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Timesonline 22 May, 2004
Grazing peacefully on an island in the Arabian Gulf there are creatures that owe their existence to one particularly enlightened man. Thirty years ago the Arabian oryx and the mountain gazelle were pin-ups of the conservation movement,
up there with giant pandas and blue whales; the surviving examples were counted in tens. Now they are to be found in their thousands on the island, roaming the forests of table-topped ghaf trees and browsing on Rhodes grass, a silky parasol-like thing that has fed Arab stallions and camels for centuries but which owes its name to the terrible Cecil who took it south to agronomise his African fiefdom.
He possibly did not notice how, in the heat, it laces the air with the unmistakable perfume of garam masala. Smells are what you notice here  chiefly the island’s all-over scent of freshly watered garden on a summer night, but here and there a high note of ylang-ylang or Persian rose. The palette of the place is subtler but no less seductive  mostly tans and taupes, except for a single mountain peak whose strata stack up in a rainbow made solid. What it all produces is that sweetshop surge of the synapses that can happen when things famed for their rarity are suddenly found in superabundance.
The name of this paradise is Sir Bani Yas  which sounds like one of those ex-colonial grandees who used to be the mainstay of the Commonwealth, but means, in fact, “the homestead of the Bani Yas peopleâ€Â. When the remnants of Alexander the Great’s forces charted this region in the 4th century BC, they found strange beasts and spice-laden trees, flora and fauna of unimaginable richness. In Athens, Theophrastus, the father of botany, was particularly puzzled by reports of the mangroves that grew along the coastline. A tree that lived in the sea and had gravity-defying roots didn’t quite square with his Aristotelian training.
But this Eden was not to last. By the time of our Renaissance, these discoveries of antiquity  the fabulous creatures and aromatic plants that formed the pre-oil wealth of Arabia  had mostly succumbed to a lethal mix of deforestation, desertification and climate change that began to take effect not just here but along the entire Gulf coast. Plants withered, animals died, birds fled; until a few decades ago the island was lifeless rock and sand. What the visitor to Sir Bani Yas sees today is all new or, at least, renewed: planted, introduced, watered and fed  even the mangroves. The island is a 230 sq km (89 square mile) garden into which nine million gallons of water are poured each day, pumped via an undersea pipeline from a solar-powered desalination plant on the mainland.
As I sit on the terrace of his palace, watching flamingoes take flight from reborn lagoons, little facts like the island’s prodigious thirst ought to trouble me. How artificial is this paradise? Is it anything like sustainable? Yet we know that what lives here now lived here once before. More marvellous than that is the way in which creating a garden is recreating the wilderness. The trees, mostly acacias, have nitrogen-fixing roots which, along with their leaf litter, transform sand into fertile compost. Before long a shrubby and herbaceous understorey establishes itself. The transplanted animals go native. Birds that were once fleeting migrant visitors decide to stay. The vegetation generates evapotranspiration: Sir Bani Yas is palpably humid. Ecologists predict that one day it will even be possible to turn off the tap.
This transformation has come about through the vision of one man: His Highness Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Ruler of Abu Dhabi and President of the United Arab Emirates, and the island is a microcosm and test-bed of what one leading British conservationist has described as “the most radical and progressive environmental policy of any modern nationâ€Â. I am there to discover why Sheikh Zayed decided to make a garden not just of this private paradise but of his entire country.
The answer ought to be obvious. Greening is a good thing and anyone whose nation possesses just under a tenth of the world’s oil reserves can afford to do it on a grand scale. There also is the thorny matter of the desert, with which, as Arabists from T. E. Lawrence down have liked to tell us, the Bedouin have always had a love-hate relationship. But nobody is trying to import some designer landscape, to “do†wold instead of dune. The country’s new environmentalism is practical, all-pervasive, and happening  a species of non-aggressive perennial revolution. You have only to drive from the airport to Abu Dhabi city and note the impact of greening on the lone and level sands to realise that these people are reconstructing their environment both in its broadest sense and right down to the details. And they are doing it on the model of Sir Bani Yas  with plants that ultimately form natural, self-sustaining communities. All that is obvious to me so far is that there is something far bigger and deeper at work.
So it is that I find myself in Abu Dhabi itself drinking honey-laced thyme and ginger tea in the Sheikh’s Private Department. His Highness, I learn, has a lifelong love of nature and gardens inspired by his early years in the oasis. Unlike most of us, it is rooted not in leisure, amenity or ornament, but in survival: learn to respect and husband plant life, or perish. This love is also underpinned by spiritual and cultural imperatives  just count the references to gardens and water in the Koran. On coming to power in the early 1970s, Sheikh Zayed decided to democratise the privileges of the oasis, to extend to all his people the fortune he had enjoyed long before as governor of one of the region’s only sources of fresh water. The best use he could find for oil within this vision was to put it to work securing water and fertility and developing Arabia’s live rather than fossil resources. Since then, most settled areas of the country have been plumbed in to desalination plants and citizens have become eligible for a gift of land, water, advice and plants.
Similar efforts have gone into conserving or re-creating what were once the signature ecosystems of the Gulf. To grasp the extent of this operation, it is necessary to think in millions and multiples thereof  the number of trees planted, the yardage of irrigation tubing laid across the sand, the gallons of fresh water disgorged each hour. It is a horticultural undertaking on a scale that has never before been seen, and my search for exact figures becomes futile as the totals rise so quickly from day to day. I do hear, however, that, in terms of habitat restoration alone, some two million acres of desertified land (rather than proper ancient desert) have been refurbished with Abu Dhabi’s aboriginal tapestry of dry forest, wadi, oasis and coastal mangrove. Even that, I suspect, is a rock bottom estimate. His Highness, now in his eighties, continues to plan and plant. “But,†I am told, “if you really want to understand you must go to Al Ain.â€Â
This garden city, deep in the desert to the west of Abu Dhabi, is now a cultural centre; bougainvillea lines its streets and odours of jasmine and frangipani perfuse the courtyards of its villas and university. Al Ain is Zayed’s homeland, a settlement that has existed since at least the 4th millennium BC as a crossroads in trade routes between Mesopotamia, the Gulf and Southern Arabia. The fortress from which the Sheikh once ruled is now a museum. It was there, two decades before oil sent the country on its vaulting trajectory, that Wilfred Thesiger encountered Zayed, then in his thirties and governing a cluster of oasis villages with a blend of charisma, paternalism and judiciousness that stole the stolid traveller’s heart. Certainly Sir Wilfred’s Arabia would not have been the same without the Sheikh’s protection and he wouldn’t have lived to tell us about it. But the fort is not the object of our visit today. What matters about Al Ain is the presence there of a spring.
It is formidable, no babbling brook but a cataract that cleaves Jebel Hafeet, a mountain ridge from whose summit the entire country and a fair slice of the Empty Quarter are visible. Where the water strikes the cinnamon sand, a wadi forms, a slash of greenery that is the most perfectly harmonised and entirely natural garden I have ever seen. Rushes fringe its banks; succulent Portulaca carpets its sparkling surface. Arching over the water are misty boughs of tamarisk, the tree whose timber carried the seafarers of the Gulf to the Far East and Southern Africa while we were still paddling in the English Channel. Further away from the water’s influence, the flora is in diminuendo  caper bushes, tiny tissue-fine desert roses and skeletal Calligonum which in hard times the Bedouin ate as an appetite suppressant. The wadi is a botanical metaphor, a community that owes its felicity to the advent of water in one of the driest places on earth. This is what my host meant me to see.
And next, following on from the wadi, what becomes of spring water, how it is commuted through vegetation into tribal prosperity. In Al Ain that means the old oasis, a maze of mud-walled enclosures irrigated by rills and thick with the fat-fruited, steely-blue-leaved date palms. This too explains why green actions should come so naturally to a people for whom chlorophyll is more precious than oil, while the rest of us still struggle with green thoughts. As the light thickens and the evening call to prayer drifts through the palms, it becomes easy to understand why my guides, for the most part younger, richer and better-travelled than I am, should continue to regard such places as pivotal. Despite Western blandishments, they return to them often to resume the way of the Bedu. For them, as for the Sheikh, the date palm is a living symbol of that heritage. “We revere this tree,†I am told, “we use its fronds for thatch. The woody leaf bases make good fuel. We eat its fruit, of course, and the bundle of stalks that remains afterwards we use for brushes and weaving. Should a date palm die, we use its trunk. But we will not kill one because for us this tree has always meant life.†|
