The pollution of colonialism

The Aleppo Pines Forests

In the majestic conifer forests that decorate the Earth’s northern regions, the wayfarer is immersed in the mightiness of the pines and larches, the smell of resin milling from the ground, and the pathway punctuated by pine mushrooms of all sizes resting on the soft needle-like carpet. If not for the truffle hunter or soil scientist, one rarely stops and looks beneath the mantle of needles that dominates the ground. Yet, these forests sometimes hide the past history of the place, the relics of a time that has been erased by the arboreal reality now present. If we move to the southern part of the boreal temperate belt, to the territory now called Israel, these plants, artificially introduced by the human hand, possess not only ecological but also cultural and political value.

In fact, over a century, more than 250 million trees have been planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The fund has developed a particular interest in the expanses of Aleppo Pines due to the fast-growing and easy management of these evergreen trees, but also because the pine tree “fulfills the European image of a true forest” in the traditional Zionist view. Today, two-thirds of the forests managed by the JNF are artificial in nature. Compared to the natural forests of Mediterranean Oak, Terebinth, and Carob trees planted in northern Israel, the monoculture blocks of Aleppo Pines are composed of trees of equal height and age, and are therefore susceptible to disease and fire. In addition, in the vast desert expanses of the south, where the goals of this massive afforestation are soil conservation, greenhouse gas reduction and biodiversity development, these plants could bring more harm than good.

According to Yale Environment 360 magazine, in the Yatir Forest in the Negev Desert, where allochthonous vegetation is used for CO2 sequestration, the dark green leaves of pine trees absorb solar energy previously reflected from desert sand. Offsetting the excess warming thus produced will take 80 years, but the forest, stressed by increasing soil aridification, may not live that long. However, the economic and ecological benefits may be irrelevant because the real motivations for planting large expanses of Aleppo Pines would be primarily cultural in nature.

Tree Sovereignty

According to Jay Shofet, a member of the Society for Natural Protection in Israel, planting trees would be “a Zionist commandment,” since in the Israeli national narrative, the land south of Jerusalem became a wasteland (shemama) as a result of the Jewish Diaspora in the 7th century B.C. and now it is the job of the “well-willing Zionist” to contribute to the “revitalization” of the land. This sentiment has as its implication that the Arabs are responsible for the current poor ecological state and that Jewish administration of the region is an “ecological necessity.” Even before the 1950s, JNF leaders led by Yosef Weitz saw forestation as “a biological statement of Jewish sovereignty” that could be used to resolve “geopolitical issues.” In these terms, property rights to territories could be legitimized and Palestinian resistance justified.

Indeed, at a deeper analytical level, “tree planting is a political effort that links ecology and aesthetics to cultural survival.” It is a way for the Jewish population to assert its existence, but it is also a strategy for land dispossession. Several studies state that Aleppo Pines were chosen because of the acidic deposits created by the fallen needles, which prevent the growth of low vegetation and thus deprive Palestinian farmers of grazing land. In addition to depriving farmers of their basic economic activities, the planting of pine trees would play a more enigmatic and controversial role. To this day, it remains a “public secret” that at least 46 of the JNF forests are located on the ruins of old Palestinian villages. As recounted by A.B. Yehoshua in the short stories Facing the forest (1963), thousands of Arab villages are buried under forests to obscure traces of Palestinian life from the view of Israeli citizens.

The forests would be a camouflage to hide what would otherwise be blatant, to break visible edges so as to render an image of a united, homogeneous territory with an exquisitely European flavor. Bayt Jiz, Bayt Mahsir, Bayt Susin, Saris, ‘Islin, Aqqur, Dayr ‘Amr, Bayt Umm al-Mays, Khirbat al-‘Umur, and Kasla are just a few of the villages that, buried beneath the Aleppo Pines forests, remain silent as evidence of a past life that the traveler daily tramples and ignores, relegating its existence to a distant past that is slowly fading from collective memory. Many of these villages were seized, depopulated and razed to the ground by Weitz’s subordinates in 1948 during Israel’s War of Independence, known to Palestinians as the Nakba (catastrophe), which resulted in the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland and the development of immense expanses of allochthonous trees, including Aleppo Pines, fruit trees (such as the almond tree) and eucalyptus. 

Is colonialism pollution?

When a natural resource takes on a strategic role during a conflict between an occupying and an occupied force, it is referred to as environmental colonialism: the negative impacts on the indigenous natural environment caused by the colonial regime subjugating the population and/or occupying the territory. In this article, the epithets of “colonial state” and “occupying state” will refer to Israeli settlements in Gaza and the West Jordan post-1967.

As demonstrated by the Aleppo Pines Plantation, the territorial occupation of a country has ecological consequences on the daily lives of the occupied population that intersect with economic, social, legal, and political dimensions. Historically, certain cases of colonial occupation have shown that it is precisely the ecological impacts caused by the occupying forces that make the occupation itself possible: the imposition of agricultural techniques that are not indigenous and not suited to the territory, such as monoculture for export; the spread of new diseases and infections; water and air pollution caused by military operations; waste colonialism; over-exploitation of natural resources; deforestation and reduction of biodiversity that impacts livelihoods and exacerbates the loss of locals’ sense of identity. It is clear that the activities of the colonial enterprise ecologically benefit the occupying population and disadvantage the occupied population. However, it is crucial to note that these human activities do not discern a social, economic and environmental dimension but must necessarily be considered with a holistic approach.

By virtue of this holistic dimension, environmental colonialism renders opaque the cause-and-effect link between its two component parts: territorial occupation and environmental damage. According to research from Princeton and Berkeley Universities, the climate crisis would increase the frequency of civil wars by 4.5% for every annual degree of increase in average temperature. While it is true that climate change will increase conflicts, it is certain that the latter will in turn multiply environmental, social and political problems. It is no coincidence that among the 20 countries most vulnerable to the climate crisis, 12 are enmeshed in this endless spiral that fuels the suffering of civilian populations and the destruction of the least resilient ecosystems. One example is soil desertification in Palestine, which is caused both by rising temperatures and by Israel’s “reclamation works”, which for years has been planting thousands of Eucalyptus trees to drain marshes in order to have building land for new settlements. The relevance is even more convoluted since the current climate changes would not be natural, but caused with high probability by anthropogenic activities. Such is the case with Shell’s extraction of oil and gas in the Niger Delta, which has created a catastrophic situation for many communities in the area and contributed to the rapid rise in global temperatures that are one of the causes of desertification in Palestine. Environmental colonialism thus operates on different scales (global, national, local) and is intertwined with various dimensions (economic, social, cultural, ecological) representing a system of practices, processes, policies, beliefs, and institutions on which international relations between different countries are based. An example of this interdependence at multiple scales and dimensions is waste colonialism caused by the production and consumption rates of the Western world. The term denotes the practice whereby Western countries extract, process, consume and discard natural resources in developing countries, keeping all benefits for themselves and shifting the impacts and disposal responsibilities to the latter. This injustice was epitomized by the World Economic Forum with the German nomination as the most virtuous recycling country despite the notoriety of its plastic waste exports. Annually, Germany exports more than one million tons of plastic, surpassing every other European state, sending most of it to China, which, however, recently imposed a ban on plastic imports. So now countries like Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia have turned into huge dumping grounds for plastic waste imported from the West.

The examples analyzed highlight how the experience of environmental colonialism is by no means a relic of the past, but survives on a planetary scale to the present day and how all individuals, willingly or unwillingly, are part of it. Not escaping this logic is Israel’s current occupation of Palestine, which officially began in 1967, after the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War that marked the beginning of the illegal (1) occupation of the West Bank (the territory west of the Jordan River, also known as the West Bank), the Gaza Strip (a small piece of coastline on the Sinai border) and East Jerusalem. The most obvious consequence of the occupation is the establishment of Israeli settlements in the West Bank territories. These settlements, 247 to date with a total of 600,000,000 Israeli settlers, violate international law, particularly Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention – also ratified by Israel – which prohibits the occupying force from transferring “any part of its civilian population into the territory it occupies”. In addition, coexistence between Palestinians and Israelis is marked by strong social, religious and legal discrimination because Arabs are subject to military law, while Jews enjoy the protection of Israel’s law.