ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Environmental Knowledge and Nation-Building: Ecology in Mandatory Palestine (1920-1938)

• In Event: Resource Management, Defined and Redefined

English Abstract

The early twentieth century witnessed the emergence of ecology as a scientific field, marked by new analytic frameworks for understanding natural habitats as dynamic systems. In botany, figures such as the American ecologist Frederick Clements and the Swiss Josias Braun-Blanquet developed influential concepts in plant sociology, as plant communities, associations, and succession.
My paper examines how new ecological methodologies and concepts were adopted and developed by Jewish botanists working in Mandatory Palestine. Beginning in the 1920s, a small circle of botanists, mostly of Russian origin, established what became known as the Jerusalem School of Botany. Embedded from the outset within a nation-building project, they founded the Botany Department at the Hebrew University and played a central role in shaping botany as both a local academic field and a public-facing science among the Jewish population.
Although their early research emphasized floristic and taxonomic work, by the late 1920s, ecological approaches became a prominent focus. Following Diana Davis’s notion of “environmental imaginaries,” I argue that ecology offered an interpretive framework through which to construct a distinctive narrative of Palestine’s environmental past and to imagine its future possibilities. At the same time, ecological methods were promoted as practical, empirical tools for assessing land resources, knowledge that contributed to political deliberations surrounding the Peel Commission’s Partition Plan (1937). These dual functions converged in the 1930s, when ecological research helped shape emerging ideas about both the historical landscape and the prospective development of a contested territory.

Author

• Naomi Yuval-Naeh, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem