Political Ecology, Causation and the Bedouin of Saudi Arabia

Andrew M. Gardner
MES Student Paper Prize Award Winner, 2001

Recent debates have challenged the very foundation of political ecology.  One important critique, stemming from the work of Vayda and his associates, promotes a problem-specific, ecological, and positivistic approach to the analysis of the causes of environmental change. Their focus on the “event,” however, is seemingly at odds with earlier concerns with process. Utilizing a case study of the Bedouin people in Saudi Arabia, I argue that the key ecological events upon which this research focuses, the Kuwaiti oil fires and the ongoing process of desertification, provide poor isolates of the human/environmental relationship. If we accept the Kuwaiti oil fires as an environmental event, or better, as a point of departure for working backwards in time and outwards in space, it becomes evident that these “events” are best comprehended as nodes in a complex web of determination, or nodes in a web of interlinked processes.  It is a web that reaches outward to the ebb and flow of the global economy, one that remains inseparable from the nuances of national politics and policy, one that reaches inward to the core cultural values of Bedouin society, and one that reaches backward in time to a series of historic conjunctures and processes.

 
Andrew Gardner is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. During the course of the project described here, he was also a research assistant at the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) at the University of Arizona. The research presented here was gathered as part of a project funded by the Meteorological and Environmental Protection Agency of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The author would like to thank Dr. Timothy Finan for his guidance and mentorship on this project, as well as Dr. Abdul Aziz Al-Eisa, Abdalah Khaleel Huddad, Khalid M. A. Arkanji, and Al-Ghoraibi Fahad Hassan for their assistance during our time in the field.