This talk offers a historical critique of the Great Green Wall Initiative of the Sahel and the Sahara (GGW) – an audacious project to stop the southern encroachment of the Sahara Desert by constructing a wall of trees across the continent. From the start, the initiative attracted scrutiny from ecologist and climate scientists who argue, rightly, that the GGW was based on the notion of a universally advancing desert border. By upstreaming, or working back in history, this talk will examine how longstanding narratives of environmental decline, deforestation, and soil erosion have been redeployed in efforts to construct the GGW. In focusing specifically on Senegal, which has already devoted significant labor and capital to the initiative, Dr. Cropper will explore how government officials and development experts have relied on ‘declensionist’ tropes – deforestation, desiccation, food scarcity – to legitimize the project, even when the science has undermined its initial aims. Put simply, he will argue that narratives of environmental decline have served as a dynamic framework to rationalize the exploitation of the Sahel’s environments and have become the fetishized commodities of a global neoliberal economy.

Dr. Ruth Mostern, Professor of History and Director of the World History Center will moderate.