LAUSR

Critical environmental scholars of the Middle East and North Africa have been rightly skeptical about narratives of crisis. These narratives have been used to justify colonial expropriation of resources and the repression of peoples whose livelihoods and lifeways threaten state power. As those narratives folded into international development agendas and post-independence policies, they have continued to support dispossession and the displacement of blame for environmental degradation onto marginalized peoples. Diana Davis has played a key role in unraveling the historical uses and abuses of environmental crisis narratives in the region.Most recently, she has detailed the spurious science and political underpinnings of desertification narratives that have had such an impact on those living in and around the Sahara. Her work—and that of other critical environmental historians and political ecologists—provides a critical framework for considering the financing facilities, development programs, and dominant discourses coalescing around climate change. We need to ask who wins and who loses when climate change is used to defend policies whose cost is disproportionately borne by those least responsible for environmental degradation. At the same time, I agree with the increasing number of scholars, activists, and popular writers who have begun to talk of climate “crisis” rather than climate change. We have likely reached the point where catastrophic global impacts are irreversible; the distribution of those impacts tracks gaping income inequalities that seem to be getting worse at the same pace as our carbon emissions. But what—and whose—crisis? Those of us who contribute most to climate change are also the ones who will literally or metaphorically ramp up the air conditioning in response to higher temperatures (among other impacts). Though this image is satisfying for crystallizing anger at collective inaction within the major emitting countries, the way it individualizes behaviors can also obscure the systemic, institutional, and infrastructural dead weight that locks us into a way of life predicated on burning carbon. Timothy Mitchell follows this infrastructure as an assemblage of social relations and pipelines, but we also need to think beyond the high-level geopolitical relations that tie the Middle East into climate change as one of the first major oil producing regions. Everyday patterns of consumption associated with the “ecology of the forces of capital” naturalize the capitalist power at the heart of climate change. These processes use discursive formations inherited from Euro-American colonialism to displace the crisis onto those groups and spaces most vulnerable to climate change yet consistently blamed for causing, or tasked with remediating, climate change’s effects. Int. J. Middle East Stud. 51 (2019), 629–632