A few nights ago a friend drove me to the Zekreet peninsula which happens to be around fifty kilometres west of Education City. The region, also known as Ras Abrouq is home to the Brouq Nature reserve which houses Serra’s monoliths. The drive to Zekreet from Doha is fairly clear at night, with little happening on either side of the road. However, this changed when we neared the desert. Hoping to find a place to park and stargaze, we instead found a McDonald’s sign illuminating the night sky. Driving further into the desert, we found Qatar Petroleum signs on buildings and realised that this region was also an oil field. The juxtaposition of a nature reserve in such close proximity to a nature reserve was jarring, albeit funny. Furthermore, it brought into question my own position as the subject, sitting in a four-wheel drive having the luxurious convenience of experiencing nature from inside an air-conditioned car. Stephanie LeMenager in her article “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief,” articulates the pervasive presence of the oil industry in our lives.[1] She writes,
The petroleum infrastructure has become embodied memory and habitus for modern humans, insofar as everyday events such as driving or feeling the summer heat of asphalt on the soles of one’s feet are incorporating practices, in Paul Connerton’s term for the repeated performances that become encoded in the body.[2]
If this is problematised, as Le Menager argues it should be, driving to a nature reserve surrounded by oil-fields is then a double-edged sword, since our ability to experience nature is rooted in a practice that is destructive to nature.[3] In Zekreet our conception of nature is doubly challenged due to our dependence on private transportation to reach the reserve and the presence of the oil-fields.
However, is there ever an authentic experience of nature? William Cronon in “The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” argues that nature is “quite profoundly a human creation.”[4] Cronon traces the origin of conceiving natural space as a cultural memory to Western colonial attempts which associated wilderness with savagery, and a biblical reading of nature would conjure images of terror and temptation.[5] This changed in the 19th century, Cronon argues that it can be traced to the romanticism movement and the importance it placed on the sublime, and the American idea of nature as a frontier.[6] Cronon writes further, “To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles.”[7] Nature, therefore, is not an isolated experience but one that is culturally constructed and manufactured. This theorisation of nature as a constructed experience, would then mean that my assumption that the presence of Qatar Petroleum buildings and McDonald’s made the Zekreet desert a disingenuous natural experience is, to a degree, flawed since it assumes that nature must exist in isolation. The modernity of the desert is only natural since it documents human change as well as geographical change.
[1] Stephanie Lemenager, “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief,” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (2011): pp. 25-56, https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.00, 25.
[2] Stephanie Lemenager, “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief,” 26.
[3] Stephanie Lemenager, “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief,” 26.
[4] William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), pp. 69-90, 1.
[5] Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” 2.
[6] Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” 3.
[7] Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” 11.
