1 00:00:07,050 --> 00:00:12,000 Well, good evening, everyone, and welcome to make a start. My name is Michael Willett's. 2 00:00:12,000 --> 00:00:19,230 I have the pleasure of being the director of the Middle East Centre here at St. Anthony's College at the University of Oxford this year. 3 00:00:19,230 --> 00:00:25,980 And I'm delighted to welcome you to what is not just the first event in the Friday seminar series, 4 00:00:25,980 --> 00:00:33,180 the Michaelmas term, but also the first in the Friday seminar series for this academic year. 5 00:00:33,180 --> 00:00:35,460 For those of you joining us for the first time, 6 00:00:35,460 --> 00:00:42,750 the Friday seminar series is the focus of the Middle East Centre, the Macy's weekly programme in Michaelmas. 7 00:00:42,750 --> 00:00:47,040 And he returns as the autumn and spring terms here in Oxford. 8 00:00:47,040 --> 00:00:51,780 It is a series which we have held for years and decades, 9 00:00:51,780 --> 00:00:56,430 and this really gives us an opportunity to host the most some of the most exposed 10 00:00:56,430 --> 00:01:01,590 and engaging speakers to discuss the Middle Eastern and North African region. 11 00:01:01,590 --> 00:01:08,310 We have traditionally held a series of the Middle East centre south, but over last year we've been obliged for obvious reasons, 12 00:01:08,310 --> 00:01:15,260 connected with covid to hold the series remotely, Daihatsu or certainly all of last year. 13 00:01:15,260 --> 00:01:24,920 We will be holding this term seminar again on Zoome, but we plan to return to doing the series in person from the start of the to return in January. 14 00:01:24,920 --> 00:01:33,130 Now, those of you in or near Oxford, that will hopefully come as welcome news since you'll be able to attend the seminar in person. 15 00:01:33,130 --> 00:01:41,080 But I also wanted to say to those of you who are based further away, we are making preparations to livestream the Friday seminar series, 16 00:01:41,080 --> 00:01:45,670 which means that you will be able to attend this lecture virtually. 17 00:01:45,670 --> 00:01:55,600 And indeed, I wanted to thank all of you who have loyally and regularly attended the Friday seminar series on Zoome over the last year. 18 00:01:55,600 --> 00:02:00,160 And I hope that by streaming you can continue to join us. 19 00:02:00,160 --> 00:02:08,620 But we will be basically running the event both virtually and in person, which we like to think gives us the best of both worlds. 20 00:02:08,620 --> 00:02:16,180 We usually have a theme for the Friday seminar series, and this term will be focussed on the topic of the environment and the Middle East. 21 00:02:16,180 --> 00:02:19,890 We have a roster of great speakers to address this issue this time. 22 00:02:19,890 --> 00:02:28,210 And I just quickly run through the speakers we will be having later in the series next week, a week today, October 20 seconds, 23 00:02:28,210 --> 00:02:36,730 we have Saddam Hussein, who will be talking the politics of water scarcity in the case of Jordan in third week on October the 29th. 24 00:02:36,730 --> 00:02:43,480 We have Jamie Thanis and he's speaking to the blue clad fennec authoritarian environmentalism in Tunisia. 25 00:02:43,480 --> 00:02:47,110 And it's after lights on November the 5th. 26 00:02:47,110 --> 00:02:55,690 We have one of our own community, Manala's Shehabi, speaking about environment, discounted energy and economic diversification plans in the Gulf. 27 00:02:55,690 --> 00:03:00,100 On November 12th, Martin Biglari will talk about air pollution, 28 00:03:00,100 --> 00:03:08,740 toxicity and environmental politics in the history of Iranian oil nationalisation week after that on November the 19th. 29 00:03:08,740 --> 00:03:16,120 Michael Mason will be coming here to speak about failing flows, the politics of water management in southern Iraq. 30 00:03:16,120 --> 00:03:21,730 On November 26, we would have a lecture on climate and colonialism in modern Palestine, 31 00:03:21,730 --> 00:03:26,200 historical ethical perspectives that will be given by Neta Cohen. 32 00:03:26,200 --> 00:03:31,150 And we finish the series on December 3rd with a lecture by Christian Henderson. 33 00:03:31,150 --> 00:03:35,440 As you will see from a list, we will be covering a large range of themes, 34 00:03:35,440 --> 00:03:42,250 countries and regions and even slightly historical periods, which give us a flavour hopefully of the topic. 35 00:03:42,250 --> 00:03:49,570 And I think this reflects the breadth of issues both covid and impacted by the environment in its broadest sense. 36 00:03:49,570 --> 00:03:56,140 And we've tried to treat the environment in its broadest sense because I think there is a tendency, I think, 37 00:03:56,140 --> 00:04:03,460 to parcel of environmental issues all on their own as a discrete subject and field to be dealt with separately. 38 00:04:03,460 --> 00:04:04,780 And I think, moreover, 39 00:04:04,780 --> 00:04:12,490 the Middle East and North Africa is perhaps the region of the world where environmental issues have traditionally had the least prominence, 40 00:04:12,490 --> 00:04:18,340 largely because of a greater attention paid, of course, to other issues. 41 00:04:18,340 --> 00:04:25,360 So with that in mind, we therefore thought it might be a nice idea to kick off this seminar series by asking some of the academics based 42 00:04:25,360 --> 00:04:32,650 here at the centre itself to talk about how issues related to the environment relate to their own research. 43 00:04:32,650 --> 00:04:38,980 I know that in the past, a number of people have said that whilst they very much enjoy bringing external expertise into the centre, 44 00:04:38,980 --> 00:04:46,570 they would the time to time like to hear more about the work and research of academics based at the Middle East centre itself. 45 00:04:46,570 --> 00:04:53,890 So here we have an opportunity to talk about that and talk a little bit about some of the research actually being done in the centre the moment. 46 00:04:53,890 --> 00:05:02,710 So therefore, I'm delighted to welcome three of my colleagues here at the centre, Walter Armbrust, a social anthropologist, Laura Minow, 47 00:05:02,710 --> 00:05:08,260 a fellow in Turkish sommat Lasama lecturing contemporary Islamic studies, 48 00:05:08,260 --> 00:05:12,400 all of whom will say about how the environment is fitted in and relates to their own research. 49 00:05:12,400 --> 00:05:18,310 I will also say something at the end about how it relates to my own field of research. 50 00:05:18,310 --> 00:05:25,630 So with all that said, I'd like to turn first to my colleague Walter Armbrust to talk about the environment in his own research. 51 00:05:25,630 --> 00:05:31,900 Walter, I heard you, Michael. I'm going to begin by sharing my screen. 52 00:05:31,900 --> 00:05:35,950 OK, our goal is to relate to environmental issues, to our own research. 53 00:05:35,950 --> 00:05:39,880 So let me begin by reading the last paragraph of my book, 54 00:05:39,880 --> 00:05:47,320 Martyrs' and Trickster's and Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution, published in 2013 just before the pandemic began. 55 00:05:47,320 --> 00:05:52,240 It was written in an uncharacteristically apocalyptic tone. 56 00:05:52,240 --> 00:05:57,390 The defining feature of a liminal crisis is pure contingency, to put it differently. 57 00:05:57,390 --> 00:06:05,500 We can never be entirely sure what will emerge from the void. Sometimes it is monsters rather than the angels we hope for. 58 00:06:05,500 --> 00:06:09,640 I remain convinced that good things emerge along with the naked violence. 59 00:06:09,640 --> 00:06:18,680 It will take time for the good things to rise to the top, but rise they will, even if it turns out to be too late to save the world. 60 00:06:18,680 --> 00:06:26,930 When I wrote that last line, I was thinking of global warming or more precisely of the inevitable result of unfettered capitalism, 61 00:06:26,930 --> 00:06:31,610 a capitalist economy is only thought to be healthy if it's expanded. 62 00:06:31,610 --> 00:06:39,530 For centuries, economic expansion took place through forcibly assimilating new parts of the world into the capitalist system. 63 00:06:39,530 --> 00:06:44,780 But now the entire world has become part of the capitalist system. It's been that way for some time. 64 00:06:44,780 --> 00:06:49,070 There are no new unassimilated territories to bring in. 65 00:06:49,070 --> 00:06:50,690 The world is a closed system, 66 00:06:50,690 --> 00:06:59,360 and therefore further expansion can only come through more intensive extraction of resources leading to more global warming. 67 00:06:59,360 --> 00:07:06,170 That, in a nutshell, is why there is simply no solution to global warming. That includes the continuation of capitalism. 68 00:07:06,170 --> 00:07:11,920 The notion of market based remedies to the climate crisis is nonsense. 69 00:07:11,920 --> 00:07:15,490 I want to relate this political economic dynamic to Egypt, 70 00:07:15,490 --> 00:07:20,440 and my book was about the unintended outcomes and revolution understood as a limited crisis, 71 00:07:20,440 --> 00:07:27,610 and it was about the often bad things that emerge when politics become fluid rather than fixed into the normative pattern. 72 00:07:27,610 --> 00:07:31,420 But this doesn't mean that one can simply dismiss structural factors. 73 00:07:31,420 --> 00:07:37,300 The contingent situations I wrote about can't occur unless people feel a need to rise up. 74 00:07:37,300 --> 00:07:46,030 So one way that I have on occasion described the cause of the January 25th revolution as opposed to its unintended outcomes, 75 00:07:46,030 --> 00:07:50,500 is to say that it was a revolution against luxury housing. 76 00:07:50,500 --> 00:07:55,520 More precisely, the deep dissatisfaction that caused Egyptians to rise up against the government. 77 00:07:55,520 --> 00:08:04,230 2011 was connected to the way both the state and the private sector allocated resources in the decades prior to the revolution. 78 00:08:04,230 --> 00:08:07,590 This was particularly acute in Cairo and other major cities. 79 00:08:07,590 --> 00:08:15,820 So a good way to understand the cause of the revolution is to appreciate the dynamics of how urban growth is managed. 80 00:08:15,820 --> 00:08:21,220 As you can see on this table, Kyra, has a population of roughly fifteen point six million. 81 00:08:21,220 --> 00:08:27,490 It could be more or less defined, define the boundaries of a megacity is never a simple endeavour. 82 00:08:27,490 --> 00:08:32,710 And this population is distributed over four thousand four hundred seventy nine square kilometres. 83 00:08:32,710 --> 00:08:37,160 But the important thing to appreciate is the trajectory of the city's growth. 84 00:08:37,160 --> 00:08:41,680 And you can discern this by looking at the subcategories on the chart, 85 00:08:41,680 --> 00:08:47,620 the older parts of Cairo, Cairo, and gives the governorates and parts of the big governorate. 86 00:08:47,620 --> 00:08:55,510 And this includes both the formal and informal housing is where 15 million of Cairo's fifteen point six million inhabitants live there. 87 00:08:55,510 --> 00:09:01,030 Ninety six percent of the population. And they occupy 31 percent of the space. 88 00:09:01,030 --> 00:09:08,830 The newer parts of Cairo, much more suburban and designed for more affluence and automobile owning population than older parts, 89 00:09:08,830 --> 00:09:16,580 has a population of around six hundred thousand. That's four percent of the population of greater Cairo occupying. 90 00:09:16,580 --> 00:09:25,150 I think I said 30 percent would actually been 69 percent. So it's 15 million people and sixty nine percent, four percent and thirty one percent. 91 00:09:25,150 --> 00:09:33,070 The point of the comparison isn't exactly just that the relation of space to population expresses a growing gap between rich and poor. 92 00:09:33,070 --> 00:09:40,270 It does to some extent, but it doesn't in the sense that most well-off people, in fact, still live in the older parts of the city. 93 00:09:40,270 --> 00:09:45,640 Rather, the point is that the trajectory of Cairo's growth has been towards moving up into the desert. 94 00:09:45,640 --> 00:09:53,470 And this has been the case for decades, going all the way back to the Nasser. But building cities and the desert has had a number of consequences. 95 00:09:53,470 --> 00:10:02,380 One is that it has been a massive failure in terms of getting the population of greater Cairo to actually disperse itself into these new urban areas. 96 00:10:02,380 --> 00:10:08,110 The second consequence of Cairo's urban trajectory has been that it sucked resources away 97 00:10:08,110 --> 00:10:13,450 from where most people actually live and put them into areas where few people live, 98 00:10:13,450 --> 00:10:17,140 which means more money for luxury housing, less for education, 99 00:10:17,140 --> 00:10:23,230 health care and housing that people can afford in the places where they actually live, work. 100 00:10:23,230 --> 00:10:26,890 Another consequence of current trajectory is that this allocation of resources 101 00:10:26,890 --> 00:10:31,660 creates both opportunities for political alliance making as well as tensions. 102 00:10:31,660 --> 00:10:36,460 A political economic dynamic of the decade prior to the revolution was that the 103 00:10:36,460 --> 00:10:40,960 private sector was better situated to benefit from urban growth than the military, 104 00:10:40,960 --> 00:10:44,470 a particularly acute issue in the context of the transition. 105 00:10:44,470 --> 00:10:54,340 Everyone was expecting from the military connected to Hosni Mubarak to his son Gamal, his proclivities lay entirely with the private sector. 106 00:10:54,340 --> 00:10:59,410 That dynamic has been decisively altered in the years after the January 25th revolution, 107 00:10:59,410 --> 00:11:04,510 as you can see from my table after the row giving data on the new desert cities, 108 00:11:04,510 --> 00:11:12,370 there's another row with a new administrative state, which is sometimes described as a new capital city because the plan is to move many 109 00:11:12,370 --> 00:11:18,040 of the government's vital ministries out of Cairo and into a new megaproject. 110 00:11:18,040 --> 00:11:21,400 This idea has been on various drawing boards for decades. 111 00:11:21,400 --> 00:11:28,780 But it was during the Sisi era that it was fast tracked and repackaged as something bold and dramatic and also, 112 00:11:28,780 --> 00:11:38,290 not incidentally, more substantial involving the military. The new administrative city is a giant blob radiating out from Cairo to the east, 113 00:11:38,290 --> 00:11:47,020 towards the Red Sea cities of Suez and so on its own, it's intended to occupy a space of around 700 square kilometres. 114 00:11:47,020 --> 00:11:52,570 In contrast to the 14 hundred square kilometres occupied by the existing desert 115 00:11:52,570 --> 00:11:59,060 cities and the 3000 square kilometres where 96 percent of greater Cairo lives. 116 00:11:59,060 --> 00:12:06,980 With the exception of the 6th of October city, all of the existing desert cities are far below their planned population. 117 00:12:06,980 --> 00:12:15,160 Capacity's a sobering fact if you've ever been caught in a traffic jam to or from one of these otherwise upland areas. 118 00:12:15,160 --> 00:12:24,550 It's a safe bet that the new administrative city will also never approach its planned capacity of six point five million inhabitants. 119 00:12:24,550 --> 00:12:32,090 But this doesn't mean that it won't consume vast resources. And this is where the environment comes back into the picture. 120 00:12:32,090 --> 00:12:42,170 Promotions for this new administrative city, imagine it as bigger, taller, flashier and just plain better than anything Egypt has seen before. 121 00:12:42,170 --> 00:12:47,090 There's a lot of talk about monorails, the Destry, nice neighbourhoods and solar energy, 122 00:12:47,090 --> 00:12:53,240 but also golf courses, beautiful vegetation and water features in the desert. 123 00:12:53,240 --> 00:12:59,630 Whatever reality emerges, the primary truth is that the new administrative capital will be another destination, 124 00:12:59,630 --> 00:13:08,570 accessible primarily by motorised transport on concrete roads, just like all the other desert cities that have been built over the past five decades. 125 00:13:08,570 --> 00:13:14,030 The giant towers visible in the advertising literature, if they're ever built on the scale envisioned, 126 00:13:14,030 --> 00:13:19,040 will require constant air conditioning, obviously increasing demand for electricity. 127 00:13:19,040 --> 00:13:23,360 Egypt has great potential to produce renewable energy from hydropower, 128 00:13:23,360 --> 00:13:30,260 solar and wind and at least officially ambitious targets for generating power from clean, renewable sources. 129 00:13:30,260 --> 00:13:39,020 But most of Egypt's electricity is generated from fossil fuels, and Egypt's demand for electricity has been rising six point five percent a year. 130 00:13:39,020 --> 00:13:47,330 Egypt could meet its renewable energy targets and still end up producing more electricity through fossil fuels than it does now. 131 00:13:47,330 --> 00:13:52,460 And industrial scale renewable energy generation isn't necessarily carbon neutral. 132 00:13:52,460 --> 00:13:59,480 It requires producing steel for giant windmills, in other words, mining and generating electricity somewhere else. 133 00:13:59,480 --> 00:14:03,750 It involves transporting power generation materials across the globe. 134 00:14:03,750 --> 00:14:09,110 By some estimates, shipping Clausewitz's 17 percent of global CO2 emissions. 135 00:14:09,110 --> 00:14:14,090 It requires mining lithium for batteries to store solar generated power. 136 00:14:14,090 --> 00:14:19,220 The promotional images of lush gardens in the administrative capital may or may not be fantasy, 137 00:14:19,220 --> 00:14:23,390 but the fact is that there is no water for anything in that area. 138 00:14:23,390 --> 00:14:28,790 It has to be pumped uphill from the Nile or pumped up from non rechargeable underground 139 00:14:28,790 --> 00:14:34,280 aquifers and transported to the city by pipes or else created by desalination plants, 140 00:14:34,280 --> 00:14:43,080 which can be run by solar energy. But again, it's a mega project that requires mining, transporting materials and building infrastructure. 141 00:14:43,080 --> 00:14:50,460 Building concrete highways, which are undoubtedly destined to be the major infrastructural element of transport in the administrative city, 142 00:14:50,460 --> 00:14:54,270 causes massive CO2 emissions. 143 00:14:54,270 --> 00:15:02,430 All of Egypt's new cities, including the new administrative city, are environmentally dubious or even environmentally disastrous. 144 00:15:02,430 --> 00:15:07,920 I started off by saying that the link to my own research to environmental issues was through politics, 145 00:15:07,920 --> 00:15:14,550 specifically the way that resource allocation enhance the power at the expense of others in Egypt. 146 00:15:14,550 --> 00:15:23,340 That can be seen as a structural factor that led to the uprising of 2011, which quickly was named a revolution by those who participated in it, 147 00:15:23,340 --> 00:15:30,680 and which led to the assumption of power by a far worse regime than the one that was in power when the revolution began. 148 00:15:30,680 --> 00:15:39,380 And the Sisi regime has essentially doubled down on the environmentally dubious megaproject strategy that the Mubarak regime had been following. 149 00:15:39,380 --> 00:15:42,230 But I don't want to suggest that Egypt is an exception. 150 00:15:42,230 --> 00:15:51,740 You probably noticed in my table displaying data on Cairo's population, I included a comparison with Metropolitan Omaha, Council Bluffs. 151 00:15:51,740 --> 00:15:59,330 That's where I grew up. The point of the comparison is not to dramatise Egypt's damaging carbon footprint. 152 00:15:59,330 --> 00:16:03,800 It's just the opposite in terms of its per capita carbon footprint. 153 00:16:03,800 --> 00:16:10,280 Omaha is far, far worse than Cairo in per capita terms, maybe even in absolute terms. 154 00:16:10,280 --> 00:16:18,230 It has more miles of carbon generating concrete roads in Cairo and roughly one personal automobile per driving adults, 155 00:16:18,230 --> 00:16:23,300 whereas in Cairo, only about 10 percent of the population used cars. 156 00:16:23,300 --> 00:16:33,050 So the problem is that the Chiros Environmental Centre, it's that the trajectory of Cairo's urban political economy is to be more like aumont. 157 00:16:33,050 --> 00:16:40,340 And of course, the aspirational models that come to mind more readily are Dubai or we are but Omaha sort of just as well. 158 00:16:40,340 --> 00:16:45,440 When I left Omaha in 1978, the population was around half a million. 159 00:16:45,440 --> 00:16:53,300 It's doubled since then. More roads, more cars, more energy generated for larger and larger houses. 160 00:16:53,300 --> 00:16:58,250 Nebraska is an ecological disaster, and though it's never had a revolution, 161 00:16:58,250 --> 00:17:04,220 the urban political economy of Omaha was destructive enough that maybe it should have had to make 162 00:17:04,220 --> 00:17:10,640 Omaha what it is today required building interstate highways right through the fabric of the city, 163 00:17:10,640 --> 00:17:15,050 as in the rest of the U.S. that required displacing residents and carving up neighbourhoods, 164 00:17:15,050 --> 00:17:23,930 particularly those African-Americans and other minorities. The highways were a necessary condition for what we often refer to as white flight, 165 00:17:23,930 --> 00:17:28,900 one of the most damaging and violent trends in contemporary American history. 166 00:17:28,900 --> 00:17:38,980 And so my final thought is that the solution to the disastrous environmental trajectory of both and Cairo and indeed the entire world is political, 167 00:17:38,980 --> 00:17:43,990 as long as a healthy economy is seen as synonymous with expansion. 168 00:17:43,990 --> 00:17:53,500 All cities will continue to feed warming except for a small downturn in greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 caused by the Korona pandemic. 169 00:17:53,500 --> 00:18:02,710 Global greenhouse gases continues to rise. That will only end when it is widely recognised that reversing global warming 170 00:18:02,710 --> 00:18:09,320 and capitalism are incompatible and that recognition is nowhere on the horizon. 171 00:18:09,320 --> 00:18:15,190 So thank you very much. Well, that was fascinating, if rather if rather sobering. 172 00:18:15,190 --> 00:18:20,500 But we will look out if there is a revolution in Omaha. You heard it here first, but thank you. 173 00:18:20,500 --> 00:18:26,850 Thank you very much. Well, I move on to our colleague, Turkish fellow Lauren, that study fellow Lauren. 174 00:18:26,850 --> 00:18:28,510 Hello. Thank you, Michael. 175 00:18:28,510 --> 00:18:40,960 Well, being a literary scholar, I cannot really claim that I have any expertise regarding environmental questions or the current climate crisis. 176 00:18:40,960 --> 00:18:44,440 However, I like the idea of today's exercise, 177 00:18:44,440 --> 00:18:53,050 inviting me to reflect on where or and how my own research and teaching that are mostly but not exclusively 178 00:18:53,050 --> 00:19:01,930 focussed on the late Ottoman and Early Republic and Turkish literary world intersect with environmental concerns. 179 00:19:01,930 --> 00:19:09,370 I need to stress here that I am not at all aiming to to give a comprehensive overview of the representation 180 00:19:09,370 --> 00:19:16,480 of nature and the exploration of environmental issues in modern Turkish language literature. 181 00:19:16,480 --> 00:19:23,110 Rather, what I will do today is more like reading excerpts from a long book recording interesting 182 00:19:23,110 --> 00:19:31,750 instances of texts expressing what we might want to call the form of environmental language. 183 00:19:31,750 --> 00:19:41,000 As we have only a limited amount of time for our discussion today, my focus will be on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 184 00:19:41,000 --> 00:19:47,050 Obviously, the works of contemporary novelists such as the late Yashar or indeed Latifiya, 185 00:19:47,050 --> 00:19:54,610 ticking off a vast opportunities for anyone who wishes to pursue an equally critical approach of literature. 186 00:19:54,610 --> 00:19:59,980 Both have been widely translated into European languages, even into English, 187 00:19:59,980 --> 00:20:07,730 and are relatively well known beyond the flexible boundaries of what we may call toco phonier. 188 00:20:07,730 --> 00:20:18,110 Much of what I will refer to today goes back to an earlier book of mine published in Istanbul in 2009 with the title Anatomy Clash. 189 00:20:18,110 --> 00:20:20,660 So that means footnotes moving to the main text. 190 00:20:20,660 --> 00:20:27,040 And this book was partly based on articles that I had written at the time for the literary supplement of 191 00:20:27,040 --> 00:20:36,440 the daily newspaper and the literary magazine called Evidence that has actually been banned in 2016. 192 00:20:36,440 --> 00:20:40,460 One of the chapters of the book was entitled And It's A Long Title, 193 00:20:40,460 --> 00:20:48,710 and I love the title at the time to let the markets demand the soldiers that I could not last, 194 00:20:48,710 --> 00:20:57,110 which in English could be contrary notes on into culturalism and the left that does not wish to become a machine. 195 00:20:57,110 --> 00:21:06,710 Now those amongst you who are a little familiar with the work of the socialist poet next will recognise the reference to the Futurist Theorem. 196 00:21:06,710 --> 00:21:14,180 I want to become a machine a which I think you wrote in nineteen twenty three and 197 00:21:14,180 --> 00:21:21,210 that was a celebration of industrialisation and of the mechanisation of production. 198 00:21:21,210 --> 00:21:26,010 But in the early 2000s, on the eve of what we call today the climate crisis, 199 00:21:26,010 --> 00:21:35,220 it was obvious that this type of celebration of productivity and in certain ways of human ization of labour was not compatible with 200 00:21:35,220 --> 00:21:46,020 the type of slowing down of downsizing and what the French called the croissants that was required to solve the ecological crisis. 201 00:21:46,020 --> 00:21:52,140 As at the time I was teaching 19th century Ottoman Turkish literature at the university in Ankara, 202 00:21:52,140 --> 00:21:59,260 I have been struck by the fact that the expression of environmental concerns had been up to a point, 203 00:21:59,260 --> 00:22:10,530 a significant aspect of the critique of modernisation that was characteristic for the writings of religiously conservative authors or some of them. 204 00:22:10,530 --> 00:22:16,140 For instance, in Panzeri Telemaque text inspired, as the title suggests, 205 00:22:16,140 --> 00:22:24,030 by finials Telemaque Methodic Efendi, who at the time had been sent into internal exile in A. 206 00:22:24,030 --> 00:22:30,600 So we are in 1870. So while he was praising intellectual and physical labour in this work, 207 00:22:30,600 --> 00:22:37,740 he put also emphasis on the need to respect the earth, the soil especially, and its fruits. 208 00:22:37,740 --> 00:22:42,810 Without such respect, the land would cease to be fertile ground. 209 00:22:42,810 --> 00:22:47,880 Now, if we were, to use today's political terminology, Methodic would be called an Islamist. 210 00:22:47,880 --> 00:22:52,410 But as we know, this is not at all a very useful term. 211 00:22:52,410 --> 00:22:59,370 But similarly, although it has dark aspects, another religious, conservative and nationalist in this case, 212 00:22:59,370 --> 00:23:06,330 namely Knoedler, talk to Anatolian socialism as a notable environmentalist agenda. 213 00:23:06,330 --> 00:23:12,870 The writings 60 70 years after Nematzadeh E to shed his dislike of modernity, 214 00:23:12,870 --> 00:23:21,260 leading him to develop a critique of it that put a strong emphasis on the need to respect the eco system. 215 00:23:21,260 --> 00:23:24,140 But if we go back to two Republican times, 216 00:23:24,140 --> 00:23:33,710 it will probably not come as a surprise that it is pioneers of science fiction in Turkish who would express a certain amount of environmental anguish. 217 00:23:33,710 --> 00:23:41,810 Here, I will evoke the works of authors who can by no means be described as conservatives, but who drew this topic. 218 00:23:41,810 --> 00:23:51,860 Portraits of the Future World. Unlike other texts of speculative fiction of the era, these texts are not concerned about the impact of political, 219 00:23:51,860 --> 00:24:01,400 economic and industrial modernisation on national, cultural or religious identity and on the future of the Ottoman state. 220 00:24:01,400 --> 00:24:09,890 But rather they focus on the impact of technology and of industrialisation on the future of humanity. 221 00:24:09,890 --> 00:24:12,590 Jalaluddin, in an untitled short story. 222 00:24:12,590 --> 00:24:24,710 At the end of the story, he stood by his department's history of the future until he committed his play of the Earthlings and Trafficante. 223 00:24:24,710 --> 00:24:28,440 The short story is this must be an illusion. 224 00:24:28,440 --> 00:24:34,130 This must be dream paints a pessimistic picture of the future of humankind, 225 00:24:34,130 --> 00:24:39,740 industrial colonisation of the seas and the oceans, the disappearance of seasons, 226 00:24:39,740 --> 00:24:44,960 the robotisation of everyday life, the destruction of human intercourse, 227 00:24:44,960 --> 00:24:50,870 the vanishing of the differences between human beings and robots, between men and women. 228 00:24:50,870 --> 00:24:56,480 And the installation of totalitarian governments are common themes in these three works. 229 00:24:56,480 --> 00:25:04,430 If some developments such as the unity of humankind, the disappearance of ethnic, national and religious differences, 230 00:25:04,430 --> 00:25:10,940 longevity, well, I can never pronounce or even eternal life could see significant advances. 231 00:25:10,940 --> 00:25:17,390 Some, at least to some of us. This is not an opinion that would have been shared by these three authors. 232 00:25:17,390 --> 00:25:22,930 It was the end of the world as they knew it and a world they loved. 233 00:25:22,930 --> 00:25:31,840 But not all visions of the future were pessimistic. We have to turn to another religiously conservative author, namely Molana David Sadeh, 234 00:25:31,840 --> 00:25:39,070 and his science fiction novel Riada tracking the progress and dream that we published around 1915. 235 00:25:39,070 --> 00:25:50,540 So although the authors celebrate industrialisation, much emphasis is put on the absence of pollution in the Islamic State of the future. 236 00:25:50,540 --> 00:25:58,460 For instance, non-polluting engines that work with air and water are considered amongst the inventions of the New Age, 237 00:25:58,460 --> 00:26:07,870 which is indicative of an environmental consciousness. A similar environmental agenda, but rooted on secular grounds, 238 00:26:07,870 --> 00:26:16,660 can be witnessed in Besame jarheads utopian story, Hayata Mobile Feed the World or the life imagined. 239 00:26:16,660 --> 00:26:27,130 The narrator recounts the story about a group of people escaping civil society and building a utopian commune on a distant island on this island, 240 00:26:27,130 --> 00:26:32,200 which reminds of paradise. Humans live in harmony with nature. 241 00:26:32,200 --> 00:26:40,180 Although the social order of the village is based on egalitarian and communal foundations, the layout of the houses, 242 00:26:40,180 --> 00:26:48,280 the four o'clock tea drinking ceremony and piano recitals tend remind of life in an idealised English village, 243 00:26:48,280 --> 00:26:57,010 but somehow Midsomer murders without the murders. Another problem is, of course, the continuation of the patriarchal order on the island. 244 00:26:57,010 --> 00:27:04,300 In this respect, U.S. story reminds of English pastoral literature with the conservative core 245 00:27:04,300 --> 00:27:09,850 U.S. Giants village of Foma intellectual's resembles a kind of ivory tower 246 00:27:09,850 --> 00:27:19,540 built far from the realities of an ever changing world the tower where an English teacher would feel more comfortable than an Anatolian miner and cat. 247 00:27:19,540 --> 00:27:21,880 And I will conclude here, 248 00:27:21,880 --> 00:27:30,100 literature in Turkish at the turn of the 19th and 20th century presents many examples that could help us nourish not only Turkey. 249 00:27:30,100 --> 00:27:35,020 A reflection on the current climate crisis. Thank you. 250 00:27:35,020 --> 00:27:44,500 Thank you very much indeed, Lawrence, and for a wonderful example of how themes that we wouldn't necessarily immediately associate with environments, 251 00:27:44,500 --> 00:27:50,440 late 19th century Ottoman history and literature are actually extremely relevant to the topic of the environment. 252 00:27:50,440 --> 00:27:56,080 It also shows us. That we tend to think that the environment has been a very modern and very recent preoccupation, 253 00:27:56,080 --> 00:28:01,240 but as you so beautifully illustrated, these concerns have been there for a long time. 254 00:28:01,240 --> 00:28:04,480 We tend to think often. I think we look and contemporary and modern things. 255 00:28:04,480 --> 00:28:08,050 We think of these things as being very new, that they've been there for a while. 256 00:28:08,050 --> 00:28:13,330 And we like to think of sense that we do history well as well and gives you the historical conception. 257 00:28:13,330 --> 00:28:24,720 Thank you very much, Lauren. Not to al-Hasani, Lezama, thank you, sort of really giving us quite a lot of breadth to the subject, 258 00:28:24,720 --> 00:28:33,790 whether we're starting in urban Egypt today or going into the mists of history, as it were, for the modern Turkish republic. 259 00:28:33,790 --> 00:28:42,310 My own sort of interest in the environment comes through the writings of the Ulama, kind of a preoccupation of my own, 260 00:28:42,310 --> 00:28:53,170 and so I'm going to be briefly sharing my screen to talk about one of these scholars whom I've begun to explore his works. 261 00:28:53,170 --> 00:28:56,760 I'm starting with this scholar, Karlovy. 262 00:28:56,760 --> 00:29:07,410 So you sort although he's one of the scholars I'm studying, he's based in the country of Qatar, a tiny country jutting out of the Arabian Peninsula, 263 00:29:07,410 --> 00:29:16,500 which actually, according to Wikipedia in 2013, had the largest per capita usage of energy in the world. 264 00:29:16,500 --> 00:29:22,620 So in a sense, it's quite a pertinent place to be concerned about the environment. 265 00:29:22,620 --> 00:29:27,910 And I suspect I mean, that's the latest data we have on Wikipedia from 2013. 266 00:29:27,910 --> 00:29:30,780 I suspect that it's maintained those sorts of levels. 267 00:29:30,780 --> 00:29:37,070 And what's fascinating to me is the number of countries from the Persian Gulf that are occupying the top 10. 268 00:29:37,070 --> 00:29:42,390 They basically make up the majority in terms of Muslim countries, Muslim majority countries. 269 00:29:42,390 --> 00:29:47,730 You've even got, you know, Brunei, Islam and the United States is number 10. 270 00:29:47,730 --> 00:29:51,460 So Omahaw isn't doing quite so bad as it were. 271 00:29:51,460 --> 00:30:02,100 But I think this brings to the fore that there is a kind of massive inequity in energy in the Middle East itself. 272 00:30:02,100 --> 00:30:10,410 So we have this is very well known, but the petro monarchies in the Gulf obviously have a significant amount of oil wealth and 273 00:30:10,410 --> 00:30:16,560 that allows them to consume on a level that is really unimaginable for most of the world. 274 00:30:16,560 --> 00:30:26,730 If I recall correctly, Britain and this list falls under. So Qatar is a 19000 kilojoules of energy sorry, kilograms of oil equivalent. 275 00:30:26,730 --> 00:30:31,200 And Britain is somewhere in the range of, I think, two to three thousand. 276 00:30:31,200 --> 00:30:37,440 So and the U.S. actually, as you can see here, is around 7000, as you can see there. 277 00:30:37,440 --> 00:30:42,690 So just give some sort of context to the amount of energy consumption that we have. 278 00:30:42,690 --> 00:30:49,920 That said, given the size of these countries, the energy consumption is minuscule compared to the global north. 279 00:30:49,920 --> 00:30:53,550 So that inequity is something that I'll refer to. 280 00:30:53,550 --> 00:30:57,720 Well, turning to corroborees sort of book for a moment. 281 00:30:57,720 --> 00:31:01,500 So we actually wrote a book when I was a little surprised. 282 00:31:01,500 --> 00:31:12,000 Not surprised isn't the right term, but I was just thinking when Lawhon described the 2000s as being the sort of early reflections on the environment. 283 00:31:12,000 --> 00:31:20,920 He wrote this book in the year 2000. It was published in the year 2001. So I'm referring to this as a scholar is now in his 90s. 284 00:31:20,920 --> 00:31:24,990 He's retired from public life, not really writing anymore. So this book may be a little dated, 285 00:31:24,990 --> 00:31:31,770 but it's one of the recent historical texts that I'm looking at just to reflect on the question of the environment. 286 00:31:31,770 --> 00:31:38,410 And so in this book, which you can actually download the entire book from his website, it's currently just put it up there. 287 00:31:38,410 --> 00:31:43,950 I'm not sure what the copyright situation is, but presumably his publishers are entirely aware of this in this book. 288 00:31:43,950 --> 00:31:53,190 I just wanted to sort of allude to how he is trying to draw on the Koran and the Hadith as a traditional Ilim, 289 00:31:53,190 --> 00:31:58,710 as a scholar who is a graduate of the US and an Egyptian domiciled in Qatar, 290 00:31:58,710 --> 00:32:05,490 but someone who is also highly influential in various forms of media over the course of his career. 291 00:32:05,490 --> 00:32:12,400 And it's fascinating to just to briefly translate this verse on the top of the screen, zoom in briefly. 292 00:32:12,400 --> 00:32:15,840 Hopefully that's going to help people be able to see it a bit more clearly. 293 00:32:15,840 --> 00:32:23,970 And this is a very strong from the Koran where it says, you know, call to your lord and be amongst those who are aggressing. 294 00:32:23,970 --> 00:32:32,130 And then in a sense, this is the set of verses that he wants to highlight wellat of civil liberties here, don't create corruption. 295 00:32:32,130 --> 00:32:38,370 And after it has been brought into a state of health, as it were, Wetherall who have forgotten that, 296 00:32:38,370 --> 00:32:46,540 but it's interlinking that with one's sort of commitment to worship of God and worship God with fear and with hope. 297 00:32:46,540 --> 00:32:52,830 Indeed, God's mercy is close to the bone to those who are upholders of accidents. 298 00:32:52,830 --> 00:33:02,400 And then this verse is sometimes sort of quoted as explicating a kind of Koranic conception of how the water cycle works. 299 00:33:02,400 --> 00:33:13,230 It says he is the one God is the one who sort of spreads the winds as kind of glad, glad tidings and the manifestation of his mercy. 300 00:33:13,230 --> 00:33:18,210 And then it takes the clouds from one place to another and it revives dead earth. 301 00:33:18,210 --> 00:33:24,660 It's a fascinating energy. It's quite poetic. I'm not doing justice to it, obviously in my off the cuff translation. 302 00:33:24,660 --> 00:33:31,440 And then it says that the water descends and through it the sort of fruit come 303 00:33:31,440 --> 00:33:36,870 forth from the earth and we gather any kind of original material to the. 304 00:33:36,870 --> 00:33:39,750 That's how we revive the dead in a sense. 305 00:33:39,750 --> 00:33:46,620 So that you may reflect and related to that is this verse which is often quoted in the context and the environment. 306 00:33:46,620 --> 00:33:53,640 And it's worth remembering, you know, this is a welcome, I believe is a revelation that came 4500 years ago. 307 00:33:53,640 --> 00:33:57,160 And so although historians will. Look at this and say, OK, 308 00:33:57,160 --> 00:34:07,420 this was obviously speaking to its own context to draw on sort of the idea of Moshe Halbertal and the notion of having these canonical texts, 309 00:34:07,420 --> 00:34:10,510 which you believe to be speaking to you in every moment. 310 00:34:10,510 --> 00:34:17,980 In a sense, someone is saying, well, this applies to our treatment of the Earth in our own time, the whole facade of the human body being, 311 00:34:17,980 --> 00:34:28,190 like I said, that even as the sort of corruption has manifested on the on the land and in the sea due to what the hands of men have brought you, 312 00:34:28,190 --> 00:34:38,860 the Obama lady, I mean, in order to give you a taste literally of some of the corruption in a sense that you have engaged in in order, 313 00:34:38,860 --> 00:34:42,910 it says in the third person, in order for them to return to God, in a sense. 314 00:34:42,910 --> 00:34:50,080 And so, you know, these sorts of evocative verses can be seen as quite general in their purpose. 315 00:34:50,080 --> 00:34:53,230 But and I'll just switch back to the boy here. 316 00:34:53,230 --> 00:35:00,490 But at the same time, they actually do provide enough sort of reflective material for him to develop a system, 317 00:35:00,490 --> 00:35:07,130 as it were, that he explicate over 264 pages in this book and he does this relatively early. 318 00:35:07,130 --> 00:35:17,020 So I wanted to just start off with kind of explicating Karbo is sort of a brief having a brief overview of his ideas in this regard. 319 00:35:17,020 --> 00:35:19,810 But I wanted to perhaps the next three minutes or so, 320 00:35:19,810 --> 00:35:30,370 if that's where I just outline in brief some of my own reflections on some of these sorts of questions in how they relate to Islamic studies, 321 00:35:30,370 --> 00:35:33,820 particularly in the traditional guise as Uloom Shariya. 322 00:35:33,820 --> 00:35:42,790 So the sort of in places like the US her, which is the Arab world's pre-eminent centre for Islamic learning based in Cairo, 323 00:35:42,790 --> 00:35:52,510 and the historic centre of learning that is definitely older than Oxford, you know, they study various Shariah meaning disciplines or, 324 00:35:52,510 --> 00:35:57,040 you know, fields of knowledge that are related to the Sharia in some way, whether it's Koranic studies, 325 00:35:57,040 --> 00:36:04,150 Hadith studies, Islamic legal studies or a whole host of other sort of theology and all the rest of it. 326 00:36:04,150 --> 00:36:10,360 And I just wanted to sort of mention that a number of these fields have direct sort of things 327 00:36:10,360 --> 00:36:15,340 to say in a sense about the environment and can be extrapolated from and this is in a sense, 328 00:36:15,340 --> 00:36:26,170 the the major challenge that modern Muslims are going to have to reflect on as they sort of respond to the environmental crisis. 329 00:36:26,170 --> 00:36:29,740 So we've seen some verses from the Quran cited by Karlovy. 330 00:36:29,740 --> 00:36:36,700 But you have hadiths from the prophet as well, such as a Hadith where the prophet exhorts his companions, 331 00:36:36,700 --> 00:36:42,190 don't waste water, even if you're at the bank of a river at the bank of a flowing river, 332 00:36:42,190 --> 00:36:49,270 that quite literally and in this regard, in a sense, what you have is the you know, there are these principles that can be drawn, 333 00:36:49,270 --> 00:36:54,910 that are found across a variety of traditions, principles of moderation, principles of abstemious. 334 00:36:54,910 --> 00:37:03,340 There's a lot of which will be expressed in Islamic law, but more usually would be expressed as values in a sense, 335 00:37:03,340 --> 00:37:11,500 to use modern terminology as ethical values that we would embody, that Muslims would embody in their own sort of personal lives. 336 00:37:11,500 --> 00:37:19,240 And that usually manifests in the tradition known as Sufism, or at least in certain elements of that sort of a tradition. 337 00:37:19,240 --> 00:37:27,860 And so, in a sense, you know, these religious values which Islam may share with other religious traditions, 338 00:37:27,860 --> 00:37:32,200 the prophetic traditions of Koranic in the Koran and the Hadith, 339 00:37:32,200 --> 00:37:41,020 as it were, will provide a lot of food for thought, for people to reflect on how to engage in moderate living, 340 00:37:41,020 --> 00:37:46,180 kind of the opposite of impulse of capitalist consumption led culture. 341 00:37:46,180 --> 00:37:54,370 And in many respects, I would argue that those sorts of traditions are probably what Muslims can draw on. 342 00:37:54,370 --> 00:37:59,050 But at the same time, given the the status of the global south and the global order, 343 00:37:59,050 --> 00:38:05,020 it's not necessarily they that need to particularly prioritise this as a set of values. 344 00:38:05,020 --> 00:38:07,630 And finally, I just wanted to highlight I mean, 345 00:38:07,630 --> 00:38:14,920 I was meant to mention this with respect to those actually quite cognisant of that global south north divide, 346 00:38:14,920 --> 00:38:25,790 he actually, in his discussions, took talks about the global north as being the major consumers and that the global south in many respects, 347 00:38:25,790 --> 00:38:29,320 and he criticises the way in which governments accept these kinds of policies, 348 00:38:29,320 --> 00:38:40,150 will take the weight of the global north for a fee and thereby dramatically damage the environment, the proximate environments of this country. 349 00:38:40,150 --> 00:38:46,780 And in that sort of context, I think it's important to highlight and conclude on this point that a lot of the people 350 00:38:46,780 --> 00:38:51,700 we're thinking of and this echoes what Malta was saying earlier in the Middle East region, 351 00:38:51,700 --> 00:38:58,240 are not really in a position to do a great deal about it, about their situation and are, you know, 352 00:38:58,240 --> 00:39:06,160 less the producers of the global climate crisis and more the recipients of the global climate crisis. 353 00:39:06,160 --> 00:39:11,800 And that's something I think those of us in the global north need to think about. Thank you very much. 354 00:39:11,800 --> 00:39:18,610 Thank you very much. Thanks very much for another fascinating talk and links in, well, with the previous two ones. 355 00:39:18,610 --> 00:39:27,760 And I think you highlighted as you hit yourself that this is a growing field of interest in scholars of Islam about the ratings of the environment. 356 00:39:27,760 --> 00:39:34,000 And it fits in in all sorts of other ways with the sort of issues that you're looking at. 357 00:39:34,000 --> 00:39:39,520 Thank you. Finally, let's turn just to say something about my own research and what I've been working on, 358 00:39:39,520 --> 00:39:45,700 looking more towards political issues and looking particularly at the Maghreb, the region. 359 00:39:45,700 --> 00:39:53,880 But I carry out research on. I recently completed a book on Algerian politics that I hope will be coming out in February, 360 00:39:53,880 --> 00:40:00,450 and the book surveys politics across the spectrum, but environmental issues come to the fore. 361 00:40:00,450 --> 00:40:06,630 And part of the book and I think show how these issues are feeding into a much broader 362 00:40:06,630 --> 00:40:12,000 patterns of politics and broad aspects of politics than actually we commonly realise. 363 00:40:12,000 --> 00:40:20,380 And I think this is not not unique to Algeria, but we see it in other places of interest to see where that wind spread. 364 00:40:20,380 --> 00:40:26,710 But the part of my book in which these issues come up is not book where I examine unrest and protest movements, 365 00:40:26,710 --> 00:40:34,690 but it occurred in some of Algeria's more distinct regions over the past 20 years, in particular in January 2015, 366 00:40:34,690 --> 00:40:42,010 in the town of Salaat, deep in the Sahara and south of Algeria, there were protests following a visit by the National Minister for Energy, 367 00:40:42,010 --> 00:40:48,040 Yusef Yusuf, to the region who was there to inaugurate new gas wells near the city. 368 00:40:48,040 --> 00:40:54,940 Now, while the development of new resources might have been expected to have attracted local popular support rather than hostility, 369 00:40:54,940 --> 00:41:00,850 it was the nature of the wells being inaugurated that attracted substantial local ire, 370 00:41:00,850 --> 00:41:05,560 euphemistically termed Algeria's first nonconventional gas wells. 371 00:41:05,560 --> 00:41:14,530 The government called them. They were, in fact, Algeria's first foray into the exploitation of its apparently substantial shale gas resources. 372 00:41:14,530 --> 00:41:20,410 As we know, use of a technique of fracking to eventually extract these resources had provoked global controversy 373 00:41:20,410 --> 00:41:26,590 over its alleged damaging effects on local water resources and possible provoking of ground tremors, 374 00:41:26,590 --> 00:41:33,940 environmentalists, activists and salaat, many of whom actually worked in the oil and gas sector locally, which I find very interesting, 375 00:41:33,940 --> 00:41:36,880 the fact that these were people who were very familiar with energy issues and 376 00:41:36,880 --> 00:41:40,840 therefore much more aware and informed about the sort of the negative side. 377 00:41:40,840 --> 00:41:45,970 These weren't uninformed activists, the people very engaged actually in the industry themselves. 378 00:41:45,970 --> 00:41:52,060 But many of these activists were the first to raise vocal objections to the claims against the wells and 379 00:41:52,060 --> 00:41:58,540 were able to mobilise a thousand local residents to protest in the days that followed the minister's visit. 380 00:41:58,540 --> 00:42:00,520 Now, these protests grew over days and weeks, 381 00:42:00,520 --> 00:42:08,140 followed soon drawing an estimated 15000 people to them in a city with a population barely twice that number. 382 00:42:08,140 --> 00:42:15,530 So nearly half the population came onto the streets to protest against the potential of fracking. 383 00:42:15,530 --> 00:42:20,330 Moreover, large supportive demonstrations were held in other southern towns and cities, 384 00:42:20,330 --> 00:42:24,140 mobilising an estimated four thousand people in the city of Tamanrasset. 385 00:42:24,140 --> 00:42:30,380 Five thousand joining a march in Wagler where activists have begun to mobilise against shale gas exploitation. 386 00:42:30,380 --> 00:42:38,780 The previous June, there was particular resentment in these demonstration that the fact that the Algerian authorities had allowed a specifically 387 00:42:38,780 --> 00:42:47,030 French company total to test unconventional extraction techniques and these techniques were not permitted in France itself. 388 00:42:47,030 --> 00:42:55,730 Now, this has resonance is not just in the fact that France, of course, was the former colonial power in Algeria, but much more significantly, 389 00:42:55,730 --> 00:43:02,570 it was the south of Algeria where the French had been permitted to carry out nuclear weapons tests in the 1960s. 390 00:43:02,570 --> 00:43:10,740 And thus the return of total evoked very important and very resentful memories amongst a lot of the population of the South. 391 00:43:10,740 --> 00:43:14,850 This French involvement did indeed allow protesters to characterise the fracking as a 392 00:43:14,850 --> 00:43:20,670 neocolonial project and thus frame their movement as one protecting national sovereignty, 393 00:43:20,670 --> 00:43:21,840 environmental concerns. 394 00:43:21,840 --> 00:43:31,020 An activist spearheaded the protests we've seen over the inauguration of these projects, but they tapped into widespread concerns, 395 00:43:31,020 --> 00:43:35,580 broader issues of marginalisation and the absence of benefits experienced, 396 00:43:35,580 --> 00:43:40,530 enjoyed by people of the region in the exploitation of these rich local resources. 397 00:43:40,530 --> 00:43:45,990 Protesters argue that despite the strategic importance of a region with its gas and water resources, 398 00:43:45,990 --> 00:43:51,450 actually insula is next to one of the largest reservoirs in the Sahara Desert. 399 00:43:51,450 --> 00:43:59,310 There had been little development in the region and even the exploitation of conventional gas had brought scant local benefits to a local population, 400 00:43:59,310 --> 00:44:02,250 even though these were things that were exploited locally. 401 00:44:02,250 --> 00:44:10,230 Local people saw very little and referring to the perceived environmental damage fracking for shale could do, one local activist argued. 402 00:44:10,230 --> 00:44:14,830 Shale gas will take what little we have and we don't want it. 403 00:44:14,830 --> 00:44:20,770 Now, the combined pressure of a protest likely contributed to the dismissal of the architect of the shale gas project. 404 00:44:20,770 --> 00:44:25,780 Energy Minister Yousef used to be the May 20 15, said it cost him his job ultimately, 405 00:44:25,780 --> 00:44:32,230 and such was the popularity of the of the protests that other groups and activities became involved. 406 00:44:32,230 --> 00:44:41,560 And they prompted an attempt to hold the first major protest by opposition groups and parties in the capital, Algiers, since the Arab Spring. 407 00:44:41,560 --> 00:44:50,800 Now, very interestingly, other slightly more unusual political groupings also began to be seen to involve 408 00:44:50,800 --> 00:44:55,270 themselves in environmental issues and could be seen as jumping on the bandwagon. 409 00:44:55,270 --> 00:45:03,400 There was an attack in March 2016 on a gas facility at the city of Inshala by what was the largest jihadi group in the region, 410 00:45:03,400 --> 00:45:12,280 al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. And this group rather unusually justified the attack on the on the gas facility as 411 00:45:12,280 --> 00:45:17,170 an attempt to protect the environment and discourage further shale gas exploration. 412 00:45:17,170 --> 00:45:22,960 So you were getting the jihadis coming in on the environmental issue now? 413 00:45:22,960 --> 00:45:26,150 It was rather implausible that this was claim, 414 00:45:26,150 --> 00:45:33,970 but I think it's perhaps better explained by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb its desire to align itself with a major local grievance. 415 00:45:33,970 --> 00:45:42,310 But it does show the power of these grievances. However, such an endorsement was not welcomed by the main protest movement, as you can imagine, 416 00:45:42,310 --> 00:45:49,060 because it then subsequently had to fend off the inevitable official accusations that somehow concerns about the environment were about terrorism. 417 00:45:49,060 --> 00:45:56,320 Every time we find too often in the region that there is a movement that the authorities don't like, they try and link it to terrorism. 418 00:45:56,320 --> 00:46:01,210 And this was the routine setting for this. However, as a result of all of this pressure, 419 00:46:01,210 --> 00:46:06,610 the authorities announced that the exploitation would be delayed for a number of years, perhaps five to 10 years. 420 00:46:06,610 --> 00:46:11,620 But following a successful campaign of repression and cooption of the protests, 421 00:46:11,620 --> 00:46:17,260 they receded and the shale gas initiatives were revived in late twenty seventeen. 422 00:46:17,260 --> 00:46:25,540 However, the protests themselves were resolved in the context of a huge national protest movement, what became known as the Iraq, 423 00:46:25,540 --> 00:46:33,280 but developed across Algeria in twenty nineteen, it secured the resignation of a sitting President Bouteflika. 424 00:46:33,280 --> 00:46:40,750 An enormous crisis in Algeria and one of the weekly protests in January 2020 was 425 00:46:40,750 --> 00:46:46,900 explicitly devoted to calls for the government to abandon its plans to exploit shale gas, 426 00:46:46,900 --> 00:46:53,510 which were condemned in the protests. There were banners and chants that week that was the theme of the weekly protest, and they argued. 427 00:46:53,510 --> 00:47:00,250 But what was really happening there was attempts to sell Algeria to multinational corporations and especially the French. 428 00:47:00,250 --> 00:47:07,750 So overall, in this way, we can see that environmental concerns have found their way into wider politics for expressions 429 00:47:07,750 --> 00:47:14,110 as diverse as a national protest of the Hirak which dominated and rather surprisingly, 430 00:47:14,110 --> 00:47:16,450 al-Qaida's franchises in the region. 431 00:47:16,450 --> 00:47:24,680 So that gives you hopefully a taste of how it's affected Algerian politics and quite perhaps some more unusual ways. 432 00:47:24,680 --> 00:47:33,560 Now, we have just about a few minutes left to raise any questions that anybody would have with any of us speakers want to contribute, 433 00:47:33,560 --> 00:47:38,600 if you would like to have a question. There is a question and answer panel you'll see on the screen. 434 00:47:38,600 --> 00:47:44,340 If there is anything you'd like to ask, do please put a question. 435 00:47:44,340 --> 00:47:50,160 Now, I see there is one question that's come through, I can just look at that one is from a welcome member. 436 00:47:50,160 --> 00:47:55,200 How are you? Yeah, good. How are you? Thank you very much. My question would be to Professor Lowe next. 437 00:47:55,200 --> 00:47:59,580 Thanks very much for this wonderful talk and for this brief survey of kind of 438 00:47:59,580 --> 00:48:05,010 depiction of environmental concerns as reflected in Turkish executive fiction. 439 00:48:05,010 --> 00:48:12,090 My question was, if Professor Lawrence sees a utopian impulse and a revitalisation of utopian blueprints, 440 00:48:12,090 --> 00:48:18,870 then Turkish literature, especially in literary dystopias that illustrate environmental and ecological breakdown. 441 00:48:18,870 --> 00:48:26,300 Thank you. So I think you're probably referring more to recent fiction. 442 00:48:26,300 --> 00:48:35,570 Yes, fiction and 20th and 21st century life. But I mean, there's also kind of, as you referred to, kind of the beginning of 20th century. 443 00:48:35,570 --> 00:48:49,700 Yes. Yeah. I mean, the post to thousands more generally in the Turkish literary world has allowed the development of a whole series of jars and 444 00:48:49,700 --> 00:48:58,700 of fiction that have been very much marginalised before then for a variety of reasons and certainly speculative fiction, 445 00:48:58,700 --> 00:49:02,310 science fiction, dystopic fiction is one of them. 446 00:49:02,310 --> 00:49:12,170 And in the context of these developments, quite naturally, the question of the environment is quite high on the agenda. 447 00:49:12,170 --> 00:49:17,210 So I would say more than ever, probably. Thank you very much. 448 00:49:17,210 --> 00:49:23,030 I suppose this is something we can talk about, because I know you work on those topics. 449 00:49:23,030 --> 00:49:26,750 Yes, yes. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for your question. 450 00:49:26,750 --> 00:49:30,200 And I'll draw the session to a close. And I just want to thank our speakers. 451 00:49:30,200 --> 00:49:34,310 Thank you for joining us. What the session has done a number of things. 452 00:49:34,310 --> 00:49:41,360 It's shown that the concerns about the environment spread across a whole range of aspects and 453 00:49:41,360 --> 00:49:45,500 dimensions in the Middle East and that the way we understand the Middle East and North Africa, 454 00:49:45,500 --> 00:49:48,440 the Middle East centre taps into a lot of those concerns. 455 00:49:48,440 --> 00:49:53,810 And the way we look at the region more broadly, even beyond environmental issues, varies in different ways. 456 00:49:53,810 --> 00:49:56,210 But there are many, many common themes coming through. 457 00:49:56,210 --> 00:50:03,050 We can see those things coming through, concerns about local communities, about not having control over what is happening, 458 00:50:03,050 --> 00:50:09,380 concerns about the rate of technological change, changes wrought actually bring benefits that local people see. 459 00:50:09,380 --> 00:50:10,850 These are perennial concerns. 460 00:50:10,850 --> 00:50:19,410 And I'm sure that we brought up again and again throughout the programme as we speak, as we will be starting the series with the individual speakers. 461 00:50:19,410 --> 00:50:25,910 Please join us this time next week at five o'clock, Hassan Hussein will be speaking on Jordan and Water. 462 00:50:25,910 --> 00:50:29,460 And I wish you a good weekend. And thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. 463 00:50:29,460 --> 00:50:43,861 Bye bye.