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About a third of all land on earth has been claimed by desert—almost twenty million square miles—and the percentage is likely to increase with 110 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 19 & 26, 2011 TNY—2011_12_19&26—PAGE 110—133SC.—HARTFORD, PLEASE DO NOT PULL THIS PAGE OUT BY 1/16”—LIVE ART—R 21628—EXTREMELY CRITICAL PHOTOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE PRESS RUN—#2 PAGE—NEW PLACEMENT OF TITLE TO PAGE 111 FROM 110 A REPORTER AT LARGE THE GREAT OASIS Can a wall of trees stop the Sahara from spreading? BY BURKHARD BILGER global warming. “The desert always menaces,” the French botanist André Aubréville warned. Photograph by George Steinmetz. TNY—2011_12_19&26—PAGE 111—133SC.—HARTFORD, PLEASE DO NOT PULL THIS PAGE OUT BY 1/16”—LIVE ART—R 21628—EXTREMELY CRITICAL PHOTOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE PRESS RUN—#2 PAGE—NEW PLACEMENT OF TITLE TO PAGE 111 FROM 110 n the Al Hajar Mountains of northern Abdullatif and Reesi wore the tradi- “Yes, a very big, open hotel. We have Oman, at the eastern edge of the Ara- tional white robes and embroidered one banana left. We share it.” bianI Desert, high above the white ter- prayer caps of Omani Muslims. They Hoff laughed. To the west, the high races and minarets of Muscat, rain comes were born and raised here—although peaks of the Al Hajar rose rank upon rank rarely and then in floods. Hajar means Abdullatif had done his horticultural into the coppery sky, the empty plains half “rock” in Arabic, and the mountains are training in England, at Canterbury Col- in shadow below them. “We have a say- made of little else—a fractal landscape of lege, in Kent—and had seen the country ing in Holland,” he said. “ ‘If you call out umber and dusty limestone, thrust from transformed, in forty years, from a near- in the desert, no one will hear you.’ ” But the sea more than sixty-five million years medieval land of warring tribes to a I knew what he was thinking: not so long ago and still shaped more by salt water unified and oil-rich sultanate. When ago, these mountains were covered with than by sweet. When the clouds burst, as Abdullatif was a boy, firewood was desert junipers and groves of bitter olive. they do a few times a year, the rain skit- still gathered by Bedouin nomads and What would it take to bring them back? ters from the slopes like oil from a grid- brought in by camel; water arrived by dle, gathers into rivulets and swiftly mov- donkey in goatskin bags and barrels once he desert is a good place for vision- ing sheets, and tumbles into the wadies filled with ghee. Now the coast was dot- aries. It can flower in the mind even that wind between peaks. The ancient ted with desalinization plants and it was asT it withers at your feet. About a third of Omanis built networks of aqueducts and sometimes hard to tell that Oman was a all land on the planet has been claimed by underground falajes to funnel the water desert nation. Along the boulevards and it—almost twenty million square miles— to their crops. Oases of mango, date highways of Muscat, the medians were and the percentage increases every year. palm, sweet lemon, and lime still survive as lush as croquet lawns. Weeping casu- Where rain is scarce and the ground is on this system, their fruit knuckled in on arina trees lined the shoulders between stripped of trees, where soil is eroded by itself against the heat, smaller and more beds of petunia, bougainvillea, and topi- the steady beat of sun, hooves, and sea- pungent than their Indian ancestors. But ary trimmed like battlements. The sultan sonal farming, a landscape can turn to on most slopes the only traces of green was said to be an environmentalist—he’d dust in a generation. “These are real des- are a few umbrella-thorn trees, Acacia recently decreed the construction of the erts that are being born today, under our tortilis, anchored to the bare rock. Their country’s first botanical garden—and he eyes,” the French botanist André Au- roots can descend more than a hundred wanted his capital green. bréville warned in 1949, when he popu- feet in search of groundwater. The illusion didn’t last beyond the city larized the term “desertification.” “The “It used to be much wetter here when limits. Most of Oman averages less than desert always menaces.” In the past cen- I was a boy,” Hamad Reesi said, as our six inches of rain a year—barely enough tury, over most of the globe, the amount S.U.V. lurched up a gravel switchback in to sustain native plants, much less thirsty of dust in the air has doubled. the foothills. “You never had to buy fod- exotics like the petunias. On the north- It’s an old story in some ways. Deserts der for your goats.” Ali al-Abdullatif ern coast, long known as the country’s have been advancing and retreating for nodded, then yanked the steering wheel fertile crescent, so much groundwater has much of the earth’s history, driven by tec- to one side to avoid a dropoff. Next to been tapped for farms, orchards, and tonic shifts and planetary wobbles be- him, Pieter Hoff dozed in the passenger date-palm plantations that salt water has yond our control. The Sahara and the seat. Abdullatif is the chairman of the seeped into the aquifers. “Look at this,” Arabian Peninsula haven’t been green for Horticultural Association of Oman, a Abdullatif told us at one point, gesturing thousands of years. What has changed is slender, cultivated man more comfort- at a line of dead palms along the road, the fact that global warming is making able potting plants than going on desert their fronds decaying to dust on the climates more extreme. Regional rainfall excursions. Hoff is a Dutch inventor and ground. “Complete destruction.” is hard to predict in the long term, but former tulip and lily grower who had When we reached the top of the first most models agree on the over-all pat- come to Oman to test an experimental pass, Abdullatif pulled onto an overlook tern. “The wet will get wetter and the dry tree-planting device. We’d spent the past and killed the engine. The sun was set- will get dryer,” Isaac Held, a research sci- few hours bumping over back roads, ting, the road getting harder to follow, entist with the National Oceanic and At- stopping every few minutes to look at and he seemed ready to turn back. “I mospheric Administration, told me. By trees that might be good for Hoff’s proj- don’t like the drops on the sides here,” he the end of the century, according to the ect: hardy natives like Ziziphus spina- said, as he got out of the car. “These sheer Intergovernmental Panel on Climate christi, said to have provided the thorns drops. They do not make me feel very se- Change, rainfall could decrease by fifteen for Jesus’ crown, and Salvadora persica, cure.” After a while, Hoff shook himself to twenty per cent in the Middle East the toothbrush tree. Its fibrous twigs awake and joined Abdullatif outside. Tall and by twenty-five per cent in North Af- were laced with fluoride and antiseptics. and pale, with a bladelike nose and a rica. “That’s a lot,” Held said. The recent Word had it that this area was home to thinning crown of blond hair, he was drought and famine in Somalia, which one of the last baobabs in northern Oman, built for cooler climes. Perched beside has killed tens of thousands of people and but we’d got lost trying to find it and had the dusky, heavy-lidded Abdullatif, he driven many more into Kenya and Ethi- picked up Reesi, a local farmer, as a looked like an egret about to snack on a opia, is a preview of things to come. guide. The great tree was deep in the lizard. To Hoff, the solution seems straight- mountains, he said. We would never “What if the car stops?” he said. “Is forward. If we can replant the forests lost reach it on our own. there a hotel here?” to desertification, he says, we can provide 112 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 19 & 26, 2011 TNY—2011_12_19&26—PAGE 112—133SC. food, fuel, shade, and shelter on an enor- a bulwark against the sand and solid at a summit in Chad in 2010. “We must mous scale. We can conserve water, fer- footing for a shelterbelt of trees. Water fight it. That is why we have decided to tilize the soil, protect wildlife, and cool would collect in the sandstone’s cool, po- join in this titanic battle.” the atmosphere. Every year, human in- rous substructure, sustaining the trees’ dustry sends about nine billion tons of roots and any settlers who wished to he Great Green Wall is a collective carbon into the air. An acre of trees, move inside. In Larsson’s drawings, the effort, which is to say, a patchwork planted in a desert, could pull two to underground rooms have the groovy, Taffair. Each country along its path will re- three tons of that carbon back down. biomorphic look of an old Yes album forest its segment after its own fashion, “Multiplied by five billion, we have cover. coördinated by a pan-African agency in solved the problem,” Hoff says.

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