Qatar’s desire to transform the status of its economy, and become an autocratic state solely dependent on itself following the GCC blockade in 2017 has altered a lot of the ways in which the country handles different domestic sectors such as trade and agriculture. For one, the government has endorsed a large sum of funds for constructing the Baladna factory that produces products ranging from all things dairy and fresh produce (tomatoes, greens, etc…). When examining the climate here in Qatar, it is clearly a desert climate which makes it unsuitable to naturally harbor and produce these agricultural goods, therefore the country has employed foreign scientific methods to alter the state of harvest, one the alternatives was crop conversions and the other is a form “climate-smart agriculture” which artificially mimics the state of foreign climates in greenhouses by altering temperatures, humidity and light exposure. Even though these modes of production have been installed to increase the country’s self-dependency, they pose adverse impacts on the existing desert climate in Qatar. The constant utilization of fertilizers, pesticides, and other forms of toxic farming chemicals may alter soil compositions, increase air pollution, and poison the balance of natural elements in the desert climate such as the amount of nitrogen present in the environment, which would interrupt the natural flow of this particular ecosystem. These undesired ramifications ultimately lead to questioning the concept of the ‘wilderness’. Does the exploitation of the natural desert climate alter the social conception of the idea of a wilderness? To put it quite simply, humans have constructed a perception of natural life over the years that depicts a transparent barrier between human and non-human life, also referred to as the wilderness. The wilderness is believed to possess vast natural and even supernatural qualities that are sacred, and key in instilling this conception of separation between human civilization and nature. When a country like Qatar chooses to industrialize its only form of wilderness (the desert) and utilize as well as negatively exploit it to further its own agricultural and independent progression does it alter that conception of a segregated wilderness? Based on William Cronon’s essay, and his classification of the wilderness, it is clear that the Qatari wilderness will lose its foreign and natural elements the more that Qatar utilizes these environments to industrialize and grow, as he perceives the wilderness to be the antithesis of unnatural modern human civilization, therefore it can become quite difficult to separate the two conceptions of nature/non-nature. On a larger scale, if these unscathed environments and ecosystems were to be exploited and invaded globally, will this hinder the idea of a wilderness? What can be said is that if this were to happen an immense magnitude of industrialization must occur all over the world, especially in areas that are considered extensions of that wilderness such as the Amazon and rainforests. The ever-changing cultural conventions in Qatar may soon take a turn to separate the idea of a wilderness and depict its natural desert environment as an extension of their urbanized cityscape and their industry, which is a rather interesting development to Cronon’s original idea of “the wilderness”.
