Abstract
Countries across the globe are undertaking a orestation projects in order to manage and restore drylands and combat deserti cation. Israel has been doing so for over a century, and some of its largest feats have been in planting the Negev, an arid to semi-arid desert. ese planted forests are part of a national strategy to restore the Jewish homeland and recover the quality of its deteriorated land. e Yatir Forest, planted in 1964, is the largest of these planted forests, and it has endured in a landscape that many did not think could sustain it. Keren Kayamet L’Israel or the Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF), the organization responsible for planting, has long touted its successes in a orestation, holding up Yatir and other a orestation projects as exemplars of restoring a degraded landscape. e forest, they argue, has combated soil erosion and stormwater runo , sequestered surprising amounts of carbon from the atmosphere, cooled the environment for human enjoyment, and provided a new habitat for a rich variety of animals. Other ecologists, though, have criticized not only Yatir Forest but the approach of Negev a orestation in general, maintaining that planting trees fundamentally alters the character of the ecosystem in damaging ways, accelerating soil erosion via the use of heavy machinery, warming the area because of the dark canopy’s heat island e ect, and pushing out native species because the new forests both fragment and decrease the area of the loess plains and steppe shrublands and allow Mediterranean animal and plant species to colonize land that previously could not support them and thus outcompete the local species. Comparing these sets of arguments side by side exposes the di culty in assessing ecological management practices in the Negev; the root of their disagreement is in their respective ideas about what the “nature” of this landscape should be. While KKL- JNF sees a treed landscape as indicative of the kind of environmental health the land would have had tens of thousands of years ago, opponents to a orestation see the Negev’s loess plains and steppe shrublands as a rare and important landscape worth conserving itself. Attitudes towards the success or lack thereof of a orestation depend on particular understandings of what “nature” is in the Negev. And, these notions about the natural landscape are conditioned by long, culturally dependent histories and political contexts.