In the late 1930s, the American oil company Aramco helped Saudi Arabia's King Ibn Saud develop his royal farm outside Riyadh. On the king's request, Aramco introduced new technology to tap the Al Kharj region's rich aquifer water and establish vast fields of wheat, alfalfa, and other water-intensive crops. Saudi Arabia's aquifers have since been pumped dry in service of the ‘Garden of Eden’ idyll promised by American advocates, who boasted of their ability to reclaim thousands of acres of ‘desert wasteland.’ This article draws on Traci Voyles' formulation of ‘wastelanding’ to interrogate the agricultural spectacle of Al Kharj in the 1930s–50s. The project was an early exemplar what came to be an established pattern of wastelanding Arabia, built on the unsustainable use of groundwater and social inequalities to create an ‘Eden’ in the desert. Agricultural wastelanding has unique spatial and temporal dimensions that set it apart from other extractive industries, like the uranium mining that Voyles examines in Diné lands. But as this article shows, desert greening projects draw on and produce similar structures of social and environmental violence – with America's ‘Garden of Eden’ in central Arabia being just one case among many of wastelanding across space and time.

1930 年代后期，美国石油公司 Aramco 帮助沙特阿拉伯国王伊本·沙特在利雅得郊外开发了他的皇家农场。应国王的要求，阿美公司引进了新技术，以开采 Al Kharj 地区丰富的含水层水，并种植大面积的小麦、苜蓿和其他用水密集型作物。此后，沙特阿拉伯的含水层被抽干，以服务于美国倡导者所承诺的“伊甸园”田园诗，他们吹嘘自己有能力开垦数千英亩的“沙漠荒地”。本文借鉴 Traci Voyles 对“荒地”的表述，以探究 1930 年代至 50 年代 Al Kharj 的农业景观。该项目是早期的典范，后来成为荒废阿拉伯的既定模式，建立在不可持续地使用地下水和社会不平等的基础上，在沙漠中创造了一个“伊甸园”。农业开荒具有独特的空间和时间维度，使其与其他采掘业区分开来，例如 Voyles 在 Dinélands 考察的铀矿开采。但正如本文所示，沙漠绿化项目利用并产生了类似的社会和环境暴力结构——美国位于阿拉伯中部的“伊甸园”只是跨越时空的众多荒地之一。