Bio:

Dr. Miri Lavi-Neeman was born in Jerusalem, Israel. Between 2003 and 2016 she lived in Berkeley, California, teaching and pursuing her Ph.D at the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. In 2014 she received the Israel Institute postdoctoral fellowship, and joined the Berkeley Institute for Jewish Law and Israeli Law Economy and Society as their research director. Dr. Lavi-Neeman’s research draws on political ecology, critical human geography, development theory, and critical ethnography. Her recent projects focus on the new epistemologies of climate change, and the relationship between conservation, science, and territorial struggles in the desert, namely the political life of camels in the Negev highland, politics of grazing at climate frontiers in Area C, and critical approaches to renewable energy in off-grid unrecognized Bedouin villages, as well as privatization and the settlement processes in the Negev.

References and concepts:

#political_ecology; #pasturalism&rewilding, #ecological crisis as the product of peace

Dr. Miri Lavi-Neeman in conversation with Galit Eilat, Rodolfo Andaur, and Guy Dolev, 3.4.2025:

Part 1: Self-presentation and mapping

Miri began the conversation by presenting several projects and research groups she is involved in—for example, a research group on pastoralism in climate frontiers and her involvement in the effort to legalize camels in Israel. Camels are a very significant component of Bedouin life in the Negev Highlands and, similarly to the Bedouins’ unrecognized villages, the camels are also unrecognized legally and are practically statusless. Miri says that this area is the southernmost point of Bedouin presence in Israel, and also where their lives are the most traditional, which exposes them more severely than other communities to climate and environmental challenges.

Three other projects Miri talked about were: (1) her collaboration with partners in Morocco, Jordan, and Palestine regarding a heirloom species of wheat; (2) her research on the informal markets of solar panels among Bedouin communities in the Negev and on how certain kinds of infrastructure produce wastelands in the region; and (3) another collaborative research project on forms of governance and adaptation to climate among pastoralist communities living at the edges of society or the margins of the state—in the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Sinai, and the Negev Highlands.

In response to Galit’s question about what political ecology means to her, Miri shared insights from spending the days prior to the conversation observing Baladi cows in the Golan Heights, whose history is an intriguing chronicle of nationality, war, and the concept of the natural and wild. Miri followed a specific herd of Baladi cows called the “Jawlani herd,” which, as a result of the war, was enclosed within Israel’s borders. These cows rewilded themselves and became immune to many hazards and diseases that cattle growers are usually concerned about. Despite this spontaneous rewilding, the herd is pursued by Israeli natural parks authorities since they are not recognized as a natural species.

Part 2: Working within and beyond the human

Answering more directly, Miri explained that political ecology emerged as a field of study and research in the 1980s, in response to apolitical explanations of the Third World, natural disasters, environmental crises, hunger, and similar issues. For a political ecologist, all explanations are political, in the sense that they relate to questions of social and financial processes—remembering that every ecology has a politics, and every politics has an ecology. Looking at the Jordan River, for example, a political ecologist would consider not only the politics that influence it but also its molecules, the ingredients in the water, and the types of non-human populations within the river—all of which are shaped by different political processes. And the influence goes the other way, too.

Miri contends that one of the positive outcomes of the global information crisis is the growing suspicion toward an anthropocentric worldview. It’s not that we can think like an ant, but there is less hubris and more modesty in the way researchers try to study different species. In modern times, we have managed so successfully to separate ourselves from other species that we have become very dependent on them. There is a tendency to attribute more agency to non-human species, not only because we understand their influence on the ecology, but also because we recognize their power to transform us. Covid is a good example of such a shift: from the perspective of the virus, a colony of bats and a human civilization are similar. What differentiates political ecology from social ecology, according to Miri, is the inclusion of both humans and non-humans in the social system under discussion.

Part 3: Social and environmental politics of Bedouins in Israel

Regarding the Bedouin society she researches and works with, Miri referred to the Bedouins’ poor political representation at the national level in Israel, which pushed them to form a council for the unrecognized villages—a move she sees as a resistive manifestation of self-organization. Within the process of forced sedentarization, Bedouin communities were relocated into other tribes’ territories, which shattered the structure and fabric of the Bedouin community as a whole. Miri contends that other state-level actions have contributed to the creation of the Bedouin Mafia and drug trafficking. But on the other hand, since the beginning of the war, it has been in the Negev Highlands that Bedouins and Jews have created frameworks of mutual aid, often based on environmental partnership, such as ecotourism.

What Miri has learned from working with Bedouins on agroecological projects is that, since Bedouins were officially recognized by the UN as indigenous people only in 2003, their self-perception as such is still being negotiated and remains unsettled. This, in her view, distinguishes them from Latin American indigenous groups, where the concept of indigeneity is more established and has had time to go through a process of stabilization within the frame of progressive politics.