Paper short abstract:

NGO work provisioning sustainable futures through agriculture and tree planting in the boundary of the Sahara desert, face what appears to be the inevitable creep of the Sahara northwards occasioning existential questions.

Paper long abstract:

NGO work aimed at provisioning sustainable futures in the boundary of the Sahara desert, although rarely stated, face what appears to be the inevitable creep of the Sahara northwards edging into the more temperate 'Mediterranean clime'. The paper delves into the how the enormity of the scales involved in this process of gradual erosion can seem to betray the phenomenological—lived and sensed world in which their is hope and options —if development aid is secured, poverty alleviation projects put into place and administered with care. I reflect on these how the 'mortal grind' of these competing temporalities as they play out in a massive tree planting operation being rolled out in this precarious ecology and the existential questions such efforts give rise to.