In 1918, South Africa’s climate seemed to be drying up. White farmers claimed that rainfall was dwindling, but government experts insisted that the rains weren’t disappearing; the land, long susceptible to periodic drought, had been further degraded by settler farmers’ agricultural practices—an explanation that white South Africans rejected. So when the geologist Ernest Schwarz blamed the land itself, the farmers listened. Schwarz held that erosion and topography had created arid conditions, that rainfall was declining, and that agriculture was not to blame. As a solution, he proposed diverting two rivers to the Kalahari’s basins, creating a lush country where white South Africans could thrive. This plan was rejected by most scientists. But it found support among white South Africans who worried that struggling farmers undermined an image of racial superiority.

In Green Lands for White Men, Meredith McKittrick explores how white agriculturalists in southern Africa grappled with a parched and changing terrain as they sought to consolidate control over a Black population. Her timely history of the Redemption Scheme reveals the environment to have been central to South African understandings of race. While Schwarz’s plan was never implemented, it enjoyed sufficient support to prompt government research into its feasibility, and years of debate. McKittrick shows how white farmers rallied around a plan that represented their interests over those of the South African state and delves into the reasons behind this schism between expert opinion and public perception. This backlash against the predominant scientific view, McKittrick argues, displayed the depth of popular mistrust in an expanding scientific elite.

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Schwarz’s plan became known as the Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme. Tell us a little more about Schwarz and the origins of this proposed solution.

Ernest Schwarz was born in London and trained as a paleontologist and geologist. He moved to South Africa in 1895, where he worked as a field geologist and then a college professor. The decades of Schwarz’s life were times of intellectual ferment in geology and related fields, as scientists began to understand that the planet’s history was much longer and more dynamic than people had previously believed and that its climate and landforms had undergone dramatic changes. But they did not yet have widely accepted theories for what drove these changes.  

Schwarz also lived at a time when Europeans and Euro-Americans were conquering and moving into many of the world’s arid and semiarid lands. And Schwarz himself ended up in an environment that was profoundly different from his native England. Much of South Africa is fairly dry and has highly variable rainfall and very high rates of evaporation. Schwarz, like many others, puzzled over the riverbeds and deep canyons that existed within places that seemed quite devoid of water. Today we understand that episodic flash floods can rage quite violently in arid places, and that such events shape the landscape. But in Schwarz’s time, many people assumed that these features were evidence of a much wetter past in these places.

These encounters with dry environments and the new understandings of the Earth’s dynamism made it quite conceivable to some people—including Schwarz—that certain places were experiencing rapid desiccation due to geological changes, and that human intervention to reshape the land- and waterscape could affect the climate. Schemes similar to Schwarz’s were proposed on other continents as well.

Scientists never endorsed Schwarz’s plan, but white farmers did. Why was there so much popular skepticism of scientific expertise?

Writing this book taught me that the science denialism we see today is not a new phenomenon, although it is often portrayed as such. The concept of trained scientific experts, who knew things that others did not know and who should rightfully help shape government policy, was relatively new in Schwarz’s time, and it was contested from the start.

But it was not contested in every sphere of life. Even today, not every aspect of scientific expertise is publicly divisive: people do not disparage the expertise of neurosurgeons and cancer researchers the way they argue with climate scientists and epidemiologists! In the context of early twentieth-century South Africa, skepticism was strongest in the domains related to agriculture: land management, livestock disease, and the workings of the climate. This was a society deeply structured by race and gender, and white farmers were quite invested in their identity as the rightful owners and caretakers of the land.  And many of them did in fact have detailed and nuanced knowledge of the environments they farmed. They rejected the idea that men with “book knowledge” or “theoretical knowledge” understood more about what was happening on their farms than men with “practical knowledge.”

Finally—and I think this is a point we often ignore in discussions of science skepticism—the experts often exuded more confidence than was warranted. Sometimes their prescriptions were wrong, and sometimes there was just more uncertainty than they would admit. This was particularly true when it came to the climate. Schwarz’s supporters united around the idea that the climate was getting drier, and experts insisted that they were wrong. The reality was that, within what could be known at the time, there was no way to know for sure. Farmers recognized this better than the experts did, and they were often more comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity.

Your book highlights the way environmental concerns intersected with white nationalism in South Africa. How did these two issues converge?

Many people assume that environmental concerns are the preserve of the political left. But both current events and historical research demonstrate that there’s nothing inevitable or natural about this. The mass killings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas, in 2019 were motivated by a form of white nationalist environmentalism that blames immigrants for environmental degradation. Meanwhile, mainstream modern environmentalism, with its focus wilderness preservation, was born out of the priorities and worldview of white, male elites who were deeply committed to white supremacy. And fascist and white ethno-nationalist movements in the twentieth century also had an environmental dimension, as with the Nazis’ slogan of “blood and soil.”

What wilderness preservation and eco-fascism shared was a concern with the survival of the white race, and both movements had a presence in South Africa. Within the white community, many people believed that they faced two existential threats: the Black majority and a desiccating environment. Not everyone blamed the Black majority for environmental degradation; that idea became more entrenched in the second half of the twentieth century. Schwarz himself believed that geological forces, not humans, were responsible for the most significant environmental changes. But whites did believe that both of these “threats” had the potential to destroy what they called “white civilization” in southern Africa.

Schwarz’s scheme was popular in large part because it promised to deal with both threats at once. Schwarz argued that increased rainfall across southern Africa would make the entire region more fertile. This would help existing white farmers who were facing impoverishment due to drought. But it would also open up vast new lands for white settlement and allow for a much greater white population. The Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme would therefore ensure white dominance and white survival in perpetuity.

The plan represented a large-scale technological solution to problems created by climate change. Plenty of big, high-tech answers to environmental threats have been proposed in the contemporary era. Why, in your view, are these sorts of approaches so appealing?

Schwarz told people that the environmental problems around them were not their fault, but the result of natural forces over which they had no control. But he also told them that technology could solve those problems without anyone having to behave differently. The situation is remarkably similar today. Conversations about how to deal with climate change focus overwhelmingly on new technologies, whether these aim at producing renewable energy or at geoengineering the planet to reduce greenhouse gases.

In Schwarz’s time, white farmers did not want to be told that they were perhaps settling on lands that could not sustain the kind of agriculture they wanted to practice. People did not want to think about environmental limits. Today, people do not want to be told that our current level of consumption, and the growth-oriented capitalist system that undergirds the consumer economy, is simply not sustainable. Technological fixes are far more appealing.

Even in the 1940s, scientists worried that if people believed technology could fix their problems, they would never make the changes necessary to protect the environment. We hear similar concerns today. What is new is that people are much more attuned to the likelihood that unintended consequences will arise from any high-tech interventions.

The Kalahari Thirstland Redemption Scheme ultimately failed. You write in the book that “the past is littered with . . . alternative futures, the apparent dead ends of history.” What can we learn from studying this discarded vision for the future?

The Kalahari Scheme seems crazy when we look at it today. The idea that you can just build a small dam and divert a major river, and that doing so will add ten or more inches to annual rainfall, is ludicrous to us. And we understand now that it would have had catastrophic environmental and human impacts.

It would be very easy for us to dismiss it as nothing more than a historical curiosity, if the archives didn’t speak persistently of its popularity over several decades. I argue in the book that one reason the scheme finally went away, so to speak, is that bureaucratic elites put some aspects of it into practice. In other words, they folded the dreams and aspirations of Schwarz’s supporters into state policy in particular ways, thereby reducing the sense of existential peril that people felt. But policy elites didn’t speak the dystopian and utopian language of Schwarz’s supporters. It is only by paying attention to the ways people talked about the Kalahari Scheme that we can understand how insecure many whites felt, even as they were consolidating racial dominance.

Alternative visions of the future that were embraced by some people in the past give us a kind of X-Ray vision. It lets us see through the official record of what did happen so that we have a little window into the range of fears and aspirations that circulated at that time. In the case of Schwarz, it reveals a convergence of environmental concerns and white nationalism that is still with us and that circulates transnationally, as it did a century ago. Its resurgence is less surprising if we understand its historical origins.

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