran. Desert researchers from Arab countries and Israel have never ceased collaborating. “We hardly concern ourselves with the conflicts in the region,” Professor Amit Gross, director of the Blaustein Institute for Desert Research at the University of Beer Sheva, recently explained to me. “Our projects think in terms of timescales beyond politics and war.”

Die Nutzung der Wüste als Lebensraum und Anbaufläche beschäftigt auch die Wüstenforscher in den wohlhabenden, entwickelten arabischen Staaten wie Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabien oder Kuweit. Die Öl-Hochburg Abu Dhabi am Persischen Golf plant mit Hilfe von Algenfarmen und anderem Anbau den allmählichen Ausstieg aus der Erdöl-Abhängigkeit, zunächst eine ganz durch „renewable energy“ versorgte Wüstenstadt, Masdar, ein Modell für die Zukunft, „wenn eines Tages das Öl zu fließen aufhört“. In Dubai versuchen Wissenschaftler des Projekts Desert Control, durch Anreicherung des Wüstensandes mit Bakterien und Pilzen „ein Netzwerk von Wasser und Nährstoffen zu schaffen, das Pflanzen ernährt“ und dadurch ihr zu 75% aus Wüste bestehendes Emirat landwirtschaftlich nutzbar zu machen. Von solchen Pilot-Projekten könnten dann auch größere Länder profitieren, etwa Ägypten, wo sich 85% Bevölkerung in wenigen monströsen städtischen Ballungsräumen drängen (allein die Mega-Metropole Kairo hat 20 Millionen Einwohner), während 90% der Fläche des Landes fast unbewohnt und ungenutzt bleiben. Saudi Arabien versucht mit dem Neom-Projekt eine Reihe größerer Ansiedlungen mitten in der Wüste, darunter die Hafenstadt Oxagon, gedacht als „modernes, sauberes Industrieökosystem“, und die utopisch anmutende Wüsten-Metropole „The Line“, gleichfalls ein Ökoprojekt, deren Lage am Golf von Aqaba bereits das größere geostrategische Konzept aufzeigt: einen neuen Handelsweg zwischen Indien und dem Mittelmeer, der über Eilat und israelische Schnellstraßen zu den Häfen am Mittelmeer, Ashdod, Ashkelon oder Haifa führen soll.

Seit Jahrzehnten kooperieren israelische und arabische Wissenschaftler auf dem Gebiet der Wüstenforschung. Dahinter stehen handfeste politische und geschäftliche Interessen. Für alle Länder des Nahen Ostens, ganz gleich welcher Religion und Gesellschaftsform, geht es um die Zukunft, ums Überleben unter extremen Bedingungen. „Was Wüsten sind, weiß man in den Golfstaaten“, schrieb die Neue Zürcher Zeitung 2022, „Die Araber haben Geld, die Israeli Ideen, die sie gerne verkaufen.“

Diese seit Langem bestehende Kooperation haben die Abraham-Accords (zwischen Israel, den Arabischen Emiraten, Bahrein und Marokko) 2020 in die offizielle Form staatlicher Beziehungen transformiert, die sich auch jetzt während des Gaza-Krieges als haltbar erweisen. Die Wüstenforscher der verschiedenen Länder haben ohnehin nie aufgehört, zusammenzuarbeiten. „Wir kümmern uns kaum um die Konflikte der Region“, erklärte mir neulich Professor Amit Gross, Direktor des Blaustein-Instituts für Wüstenforschung an der Universität Beer Sheva. „Unsere Projekte denken in größeren Zeiträumen als Politik und Krieg.“