Natalie Koch on arid empire, camel colonialism, and desert imaginaries

"In a lot of ways, this is the short-term mirage of our everyday present."

Natalie Koch is a Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University. She is a political geographer specializing in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula region.

I spoke to Natalie about her new book, Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia. This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

MH: What is arid empire?

NK: I think there's a lot of ways that one could define arid empire. And so of course I should say, as a good geographer, we always want to situate ourselves in the story, that this is a story coming from my perspective. And that means that I'm going to think about it in this particular experience that I have growing up a descendant of arid empire in the US Southwest. So before I branch into what that means, I would say there theoretically could be arid empires in lots of other places of the world, depending on what kind of desert environment you’re thinking about. In South Asia or in Africa, there's different versions of arid empires.

For my framing and my thinking about it, I come to it from the perspective of how the US started to settle and colonize what we now know as the US Southwest, to take control of that land that was Indigenous land before. Arid empire was a challenge in a lot of ways. The colonizers didn't know how to deal with desert environments. They were coming from the East Coast, they were coming from—generations before—temperate parts of Europe, and so they needed to figure out a way to bring that imperial project of taking over the US West. They did that through taking these ideas of Old World deserts and bringing them to the New World deserts to bring that civilizing mission of most imperial projects through that desert knowledge and expertise and things and products and people and animals, as I talk about in the book.

So there's that domestic empire side of the story, but then there's also this bigger trajectory or afterlife of that, which is that that starts to circulate in the building of US empire internationally, including in the Middle East. You have these things and ideas that were taken from the Middle East that then get imagined, reworked, and crafted into this kind of special US desert expertise from the Southwest, that then gets packaged in the service of US empire-building in Saudi Arabia, in the UAE, in Oman, and elsewhere.

You write in the book how the US imported camels from the Middle East in the 19th century. What was the impetus for that, and why did that happen?

So the US was really struggling to take control over the new territories that it got from the Mexican-American War. These huge new tracts of territory from California, Arizona, New Mexico, and even further north. This huge block of land was primarily desert, and the Army really didn't know how to efficiently take control and set out all these Army outposts, etc. through this land. First of all, there were just no roads, so that was a major challenge. But beyond that, when they were trying to set up these outposts, they had all sorts of pack animals, but the pack animals were expensive, primarily to feed. And so the idea of the camels was basically: we can bring in camels as these pack animals, they can carry way more than a mule or a horse, and you don't need to feed them because they can just browse on whatever vegetation is on the side of the road. So there was this idea that they could serve as this hyper-efficient transportation force that would help the Army expand into the further desert reaches of the Southwest. They tried a bunch of different types of camels; they traveled all around the Middle East and picked up different varieties.

They also brought with them a bunch of cameleers, the guys that could help manage the camels. As it turned out, most of the cameleers didn't know what they were doing. They just kind of said, “Yeah, sign me up for a free trip to this foreign place called America.” But there was one guy, Hi Jolly, who did know how to handle the camels and he was one of the big camel leaders. There's a nice monument to him where he was buried in Quartzsite, Arizona.

I had no idea this happened. And I thought it was really interesting that Jefferson Davis was behind it. I was like, Oh, Jefferson Davis, the eventual president of the Confederacy… 

Exactly. And it's actually entirely in keeping with him, right? At that time, he was Secretary of War, and he and the other people who were big advocates of the camel project—I could talk for hours about the camels and I probably shouldn't—if you read the documents and see how they talked about the camels, one of the things that they really felt was attractive about them was that they would intimidate the Natives and that there was this impressiveness, this impressive display of a camel force coming in.

And here they were referencing the Ottoman use of camels in war in the Middle East, because many of these guys had experience in the Middle East and had seen the Ottoman use of camels. There was a sense that there was this impressive sort of entry spectacle when a military attachment came in with this huge storm of camels. They thought that this would really scare away the Native Americans. This would be a totally foreign animal for them, and that spectacular element of it was something that was entirely appealing. So Jefferson Davis, not a friend of Native Americans, was sold on that. 

To quote you from the book: “In the Western imagination, deserts are places of desolation, emptiness, social, environmental extremes, are just wastelands. But they're also romanticized, as in the pastoral tradition.” They're portrayed as both these really hostile places—whether that's ecologically or because there are Indigenous people there that they're trying to displace or eliminate—but also blank slate laboratories. So there are these contradictions in the way that deserts are portrayed and imagined. How are these contradictions utilized for colonialist and imperialist ends? What work do they do?

Any of these projects of empire and authoritarianism, they work through the typical violent side that we know and think about often, but they also work through the seduction side and the appeal on the positive side. This is true of all of these projects. When we think about the westward expansion of the United States and colonization of any lands, it's very easy immediately to see the violence of that, that brutality of genocide and attacking and displacing the people. That's part of that blank-slating of a place that is an act of erasure that's essential to any kind of imperial project. But on the other side, you also have that civilizing narrative or that progressive narrative of making something a better place and legitimating that take over: Yeah, we had that violent past and we erased all of those things that were bad before, but now we have this great, wonderful new order.

This is something that we see in a lot of the projects that I tried to trace and focus on in the book because I want to show that it's not just the negative, it's these positive types of projects. So for the University of Arizona and other institutions within Arizona that were part of this arid empire in the colonization of the US Southwest, doing that through agriculture, through water works, through science, through all sorts of different ostensibly positive projects which are about re-narrating and re-imagining what modernity is in this particular place, and what is valued and valuable in this kind of place.

I think the other really important thing to note here: this is typically an extractivist and commercial-oriented project. And I think that approach—the positive, happy images of civilization and productivity and opulence in the desert—it's adding a sheen to exactly how that violence is being enacted through this extractive project.

Nowadays we hear a lot about billionaire fantasies of extraterrestrial colonization, especially Mars. And, as you write about, that's not a new thing. What role does the desert—as both a physical place and as an idea—play in selling those techno-utopian futures?

There's a really, really long history to this. And I would quickly make a mention of a group that I'm part of, the Desert Futures Collective. It's organized by colleagues at Notre Dame, at Yale, and at Williams College. Most of the people in there are in the humanities. The humanities scholars have done a fantastic job of really looking at the role of the sci-fi imaginaries and all of those sorts of popular fiction accounts of deserts, these visions of what the desert landscape is and could be, and how that links up with the extraplanetary futures as well.

The general idea of a lot of this work is that the desert is this passive backdrop in a way. Passive because it's just an icon or it's indexing a particular state of affairs. What it typically is indexing is environmental collapse or eco-apocalypse. There's lots of different ways that that sort of eco-catastrophist narrative is framed over many years, from the 1960s to today. In that, the desert just becomes a passive reference for environmental collapse, and what that immediately does is it says that the desert in itself is not valuable. Growing up in the desert, I know and I love the desert, and I really wish people would just leave deserts alone and just love them for being left alone. It's a glorious thing.

But it means, if we just associate the deserts with apocalypse or collapse, that there's something still aberrant about it, that there's something deficient about it. The desert becomes a place that helps motivate that justification for the movement of plot, and that plot typically is a rehearsal of or a reenactment of that same arid empire vision of extraction and colonization and the extractivist vision of natural resources. This is really the challenge, from my standpoint, in looking at all of the media—whether it's fiction or real life—in how the desert just still gets treated as this passive thing, but also as a place that can and should be extracted and treated with reckless abandon.

I didn't get into this in the book, though I certainly wanted to because of my previous research in Central Asia, but it's a place of nuclear weapons testing. This is something that has always been really, really important for me. The Soviet Union tested almost all its nuclear weapons in Kazakhstan, which is where I was working before. Those similarities and connections between Central Asia and the Nevada and the New Mexico testing sites, it's really quite an important history to remember. But when we just imagine that the desert is this place that is meaningless, or it's just a sign of apocalypse, then it can become a self-reinforcing thing where we then explode nuclear weapons there or think that it's appropriate to just leave it completely contaminated in ways that it absolutely should not be.

I would be interested in, for your next book maybe, tying it to weapons. I read your recent New York Times op-ed, and you connect this to Raytheon operating both in Arizona and Arabia. 

I really wanted to, and I think I'm slowly moving in that direction. Because in all of this research, I found constant connections, especially with the agriculture projects and the military. They were just rife with connections. I talk very briefly about this in the Oman discussion, where there was a big new date palm facility that the University of Arizona developed in Oman that was funded by a military offset. So there's things like that, where it's actually military money that is going into these projects. Or in the case of the Saudis in the 1940s, the ag projects were about getting on good military relations with the Saudis.

So it was always there implicitly, or quietly, but I needed to do a lot more research in order to be able to tell that story fully. This is also where I've been really interested in the story of Raytheon. Because if you look at the state of Arizona, there's half a dozen military bases, we have the largest missile manufacturing facility in the US; it's a whole garrison state there. 

That is very under-appreciated and under-discussed, the connection between the military and industrial agriculture. That goes back a long way with pesticides and fertilizer and things like that. 

There's been a lot of attention recently on the water usage of Arizona because of looming water shortages in the Southwest, and a lot of that attention has been on Almarai, the Saudi Arabian company that grows alfalfa in Arizona to feed dairy cows all the way across the world. And that’s generated a lot of outrage. As you write about, that agricultural relationship goes back a long way, and it goes back and forth in both directions. Why is that history important to help us understand what's going on there right now? And why does a narrow focus on this particular manifestation of water extraction miss the forest for the trees?

When I first heard about the project and I started asking people in Arizona about it, about five years ago, people mostly told me, “It's just one farm, it's not a big deal, it was already an alfalfa farm.” I didn't want to leave it alone, though. Of course it is just one farm; every farm is just one farm. It's a significant one because it helps us understand a broader phenomenon: the wide range of international networks that relate to our land, water, and food production networks. These are things that we need to have a clear understanding of. 

So I first started to look at what was happening with this particular farm, trying to understand why they were there. You can tell the immediate story of that, and you also then start to see that there is this longer history. The immediate story is one that is incredibly important, and which the New York Times piece that I recently wrote was focused on: Arizona’s completely ridiculous water laws. So it matters in that sense.

The longer history of it, though, helps us move away from this sense that I was constantly hearing when I first started talking to people in Arizona about the Saudi farm: that they're coming to steal our water. This was very frustrating for me, not only because who are we? And whose water is this really when you actually are thinking about this from the framework of understanding how American settlers came and took over the land of Indigenous people? The people who are saying they're stealing our water tend to be erasing those Indigenous claims on Arizona's water. And there's a dramatic and terrible situation with respect to Indigenous rights in Arizona and water.

It's really important to understand that history. That history of how the Americans came to colonize and settle Arizona and construct themselves as desert agriculture experts is precisely what these state leaders were using to sell their relationship to the Saudis back in the 1940s. The short version is that in 1944, the US government ended up sending a team of Arizona farmers to Saudi Arabia to this one royal farm area to help them set up their alfalfa fields and to help them develop these new pumping operations and irrigation networks across the middle of Saudi Arabia to be able to produce their own agriculture. This operation and other efforts on the part of the US government and later Aramco (now Saudi Aramco), the oil company, helped fund a lot of these developments.

Then King Saud al Saud came to Arizona in 1947, when he was Crown Prince. After that visit, he wanted to have his own dairy setup in Saudi. Basically taking this idea that: Arizona has these great dairies, we want to do that in Saudi, too. This sparked the Saudi dairy industry, and it is now the headquarters of Almarai, that dairy company that owns the big Arizona alfalfa farm—now farms today—and where they are sending that Arizona-grown alfalfa back to. So you have this long relationship—exchange of ideas and people and things—between Arizona and Saudi since the 1940s that also challenges this idea that Arizonans are the victims here. In a way, it's not so direct, but it still does not allow you to have such an easy subject position of: I'm the victim here, they've just come to us and they are exploiting us. This is a much longer relationship that can't just be divorced by them dropping in and buying one of these farms. 

As you write about, these American farmers and scientists go over to Saudi Arabia basically under the idea that they have to teach Arabs how to farm when there's people there doing small-scale agriculture that developed over thousands of years. But it's actually a particular type of agriculture, mechanized industrial agriculture with artificial inputs and corporate control, that brings with it certain power hierarchies. 

Exactly, and I think that it's this focus on the commercial side of it that was most of interest, both from the US side and from the Saudi side. So you have this partnership around this idea that we need to modernize and mechanize and “improve” the agriculture in that way. One of the fascinating pieces that I uncovered in some of the archives is they were struggling to get the farming equipment sent to Saudi because it's quite far inland and there was really bad transportation at the time. They were struggling for quite a long time to get the farm machines. They eventually convinced the Bureau of Indian Affairs to send a bunch of farm machines from the Southwest to Saudi: Well, if the American Indians aren’t going to use them, then we're going to use them in service of this other empire now. 

What were the political and ecological effects of the US bringing this Green Revolution, high-tech agriculture to the Middle East?

There were many, and certainly I don't think that I would dare to paint this really, really big picture explanation of exactly what all of this did. But just to talk about Saudi, this was quite important for starting the Kingdom on this idea of agriculture as an important part of its state-building agenda. There's a wonderful colleague of mine, Toby Craig Jones, who wrote a book called Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia. In it he talks about how you have this relationship between water and oil. But certainly tied to water and oil is a story of food, and how the green technology comes in—as it does in so many other places—is it creates this short-term mirage of success. As we know, when you have a desert and you put lots of fertilizer there and lots of water there, it can grow things. But that doesn't mean that it's sustainable. And I think that, in a lot of ways, this is the short-term mirage of our everyday present. We live with this fantasy of what the unsustainable application of water and fertilizer does in a given moment.

So for the Kingdom, this meant that it was able to invest in this completely unsustainable agriculture system. And because of the way that state revenues and finances work in a place like Saudi Arabia, a lot of this was being given out to various groups as subsidies for large farming operations. This crushed the small farmers, slowly pushing them out of the market and consolidating money and power in the hands of these larger families that were able to monopolize commercial agriculture. And, as colleagues have argued, this helped create this set of loyal elite patronage networks with the ag sector and the Saudi state. This, for at least the last 50 to 60 years, has been an important dynamic within the Saudi state.

It's one of these pieces that we often forget about: if these technologies are able to facilitate the construction of monopolies and the concentration of power and money in the hands of certain elites, this can also then mean the reinforcement of those unequal power structures. And I think it's really important to remember that when the US was promoting these agricultural technologies all around the world, they were not particularly interested in promoting democracy at that time. They may have said that in some of their initiatives, but certainly in Saudi Arabia this was not about promoting any kind of democratic agenda.

A theme throughout your entire book is that farmers and scientists were really critical to expanding the US empire, wittingly or not, and the state-building project and advancing these commercial interests. As you alluded to, we think of that as a military thing, but this is in the name of science or growing food, ostensibly. How do you think about that less overtly violent role that farmers and scientists and researchers can play or have played?

I think this one is quite tricky, because many people who count themselves as arid lands scientists or researchers or scholars—advocates even—they don't see themselves as doing something “wrong.” But in the way that they are living in this broader geopolitical and historical framework, you can't escape the violence that structured the condition of possibility for their existence and what makes them proud and the work that they do, and just the existence of the University of Arizona. Yeah, they're doing a good job today of promoting Indigenous students and inclusivity, but that doesn't undo the fact that they're a land grant university that is built on a system of Indigenous land theft.

So I think that this is always the challenge of addressing that sort of positive side of a lot of this work. Sometimes it's just very openly colonial, and I think that's a little less tricky. When you have scholars and colleagues, plenty of them, that really just do feel that as Western-educated scholars, they know better than you and they're going to tell you that; they don't have any qualms about that. That's a very paternalist and patriarchal and imperial mindset and point of view.

The challenge for me in writing the book was: how do I acknowledge that I am the descendant of this white settler empire? I grew up here, I am a white person with this background, what does that mean for me? What kind of ethics and responsibility does that bring to me? I think this is where it becomes really important to keep that tension between the positive and the violent side of spectacle, the punitive and the celebratory spectacle, to hold that together. That every time we are talking about some wonderful achievement, we cannot forget that that is still an achievement built on a structure of violence. I think where it becomes really problematic is when celebrating the spectacle with the civilization development, whatever it is, without acknowledging that or hiding the violence of the colonial project or of the violence to the Earth.

I'm in Bahrain right now, and I’m at this new development. It's a series of new artificial islands, and many of the Gulf countries are doing this. Once they build these new islands, it's a beautiful, gleaming, gorgeous spot. And you can focus on that, but there's so much resource waste and so much violence to the Earth was done to create that and to create even the possibility that those homes receive water, that cars get out there; all of the resources that go into creating these artificial islands is so unacceptable. But I think the beauty of it is designed to keep you from focusing on that. That should define how we accept or reject certain types of projects and certain types of scientific investments or partnerships, or whatever it is.