The far south of Tunisia hasn’t always been a sandy wasteland. Once it was a savanna stretching from present day Morocco to the Nile River. Today, it’s a combination of sand and dry land. Somewhere along the way, several thousand years ago, the land underwent a radical change from productive grasslands to sands devoid of life. Whether it be purely as a result of climate change or maybe as a result of over grazing by wild animals or even domesticated livestock or perhaps a more systematic abuse of resources no one at the moment can say. It is clear though, that this process is ongoing and without human intervention, will continue to claim more land every year.
Fighting against desertification is nothing new. People have been battling the sands of the desert for thousands of years. In the desert oases of Tunisia, palm frond fences have been employed since the founding of the first palmeraie to check the advancing sand. With time and persistence, humans have fought and won battles against the desert in hundreds of oases, pushing the cultivated land farther and farther from the water source. A key portion of this effort has been controlling the sand.
In recent years, this effort to control the sands of the desert has been broadened beyond the oasis to the rest of the south of Tunisia. Along most of the major and secondary roads, sand fences have been installed, with good success, to check the advancing sands. In some places, the sand drifts caught by these fences are over 30 meters high and still growing. To keep these artificial sand dunes in place, it requires constant vigilance on the part of the local authorities. Every time one of the fences gets buried under the sand, another fence must be installed at the top of the dune. There may be ten fences below the visible fence!
Efforts to control desertification don’t stop with sand fences. In Libya, for many years, hundreds of thousands of hearty trees have been planted in the desert, pushing back the unusable land and opening vast swaths of country to the possibility of cultivation in the future. In Tunisia, traditional check dams designed to capture scare water during the infrequent but violent rainstorms have been beefed up and improved to keep more land wetter longer. In Morocco, at the edge of the great sand sea, I watched as front end loaders and dump trucks were used to dig out part of a village from the steady advance of the sand dunes. Each country and each region fights wars against the sands in different ways.
Looking out over vast expanses of sand dunes and finding a place where the sand parts and a little bit of the dead earth beneath is revealed makes me wonder just what might lie out underneath the sands of the Sahara. Walking between the dunes in Morocco revealed artifacts dating back several thousand years including such exotic finds as seashells and bits of coral from the red sea. I have a feeling that one day, if the sands can be pushed back far enough, whole lost civilizations will emerge out of the dunes. Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself and the sands and desertification are held at bay. Otherwise, one day, all of North Africa will be one big sand sea.