Meredith McKittrick. Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid. University of Chicago Press, 2024.
Last year, I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future and found it baffling.[1] Robinson narrates a techno-positive story about humanity’s fight against climate change: countries and global organizations mitigate the global disaster primarily through geoengineering techniques like solar radiation modification and carbon capture. On the one hand, I appreciated how well Robinson made dense scientific and economic theory accessible to unfamiliar readers. On the other, I had difficulty understanding why anyone believes we can, as the popular saying goes, “engineer our way out of climate change.”
Meredith McKittrick’s deep dive into an imagined water scheme in the southern African Kalahari helps explain why so many people believe in these kinds of schemes. In Green Lands for White Men, she examines early twentieth-century geologist Ernst Schwartz’s Kalahari Redemption Thirstland Scheme, a hydroengineering plan that proposed making an arid African landscape wet again for white settlement and control. By contextualizing the Scheme’s background and the debates around it, McKittrick argues that white communities and leaders have historically constructed particular kinds of environmental knowledge to support and sustain white supremacist attitudes and ideals. This constructed knowledge often conflicts with scientific expertise, especially when that expertise contradicts white supremacist goals. While the book targets academic scholars and students, it offers insights to any interested reader, explaining why and how seemingly peripheral ideas can become part of the mainstream popular and scientific imagination.
McKittrick organizes her analysis into eight chapters, with an epilogue that broadens the book’s scope beyond southern Africa. Chapters one to three investigate the creation and rooting of white settler knowledge about the South African landscape as something to be saved from desiccation. In the early twentieth century, white South African scientists and settlers believed that white populations were meant to control the Kalahari; however, they diverged in how that control should be exercised and why it needed to happen. White settlers drew on three areas of knowledge: their lived experience of farming in the region, basic understandings of the water cycle, and African folklore about past lakes and rivers that had disappeared. Since the Kalahari had seemingly become a dry environment that did not have enough water to promote rainfall, settlers argued that rainfall was decreasing and that the landscape did not capture it effectively enough to maintain a constant water supply. Scientists, meanwhile, drew on quantitative measurements to argue that rainfall was not, in fact, decreasing. Rather, they believed that natural processes ensured that the Kalahari remained dry. The settler farmers’ outdated farming methods just failed to conserve water effectively.
In the 1910s, the British South African government began pushing white farmers to update their methods to align with modern science. White farmers were, predictably, unhappy with this direction. They were especially angered by the government’s push for African Basutoland farmers to take over some of the region’s land to make it more productive. Chapters four and five explain that as African farmers moved into the landscape, and scientists increasingly contradicted white settler environmental beliefs, white farmers clung more steadfastly to older notions of water running to waste, of decreasing rainfall, and of Indigenous African misuse of the land. They expected South Africa to become a white-majority country like Australia, but Africans remained the population majority, especially in rural spaces. So, when the scientifically backed South African government supported African farmers, settlers viewed the same government as undermining their rights and ideals. The more these settlers dug in their heels, the more the government saw them as backward and uncivilized, and the greater the gap between farmers and the government grew.
By the 1920s, divergence between scientific expertise and local desires had become critical, which Schwarz used to his advantage. As explored in the book’s final chapters, Schwarz drew on growing calls for rural white supremacy to gain support for his Kalahari Redemption Thirstland Scheme. The Scheme intended to increase rainfall by redirecting the region’s rivers into the Kalahari Basin, thereby flooding it and promoting the local water cycle. It promised to return the Basin to what farmers believed was a historically wet state, maintaining a secure water source for white agricultural development. Farmers saw this as an opportunity to gain more settler control over a hostile landscape. Government experts, on the other hand, contended that the scheme would not work because the landscape was simply not built for this kind of technofeat.
The experts won out – the South African government denied Schwarz funding. Yet, as McKittrick notes, Schwarz’s real victory was his influence in popular and scientific circles. While his Scheme may have failed, its ideas shaped how the future South African public and officials engineered arid environments for the benefit of white settler agriculturalists, usually at the expense of Black African farmers. By the time apartheid took hold in 1948, white farmers had already rallied around the notion of “their future as farmers in an arid land, and the responsibility of the state to secure that future,” according to their own constructed knowledge systems.[2]
Today, we call this kind of work geoengineering. While some climate-fighting feats like reforestation and slow water are rooted in Indigenous knowledge, many more seem to emerge from fringe cli-fi narratives and beliefs, as those in Robinson’s novel. But McKittrick shows that geoengineering techniques and technologies are rooted in older colonial and capitalistic structures that uphold white supremacy and the status quo. They allow wealthy white settlers across the world to maintain their cars and planes, their careers and mansions, and their hyper-consumerist lives without tackling the bigger problem. It is a problem that, as McKittrick demonstrates, cannot be fixed without addressing its origins in constructed racial identities.
[1] Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2021).
[2] McKittrick, Green Lands for White Men, 240.
*Cover Image: Cover of Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid, by Meredith McKittrick.
[Cover Image Description: Book cover of Green Lands for White Men: Desert Dystopias and the Environmental Origins of Apartheid featuring a southern African wetlands landscape. Water and grasses wind around and through each other. Trees dot the horizon.]
Edited by Katie Kung; reviewed by Adrienne Brown.
