The Green Bridge

NOTES FROM THE FIELD / CLIMATE CRISIS

Waiting for Rain in a Dying Valley.

During my time in marrakech in the spring of 2023 I heard stories of drought. Stories of suffering Berber villages in the valleys to the South-East. It was well-known in the region that the summers of Maghrebian Africa had become harsher and the separation of seasons had begun to erode. That, as a result, rivers and mountain reservoirs were drying up sooner, that the desert continued to encroach on the increasingly scarce productive, fertile land of the plains and plateaus. 

A friend of mine in the city was originally from the town of Agdz, one of the many Berber centres set on the banks of Oued Drâa, Morocco’s longest river. I sat with him one morning on the rooftop of the riad where he worked, handyman, errand-runner, and reluctant confidante to the guests. The terrace was a temporary community, a meeting ground for all kinds, both local and expatriated. A Canadian—drug-addled, ex-special forces, and well past his visa expiry—spent his days hiding from a local sex worker who thought he might be her ticket out. Moroccans visiting family drifted in and out and kept to themselves. And the odd New Zealand backpacker well out of his depth. 

“My family left years ago. I haven’t been back since,” my friend explained that many left when the rains became unpredictable and the harvests failed, his family among them, back in 2016. Many smaller villages and settlements flank Agdz to the North and South, running along the meridian of the Mezguita Oasis, an indispensable agricultural resource intrinsically tied to the health of the Drâa. Mezguita is the northernmost of six oases that stretch the valley towards the Sahara Desert.

“We all had to find a living in the city. A very big city. I don’t even need to ask how the farmers are doing, I know the harvest is bad because the produce that comes to the city is shit,” he looked exasperated, like talking about it physically hurt. “I don’t want to go to Carrefour we cannot afford to because it either comes from a new greenhouse or from Spain.”

A few days later, I was on a bus travelling cross-country over the Atlas Mountains, through high-altitude villages before descending on the arid Eastern plateau. Passing through Ouarzazate, the last city on the route, the coach all but emptied, only a handful remained for the rest of the journey. Khadija, a schoolteacher from Zagora, in the desert, was making the multi-hour afternoon journey back home after buying classroom supplies in Ouarzazate. We watched as the landscape changed; mountain slopes gave way to dramatic canyons and valleys transecting the endless expanse of the plateau. 

The rickety bus kicked up dust as it disappeared into the distance from the junction pit stop in Agdz. This was the last stop before the desert. The landscapes that passed by the window on my journey were dry, but not sandy. Strangely reminiscent of the Mackenzie Basin back home.  Ironically, it looked as though it might rain, thunder rolled over the plateau and the, now distant, Atlas Mountains were shrouded in cloud. Though nothing other than a few distant lightning strikes came of the dark skies. 

The town’s centre was bustling, echoes of its past as a trading outpost remained. The river’s lush valley was once a part of a vital route for caravans travelling from Marrakech to Timbuktu in what is now Mali. The Green Bridge was instrumental in the development of Saharan-Africa; leading traders from the Sarhro Range down to Zagora, providing them a haven before venturing into the Sahara-proper. 

I made a quick stop at a textiles vendor for a face covering to protect me from the dust before taking the road North on foot, passing by mosques and schools as bells rang and children were just being released. Kilometres passed and the dense buildings slowly gave way to areas of dry farmland. With the horizon unobstructed, the peak of Jebel Kissane, a prominent and distinctly pointed mountain, revealed itself as the backdrop of a dense grove of palm trees: Mezguita. The clouds quickly parted, and the heat began to set in. Passing through a fork in the road, I arrived in a dense network of earthen homes, criss-crossed with narrow alleyways and low-hanging telegraph wires. This was the village of Asslim, whose inhabitants are reliant on the adjacent oasis and river. While this agrarian settlement wasn’t far geographically to the far more urbanised, albeit still rustic, centre of Agdz, it felt as though they existed in separate worlds. 

“Yallah, yallah!”  I was being ushered out of the now sweltering mid-afternoon sun through a wide, barn-like wooded door into an earthen abode. This was the home of a family I had communicated with back in Marrakech. 

I was promptly sat down on an intricate carpet in a shaded terrace and handed a glass of mint tea by an older woman adorned in lavish fabrics—Najat. Despite her speaking neither fluent English nor French, and me lacking any real proficiency in Arabic or Berber, with the use of rudimentary phrases across several languages, and a fair number of charades, we were able to communicate. She introduced me to her sister Hakima, who spoke good French. Hakima’s husband, their three children, and her mother also resided in the complex.

We spoke about the river, the land, the history of the area. The Drâa is no less important today than it was in antiquity; its waters provide irrigation for thousands of hectares of date palm plantations, interwoven with small, terraced fields of durum wheat and other crops that feed the mouths of hundreds of thousands of Berbers. Najat and her family are among them, relying on the oasis for produce and grain. 

“Jardin? Non. Soleil. Hot” Najat told me. I would have to wait; it was still too hot.

Later, as the sun began to dip below the horizon, Hakima led me through the labyrinth-like plantation. We crossed through an abandoned fortified earthen complex, a ksar, and emerged at the boundary of the oasis. The transition is abrupt; the outer shell of palms just stops where it meets the earth ring road. Entering an entirely different realm, narrow dirt paths meander through small fields, which grow in the shadow of lush date palms. The calls of birds filled the air as locals harvested their crop and children played in the cooling evening air. The illusion of a green utopia is, however, quickly shattered; the plantation exists in two realities. While one side of the track is a picturesque oasis, the other reveals a more sinister truth: dead palms, crops wasted, and cracked soil devoid of moisture. Large swathes of pasture were completely without irrigation, and as a result, unusable. We stopped briefly at a small field to cultivate some crops. The next plot over was empty. 

“No river means no water and then we see the plants start to die,” Hakima explained while picking leafy greens. Having collected a meal’s worth, she raised her bundle of produce to her head where it would balance for the rest of our excursion. 

Continuing down the path, Hakima ran her hands through a lone bush on the side of the path. 

“Here, eat,” she passed me a handful of husked seeds. Nothing here was without purpose, each individual component of the oasis was precious, intrinsically, whether directly to us as humans or to the wider wellbeing of the system. The oasis had an aura, a synergetic value greater than the sum of its parts. Though the feeling it was struggling lingered in the air. 

The day’s final rays of sunlight touched the summit of Kissane as we emerged from the trees on the baron banks of the Drâa. Unlike the liveliness in the plantation, time stood still here. The disturbing silence broken only by the occasional whisper of a dry breeze, a reminder of the once thriving ecosystem. No chirping birds, no rustling leaves, not even the buzz of a fly. The vast wasteland before me would ordinarily be an active, flowing river—the largest in Morocco—but the only evidence that this was in fact the famed Drâa were her arid channels etched into the fissured earth. The grand natural landmark that once guided caravans of traders to the Sahara lay dormant. It was spring, the river should have been flowing with the melts from the High Atlas. 

What I had witnessed in the oasis wasn’t a local anomaly. Over the last hundred years, the oases in Morocco have lost two-thirds of their surface area. The water table in the Drâa basin continues to recede, requiring farmers to dig more, and deeper, wells for irrigation. In the mid 1960s just a few hundred domestic and agricultural groundwater wells dotted the valley floor, by the 2010s it was well over 10,000. Each reaching deeper into the Earth, pulling up water that’s increasingly saline and damaging to crops. Most are also illegal, promoting crackdowns by local authorities. 

The distribution of water in this region was never just. Since the 1970s the flow of the Drâa has been dammed and portioned with managed water releases to the basin. As the reservoir level dropped year on year so did the number of releases and volume of allotted water, which now sits at four annually. 

The amount of annual rainfall is not enough to replenish the groundwater without more access to the high-altitude reservoir, flows from which have been diverted to major cities. 

This is more than mismanagement; it is the consequence of a system that was never designed to serve those who live closest to the land. A system that until less than a decade ago invited foreign corporations to farm water-intensive cash crops in the desert. A system that was only willing to ban them after the damage had been done. 

International aid brought drought-resistant crops and new sustainable farming techniques, but it wasn’t enough. It never could be. There simply isn’t enough water. The indigenous knowledge systems once capable of supporting life in this environment, knowing where to dig and when to sow, are being pushed to the brink by the compounded impacts of policy, extraction, and imported collapse. 

The following evening, after a trek into town for supplies, I found Mustafa, a local labourer, on the rooftop repairing an adobe wall. The sun had lowered enough he was able to work. A deep orange haze filtered the expanse of the pre-desert. The floor was strewn  in watermelon rind and ash. He invited me to sit, offered me a puff of his pipe—that unmistakable fragrant smoke you cannot escape in North Africa—and a slice of watermelon. Swarmed by flies we ate, smoked, and laughed as the sun slipped away on another day of unseasonable temperatures. I asked him about the rain, the desert, the trees. 

“Hundreds and hundreds of dead palm trees. It’s been months since we’ve seen a drop of water, but God will offer us rain soon. Inshallah,” he said, tapping the ash from his pipe. “The men of today are not men of God, and he is punishing us for it.” 

A recognition and acceptance that the climate is changing with an effort to adapt, all beneath the veil of theology. It’s not a rejection of reality, but a reframing of it. Disaster being rendered more bearable, more meaningful through a spiritual lens. One could mistake this for naïvety, but naïvety would be denial. Insisting the rains will return just because they always have. Mustafa believes there isn’t suffering without cause, and that with repentance balance will return. The theological pragmatism maintains an ember of hope; the trees are easier to mourn when you know there is a chance they might return. 

Later, in the darkness proper, with a head full of hash, I wandered out into the hills and dunes. I lay down on the dust and watched the unpolluted sky, only slightly terrified of snakes. Nothing I’d read or asked or seen could quite hold the full weight of it all. 

When I returned to Marrakech, I told my friend what I had seen in the Valley.

‘It’s worse than they say it is then?’ 

‘Apparently so,’ I replied. 

‘It’s good we left when we did. But life in the city isn’t easy.’

What he said is true. Life in Morocco’s major cities is underscored by systemic failings in governance. Such policy (in)action presents in rural communities like the Drâa valley as the erasure of culture and livelihoods, causing urbanisation, while in urban and suburban life it surfaces as acute poverty. The system perpetuates its own issues.  

Last I heard, life carries on in the village of Asslim. Mustafa, in his old age, still works the rooftops. Farmers dig more and more wells. Children still play in the maze of the palmeraie. But the drought continues. The 2024 harvest was expected to plummet by half. The reservoirs in the High Atlases have become more tightly controlled, prioritising the bigger towns and cities like Ouarzazate. The rural communities of the Drâa Valley are slowly being forgotten, as are the centuries of culture and history that these oases hold.

—

Joseph Davidson-Labout