Paper short abstract:

This contribution focuses on the intersection between socio-ecological crises and shifting human-olive relations in a Moroccan oasis. It explores how the lived experience of unpredictability can precipitate changes in human-plant dynamics that come to redefine the local agrarian life world.

Paper long abstract:

Dwellers of southeastern Moroccan oases are skilled at living with uncertainty. In these semi-arid lands, human-plant relations are continuously reworked so as to correspond to long-standing climatic unpredictability and emergent socio-ecological pressures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Skoura oasis, this contribution focuses on the intersection between socio-ecological crises and shifting human-olive relations. Its aim is to explore how the lived experience of increased unpredictability can precipitate changes in human-plant dynamics that come to redefine the local agrarian life world.

Following the ruinous impact of the Bayoud – a disease caused by a soil-borne fungus that depleted North African palm groves – Skoura’s agroecosystem underwent a shift in keystone species, from date palm to olive tree. For most farmers, this entailed relinquishing well-defined historical, affective, and mimetic entanglements with the palm tree, in favor of a cash crop whose value was tied to a growing market for olive oil. When the current drought – the worst in three decades, now entering its fifth consecutive year – thwarted the biotic capacity of olive trees to respond to commercial expectations, for some olives became one of the many allies making up the network of interdependencies on which subsistence farming rests. For others, the current socioecological predicament renders olive production obsolete: memories of a past ecology centered around the palm tree inform new dreams of establishing a collectively owned, mixed-species plantation in the steppe surrounding the oasis.