Green Lands for White Men : Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McKittrick, Meredith.

Series:

Science. culture Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Schwarz, E. H. L. (Ernest Hubert Lewis), 1873-1928.

Schwarz, E. H. L.

Climatic changes--South Africa--History--20th century.

Climatic changes.

Climatology--Political aspects--South Africa.

Climatology.

Irrigation farming--South Africa--History--20th century.

Irrigation farming.

Reclamation of land--Political aspects--South Africa.

Reclamation of land.

Reclamation of land--South Africa--History--20th century.

Water diversion--South Africa--History--20th century.

Water diversion.

White people--South Africa--Economic conditions--20th century.

White people.

South Africa--Race relations.

South Africa.

Kalahari Desert.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (394 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Summary:

How an audacious environmental engineering plan fanned white settlers’ visions for South Africa, stoked mistrust in scientific experts, and gave rise to the Apartheid state. In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, while nineteenth-century missionaries and explorers had found riverbeds, seashells, and other evidence of a verdant past deep in the Kalahari Desert. Government experts insisted, however, that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan, which became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme, was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority. Green Lands for White Men explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Meredith McKittrick’s timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite. A detailed look at the intersection of a settler society, climate change, white nationalism, and expert credibility, Green Lands for White Men examines the reverberations of a scheme that ultimately failed but influenced ideas about race and the environment in South Africa for decades to come.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

1 Lost Lakes and Vanished Rivers

2 The Origins of Rain

3 The Invading Desert

4 White Men’s Fears

5 Watering the White Man’s Land

6 “The Kalahari Dream”

7 Redemption Reimagined

8 Afterlives

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226834689

0226834689

OCLC:

1446408213