Dr. Abu Zenada of the environmental agency said last week that he wants to protect the desert truffle by issuing licenses and regulating the collection of the delicacy.
Anything that will help protect our decimated flora and fauna is welcome. In this instance, however, the good doctor does not seem to understand the desert or its products.
The truffle is a crop and not a herd to be protected from hunters. A crop is harvested and if left to its own devices, it will simply rot and shrink and go nowhere.
You don’t protect the truffle by issuing licenses which no one will honor. The citizen labors under so much regulation as it is, we do not need one more bureaucrat telling us how to behave in a place we know like the back of our hands.
If the man and his agency are serious about protecting the truffle, they should protect the land where it grows and not the crop itself. The land is being taken away by big shots who build on it, fence it, claim it, and hardly ever protect it.
Surely the doctor knows that truffles grow in a certain landscape of the desert if the climatic conditions are right (thunder and lightning are just as important as rain in the Wassem).
Harvesting the crop does not affect next year’s product. In 1976 we harvested the crop three miles outside Riyadh in what is now the Olaya district.
The highways and the buildings that exist today in that area are the reason why the truffle cannot be found anymore.
The truffle is not known in the Hijaz nor is it appreciated. It is mainly found in Najd and in the north of Arabia.
Those people who know the truffle manage it fairly and sensibly. They have done so for millennia.
What really needs protection is the wood that is harvested in the Nefud desert without care for the land or its vegetation. Gada and Arta wood are the best in the world.
They burn for a long time, produce glowing and long burning coals, and have a smell that makes the food you cook with it taste better.
If the doctor cared to visit the Nefud on a government provided Land Cruiser, he would see how the great bushes have been dug up and harvested.
If he does not have the time or the stomach to go over the monstrous dunes, he could visit the wood market in Riyadh to see how the landscape is being looted.
He could also reintroduce the Arabian gazelle into the Nefud and help protect it. This is the natural place for them from which they have been wiped out.
There is hardly a Jerboa left in the desert these days. They probably moved to the city like everyone else.
Our government officials have a penchant for issuing orders. It sort of gives them the assurances they need about their ‘power.’ Yet the Bedu are, by definition, haters of regulations.
They follow the seasons, the climate, and their good common sense. We simply hope that the good doctor exercises a bit of wisdom and work with the Bedu rather than against them. They are, after all, our real connection with this land.
