https://www.biographic.com/a-protected-place/
"When I finally reached the crest of the windswept hilltop and took in the
rocky terrain around me, my first thought was that it looked dead. This was the
Badia, an arid landscape covering 80 percent of the country of Jordan, and I’d
driven here, about 35 kilometers northeast of the capital of Amman, to
understand what makes it worth preserving. Besides a few irrigated fields of
olive trees in the valley far below, the place appeared to be a vast expanse of
shriveled grasses rustling in the wind.
I looked closer. It was June, long past the height of the rainy season, and
though the ground was dry, it was also carpeted in a bevy of thistles
(
Onopordum jordanicolum), spiny zillas (
Zilla spinosa), and yellowed
shellflowers (
Molucella laevis), hibernating through the summer heat as they
awaited the fall rains. A sand fox (
Vulpes rueppellii), blending in with the
dun-colored earth, watched me warily before darting behind some rocks. Every
few feet sprouted a spindly bush with pale green tufts of needle-thin
leaves—al-retam or white broom (
Retama raetam), long used by Bedouin nomads
to heal burns and fractured bones.
This was the version of the Badia that Emad al-Alimat, a Bedouin shepherd from
the nearby village of Douqara, wanted me to see. Ten years ago, he told me,
this area was overgrazed; every time young shoots came up, hungry domestic
sheep would nibble them back to the root, leaving the land in a perpetual state
of exhaustion. Shepherds suffered, too; once the native forage ran out, they
had to buy hundreds of dollars’ worth of feed for their animals, a heavy burden
in an impoverished area. Older people remembered the medicinal plants they once
gathered here—wormwood (
Artemisia sieberi), yarrow (
Achillea
fragrantissima), and mugwort (
Artemisia judaica), known in Arabic as
shieh,
gaisoom, and
ibeithran. They hadn’t been able to find them for a
long time.
Things were different when I arrived, though, because the area had become part
of a
hima, or “protected place,” in Arabic. Himas are set aside for
rotational grazing or protected from hunting, logging, or other extractive
uses. The concept dates back more than 1,400 years, predating the spread of
Islam, but is imbued with religious significance for many members of Jordan’s
Bedouin community. “Our religion tells us that whoever plants a tree—and an
animal, a bird, or a person eats from it, or takes shade in it, or lives in
it—then he has good deeds, and his reward is with God,” al-Alimat told me.
Over the past century, as formerly nomadic Bedouin were encouraged to settle
and traditional pasturelands became government property, himas disappeared, and
Jordan’s Badia deteriorated. With overgrazing and climate change threatening to
turn more of this fragile environment into a true desert, the International
Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) made a suggestion—why not bring back
the concept of the hima to protect the Badia in a way that would also benefit
the herders who rely on it?"
Via
Fix the News:
<
https://fixthenews.com/good-news-capital-punishment-mental-health-rwanda-pollution-europe/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
