Muhammad Qashat was a Libyan poet, scholar, and diplomat whose work for the revolutionary Qaddafi regime straddled the line between ethnographer and political provocateur. As Director of the Tripoli-based Center for Saharan Affairs he travelled widely across the Sahara, Sahel, and the Arabian Peninsula interviewing and advising groups like the Polisario, Tuareg nationalists, and the Dhofar Liberation Front. His extensive body of political and scholarly writings articulate an anti-colonial ideology rooted in the landscapes of the Arab nation. This paper uses Qashat's publications like The Tuareg: Arabs of the Sahara and From Dhofar to Sagia Hamra to explore his revolutionary environmental imaginary, in which the desert (al-badia or al-sahara) both determined key elements of pan-Arab national identity and provided the necessary material platform for launching revolutionary armed struggle. These writings reflect a moment in the closing years of decolonization in which the Libyan state attempted to support and harness the global appeal of leftist activism. As scholars turn their attention to lost trajectories of the Maghrebi Left, Qashat's work reveals an anticolonial environmental imaginary which attempted to link various armed movements across the region to the Qaddafi regime. Long since discredited and forgotten, this Libyan vision of desert decolonization was nonetheless a possible future which held significant appeal in the 1970s and 80s.