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Lebanon’s Goats and Their Herders Brave Warmer Weather

How climate change is slowly eroding the millennia-old profession of transhumance in a mountainous, remote corner of the Levant

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Lebanon’s Goats and Their Herders Brave Warmer Weather
Muhammad al-Zein waters his herd of about 75 goats in Jabal Akroum, Lebanon, in June 2013. (João Sousa)

There is a word in Jabal Akroum, in the far northeastern reaches of Lebanon’s Akkar province, for the coldest 40 or so days of winter: al-murabaaniyah. Abdulaziz al-Zein, a 21-year-old resident and environmental activist, tells me that the 40-day al-murabaaniyah lasts from about the middle of December through January. But those days are months behind us. During a heat wave in mid-June, Abdulaziz picks me up right outside Jabal Akroum’s smattering of seven small villages and drives me past the army checkpoint into his own village, a couple of hundred yards from the Syrian border.

Despite his youth, he has vivid memories of al-murabaaniyah in Jabal Akroum.

“See?” Abdulaziz points to some pipes leading down from the roof of one local house in which water flows to collect in a plastic cistern in the garden below. “It used to be that the snow was really intense,” he says, driving us past the house. But the free water came at a cost. “People would even die from the cold,” he claims.

“This year is the first time I can remember there being no snow.”

On average, Jabal Akroum gets about 2 inches of snowfall and 13 inches of rain per year. Most of the precipitation comes in January during the al-murabaaniyah, according to Weatherandclimate.co.uk, which compiles climate data.

Historically, much of Jabal Akroum has relied on animal transhumance, which predates human pastoralism. The latter started in earnest about 10,000 years ago in the Steppes and the Middle East, particularly in the Fertile Crescent, including today’s Lebanon. If you’re transhumant, you simply follow the natural migration of your animals to lower-lying warm valleys in winter and back up to the cooler mountains for summer.

And some shepherds in Akkar still travel dozens of miles to follow the seasons; others stay closer to home to cut time and costs.

By this summer, as Abdulaziz and I drive to his village, it’s about time for the local goatherds to move back up the mountain.

Among a now dwindling number of goatherds in the area is Omar al-Khaled, a young herder with a serious, quiet demeanor. Like others before him, Omar keeps to the rhythms of transhumance, walking his own flock to a warmer area further downhill during the winter’s al-murabaaniyah.

Then, in summer — around mid-June when the baby goats of the past spring are strong enough to travel — he moves back up to cooler pastures. I’ve come up to Jabal Akroum to join him on that move.

Omar Khaled pours water for his goats to drink during a heat wave. (João Sousa)

His father and other older herders still endowed with larger flocks migrate even farther with the seasons, down to a lower elevation each winter to escape the snow and then somewhere high up in the hills to graze through the summer.

But the steady creep of climate change, combined with dire daily realities, means that the ancient rhythm of transhumance is losing its pace in Jabal Akroum. The distances they migrate are shrinking, Omar and other shepherds say, as it’s just not getting as cold as it used to. Everywhere it’s warm. It doesn’t help that the country remains in the economic crisis that started when its banking sector collapsed in 2019 or that it continues to grapple with the refugee crisis from Syria’s war and, most recently, with spillover from Israel’s war in Gaza. One Israeli strike in southern Lebanon earlier this month killed 200 goats and forced shepherds to abandon their flock for safety.

“It’s our identity,” Omar tells me, referring to transhumance. And now they face it dwindling further.

At about 3,000 feet above sea level, Jabal Akroum is only one-third of the elevation of Lebanon’s highest peak, located farther south. Still, this part of Akkar is colder than other parts of Lebanon closer to the coast and sits in the middle of a strong wind corridor, according to a countrywide wind atlas drawn up in 2011 by the United Nations Development Programme and the Lebanese government.

The area is also one of Lebanon’s poorest, relying mainly on agriculture, livestock herding and sending its sons off to join the Lebanese army. “Akkar is the storehouse of the army,” folks often say. Yet there are still remnants of the area’s semi-nomadic livestock herding lifestyle: goatherds like Omar who follow the changing temperatures of the seasons with their flocks.

Omar’s is a solitary craft with its own language and no rigid lines marking its edges, ebbs and flows. There are the guttural, Akkar-dialect goat commands of “irik, irik!” (“come, come!”) and “isiou!” (“go over there!”) that he learned from his father — but there is also the unspoken, quiet attentiveness to when and where the goats themselves want to move. For months, I have waited for the right time to venture north from Beirut and join Omar on his first summer outing with his flock, as he watched for the weather to warm up enough for the year’s new baby goats to survive outdoors on the mountain.

One of Omar Khaled’s goats walks through the fog in Jabal Akroum in June. At the time, wildfires in the area had forced Omar to change part of his route. (João Sousa)

The transhumance of Akkar’s shepherds is a migration pattern found across Lebanon and the wider Mediterranean, according to anthropologist Sylvain Perdigon.

For the past five years, the American University of Beirut (AUB) professor has been following the massive sheep and goat flocks of Lebanon’s more arid Al-Jurd mountaintops located further south, as the seminomadic men and women there herd their animals through the seasons. Part of the beauty of the cycle is the knowledge that human, goat and sheep alike amass as they traverse the same mountain stretches each year.

“Since the flocks are very stable from one year to the next, you have generations living together and replacing [older] generations,” Perdigon says. “The flock has a memory of the landscape.”

Omar has no idea how far back the craft of goat herding runs in his family. Somewhere out in the hills, his father still wanders with his several-hundred-head herd of goats, he tells me. And his grandfather did, too, before that, albeit with a yet larger herd. “And his father and his father and his father,” Omar figures.

Abdulaziz, too, says the craft runs deep in his family tree, though he isn’t a herder himself. Deep in the olive groves his relatives own next to the Syrian border sit several goat pens made of stone that nobody seems to know exactly when they were built. Two of his relatives and their shepherd dog still tend to a flock of goats that sleep inside the goat pen at night. Abdulaziz’s best guess is that they go back 150 years, a time before any of his grandparents or great-grandparents could remember, yet still spoken about in wisps of memories passed down through the decades.

But the practice began far before that. The question of when transhumant shepherding emerged “is a very interesting question,” Perdigon says. “It’s the animals themselves — the wild goats, wild sheep, who invented the transhumance in the sense that … in the countries where they still exist, they go down into the plains in winter and up into the mountains in summer.”

Domestication of those sheep and goats likely began some 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, around the same time as the dawn of agriculture, Perdigon says. “There are endless debates about how domestication happened, but it probably took place in the form of humans following flocks of wild sheep and wild goats … in this yearly pattern.

“So transhumance is actually a very, very old pattern. We could say it’s not only the original form of pastoralism, but in a sense it’s older than pastoralism itself.”

But that landscape is shifting.

The World Bank reported in March that water availability in Lebanon — crucial for keeping livestock and the plant life they graze on alive — could decrease by 9% by 2040. In the dry summer season, that availability could drop by as much as 50%. The number of annual snow days is also expected to decrease.

And though Perdigon’s research project on shepherds was initially designed around the question of climate change, he says the people he spoke with in the Lebanese Al-Jurd had little to say, if anything, about its impacts on them. Perhaps it’s too soon for them to know, still cycling through different altitudes to follow the changing seasons.

“It’s the fact of shifting baselines,” Perdigon says, “when things change at a slow pace, leaving it untraceable within your own life. You get used to the fact that things are not the same as before, and you don’t perceive the change.”

Perhaps in Akkar the changes are more visible.

I spend a long evening in Abdulaziz’s family home in the village before the next day’s goat trek. A gentle breeze moves in through the windows and the front door, which he’s simply left propped open. A few kids play soccer among the olive trees below our balcony. Out back, his mother and sisters dry out little mounds of kishek cheese, Akkar-style, on a mat under the sun.

Homemade kishek goat cheese laid out to dry in the sun at Abdulaziz al-Zein’s home. (João Sousa)

We’re here in the quiet before the Eid al-Adha holiday. Slowly, though, the sun dips away and a call to prayer recording crackles from the modest, concrete mosque across the street. A few older, thin men in white keffiyehs file in, hands clasped solemnly behind their backs. Abdulaziz soon mouths along with the loudspeaker’s prerecorded Quran recitation.

Suddenly, in the now-darkened valley below us, a patch of orange light pops up through the nighttime. It grows, glimmers and splits into two patches of light, and then more. It’s a bush fire.

“That’s Syria,” Abdulaziz says, pointing at the distant valley. The fire eventually peters out, though others sprout elsewhere in the dark. I figure they’re right across the border, somewhere in the flatland of Syria’s rural Homs province amid the farms and reservoirs.

This area is a front line for the growing battle against wildfires, borne of rising temperatures and long, dry summers, lasting well into what used to be autumn.

George Mitri, director of the Land and Natural Resources Program at the University of Balamand, helped present the Environment Ministry’s wildfire preparedness campaign earlier this summer. He says temperature expectations across Lebanon for June were “2 to 3 degrees Celsius above seasonal averages.”

“And then also for July, August, September, we have above average temperatures. This indicates that we will be facing heat waves,” Mitri says. That means higher risk of fires, and at higher altitudes, too. “This is for all Lebanon, but Akkar has always been on the front because in Akkar … it’s an area that is exposed to wind — dry winds and very high-speed winds.”

Back in 2021, that toxic stew of heat and wind caused catastrophe in this corner of Akkar. According to Global Forest Watch, an open-source data bank on forests, that summer fire season saw 1.4 square miles of forest lost to wildfires. Mitri estimated the losses to be much higher, devouring 5.8 square miles — approximately 10 times the size of Hyde Park in London. The largest blaze that year burned for several days, killing a 15-year-old boy in the Jabal Akroum village of Kfartoun who had been helping put out the flames.

When I visited the area last year, I could still see the large poster dubbing 15-year-old Amin a “martyr,” beyond the blackened remains of the estimated 3 million trees lost in the fire. Residents showed me the cell phone videos they had taken of church bells ringing by night to alert them of the growing flames.

After a night’s rest, we awaken at 6 a.m. the next day, and already the morning feels stiflingly hot. Omar meets me outside of his modest concrete home in Jabal Akroum, along a stretch of hills that jam up to the border with Syria. Behind him, in his garden, is a heap of freekeh sunning on a blanket and a family of chickens with their baby chicks.

His wife, Duha, seven months pregnant with their first child, peeks shyly from the front door and says hello. We promise to join her for lunch later, and we set off.

Our destination: a low, wide oak tree in the distance, where Omar’s several dozen goats sit waiting for him in the shade. Soon, it’ll be time to milk the mother goats before herding them all away from the tree and toward the nearby river for water. It’s a trip that takes about 10 hours, and it’s their first trek of the summer season. He has the entire route memorized.

As our luck would have it, that day finally comes amid a first, punishing summer heat wave. We let the goats drink from a water tank in the shade of their oak tree before we start our hike. Below us, down from the mountain, is an expanse of flat, green valley that rolls into Syria. I can only guess where the border, now peppered with landmines, officially sits. I hope we don’t step too close.

“Back then, you could take your herds down there and just keep going,” Omar says. That was before the al-murabaaniyah snow began to disappear, before the decade that saw Syria ravaged with war and Syrian refugees flood Lebanon, and before a hard border snaked through the hills.

I check my weather app. It’s supposed to be 100 degrees Fahrenheit by noon.

Omar says the language to wrangle the goats to their watering spot a few hills over sounds like “Isss! Isss! Irik!”

One command involves no words at all but simply throwing a rock in the direction he wants the flock to go. Sometimes, Omar says, he just lets the goats feel their way around the hills, choosing the path they want, to their favorite trees for nibbling. It is slow moving — though there are only a couple of dozen of them — the goats are hungry, and they are weighed down by today’s heat.

The animals have different personalities, too. I ask if they are like people. “Sure, some of them are shy and like to be alone, other ones like to come up to you and interact,” Omar says. One roan-brown youngster tends to follow his footsteps and watch him, transfixed. Her name is Arabarsa, Omar tells me, after her reddish fur and lack of horns. She and the other animals are his only companions in the hours he spends herding them, time he whiles away by simply thinking “to myself,” Omar says.

Shepherds are a sort of bellwether for changes in nature itself, I’m told. “There are plenty of words from people in suits and COP [climate change] conferences,” says Sandra Sleiman, a project manager and volunteer for Akkar’s Council of Environment. The group runs a forest fire observation tower, leads ecotourism outings and advocates for biodiversity in Akkar. According to Sleiman, it’s people like shepherds, “people who are directly working with land and forests, who understand.”

“We have good connections with shepherds from coming across them while hiking. We talk to them. Their behavior is changing due to climate change,” Sleiman says. There’s less water in the springs once fed by melting snow, more pests attacking trees and, of course, more forest fires.

“It’s slow but we’ve noticed it — often when hiking we don’t even bring water because we can fill our bottles in the springs. But some of them are now dried up,” she says. “It’s still slow because you can still find different resources, or if the vegetation is dried up in one spot, you can still find another.”

When they, like Omar and others, change their routes — or shorten them altogether — because of forest fires, hot temperatures and vegetation lost to the long, hot summers, it’s cause for concern, she says. “They are the children of the forest. We should be alarmed by how they change their ways.”

Omar is still optimistic about his own stretch of mountain. “It’s good land for the goats,” he tells me, simply, as our hike edges toward noon. I try to imagine where Omar’s father might be right now, with his herd of around 200 goats somewhere off in the hills, preparing for the upcoming Eid al-Adha slaughter in three days’ time.

Before that, his grandfather used to traverse even farther, venturing down into Syria’s larger pastures across the border.

“These Bedouin shepherds would speak very fondly of the possibility of taking their flocks to Syria,” anthropologist Perdigon says of his own research. “It was people who were 50 [years old] or more who had memories of that. The boys who would work the flocks … the teenagers … they had no memories of that.”

In the meantime, though, they spend hours out in the heat, traversing up and down the faces of the hills in search of vegetation that may have dried out by now thanks to the weather. Why keep shepherding, despite the harshness of the lifestyle? “It’s our identity,” Omar says during a break in our walk. Arabarsa appears to listen in, leaning against a tree with a blank stare in our direction.

One of Muhammad al-Zein’s goats stares at the camera. (João Sousa)

Yet if climate change hasn’t yet begun killing off the goat herds with its drying water supplies and increased wildfires, economic downturn has, residents figure. Amid Lebanon’s economic spiral — often touted as the worst since the 19th century — Akkar has been hit especially hard. In May, the World Bank reported a 70% poverty rate in Akkar.

With few other options for steady income, much of the men in Jabal Akroum these days are rank-and-file Lebanese army recruits rather than full-time farmers and livestock herders. Omar himself is a soldier and rotates responsibility for his flock with his brother Muhammad, also a soldier. And unlike Omar, Muhammad doesn’t want his sons to become shepherds at all.

“Times are different now,” Muhammad sighs.

Perdigon says he has seen a similar shift among the herders he follows, too. “Many of the children, when they grow older, you can see that they want to do something else. Some of them go to the army, some of them work as agricultural laborers.

“It’s hard work, and it’s more and more difficult in the sense that Lebanon is less and less hospitable to them in the sense of access to pastures. You sense that the space they have to do their thing is shrinking.”

That space is shrinking in Jabal Akroum, too, says Khaled al-Zein, a distant cousin of Abdulaziz and a geography expert from one of Akroum’s seven villages. Like others in the area, his ancestors were shepherds, though the tradition stopped with his father’s generation.

“There’s no more public space for grazing and shepherding across long distances,” he laments. It’s all private property now — small plots of farmland divided up among families.

Added to Lebanon’s devastated economy, shepherding has become “more of a side trade” these days — “small-scale work. You can herd maybe 50, 60, 70 heads of goat and help make ends meet,” Khaled says. According to Sleiman, many shepherds today are simply young men in need of extra income or army veterans who take on goat herding to sell goat meat and dairy products to make up for paltry government pensions. Gone are the days of full-time shepherds in Jabal Akroum with hundreds of nomadic goats in tow.

That means, in the future, fewer goats to nibble away at the countless little plants and weeds that could pose wildfire risks to the area, Khaled says. Sleiman concurs.

Still, according to Perdigon, the transhumant way of life can be somewhat resilient in the face of ecological changes — and its disappearance isn’t a given.

“In a country like France, transhumance [in the south] had nearly disappeared in the second half of the 20th century, in this context under the pressure of the ‘modernization’ and rationalization of agriculture,” says Perdigon. “Then there was a rediscovery of the virtues, including ecological virtues, of these mobile pastoral systems, and then policies were put into place to reopen pastoralism zones from which pastoralism had been excluded.

“In my view, Lebanon would need not quite that exactly but something a little bit like that — at least an understanding that recognizes the value of what these ‘traditional’ pastoralists do,” Perdigon says.

We stop for another break under the heat while the goats graze on the hillside plants. Arabarsa trots over to join us yet again, sitting in the shade of a tree next to us. Below us is the riverbed, though the closer we walk to it, the further downhill it seems from us.

The routes for transhumance are shorter too, it seems. A couple of hours into our own trek, we can’t go any further. It’s simply too hot for the goats. By their own volition, the goats stop, ready to turn and trudge their way back to the shaded pen where they began. There, they know they have a row of metal troughs for water. We haven’t even made it down to the river.

Still, it’s a life that Omar says he wants to pass down to his son when he’s born in about a month’s time. He and his wife, Duha, already settled on a name: Abu Bakr.

Soon we’ll return the flock to their pen, and we’ll sit in Omar’s concrete house doused in sweat. Duha will, once again, peek inside to say hello, only this time serve us a platter of chickpea fatteh smothered in sour goat yogurt that she made from Omar’s flock. She’ll retreat into the kitchen to slice cantaloupes over her pregnant belly, and we’ll listen to baby chicks puttering on the other side of the living room wall.

Chickpea fatteh made with fresh goat’s milk from Omar Khaled’s herd. (João Sousa)

But for now, we rest under the shade of a tree out on some hill, overlooking Syria’s rural Homs valley splayed out below.

“I’m proud of this life,” Omar says. To him, the most important part of the craft is simply treating the goats “with kindness, so that they will be kind to you, too.” He says when Abu Bakr is old enough, maybe 10, he’ll start taking him to the pasture with his goats, like his father did with him years ago.

“I’ll have him join me and learn the [command] words, how to take care of them.” He’ll learn where the river is, where the leaves are that the animals like to eat, the body language of goats, and the bits and pieces of Arabic that the goats seem to comprehend.

“When he knows enough, he, too, can go out and herd the goats alone.”

Down in the valley below us, gray smoke rises from yet another bushfire.

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