This article reconstructs the environmental history of Israel’s Makhtesh Ramon as a layered landscape on which extraction, security and conservation have been successively inscribed. Policy and planning files, government decisions, press articles and interviews reveal four phases between the 1950s and 2000s: mineral exploitation linked to state-building; militarisation and reserve creation following the 1979 Israel–Egypt peace agreement; a policy turn to protection involving environmental impact assessments (EIAs) and rehabilitation funding in the 1990s; and twenty-first-century programmes of landscape restoration, geo-tourism and dark-sky designation. This article shows how infrastructures – quarries, roads, lighting systems, outline plans, land-use designations and EIAs – created an ecology that brought new meaning and purpose to the sites involved. It also argues that conservation in Israel expanded to encompass abiotic values, industrial heritage and biodiversity, while visitor management became integral to ecological recovery. Framed as a site-based case study, Makhtesh Ramon clarifies the entanglements of governance, science and memory that shape contested desert nature.
Galia Limor-Sagiv (Thu,) studied this question.