During the late 1960s and early 1970s, industrialized resource extraction, drought, and the emergence of anti-imperial revolutionary political movements occurred contemporaneously across northwest Africa. Unlike elsewhere in the Sahel, where prolonged drought entrenched new forms of humanitarian governance (cf. Mann 2015), the concurrence of environmental crisis with an influx of capital investment in mining operations produced a “moment of generativity” (Ferry and Limbert 2008) in both resource making and political processes across northwest Africa. This paper approaches a transformative period in western Sahara through a social and political history of Zouérate, a city in northern Mauritania where the effects of all three processes converged and intensified. Zouérate formed and grew throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s as the newly independent Mauritanian state, through an internationally financed entity known as MIFERMA, began mining iron ore. As informal settlements around the miners’ and railroad workers' towns proliferated, Zouérate grew from a small colonial outpost of a few hundred people at independence to a city of 15,000 in 1969. During this time the city became the locus for two, mutually supportive revolutionary movements: the Mauritanian Kadihin, and the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi anticolonial movement that operated out of Zouérate in the early 1970s while in exile from Spanish Sahara. Conceptualizing Zouérate as a new (and qualitatively different) node in the networked social formations of the broader region of western Sahara, this paper proposes thinking of both the city and the surrounding desert environment as "revolutionary subjects," i.e., as catalysts for transformation in environmental, social and political terms.