ABSTRACT Bedouin, Place, and Environment in Desert Literature A spate of contemporary Arab “desert novels--” including Sabri Moussa, Seeds of Corruption, and Ibrahim al-Koni, The Bleeding of the Stone-- depicts the desert dweller as an environmental/ cultural conservationist, a kind of “ecological Bedouin.” I argue that the novels suggest a strong link between the Bedouin sense of place and his caring for the natural environment. Unlike in many other novels, place is not used just as stage on which events occur or as a metaphor for human emotions; it is essential for the movement of the story itself, and the relationship of the protagonists to place is a primary preoccupation. “Sense of place” and equivalent constructs-- like “place-making,” “sense of self-in-place”—have been claimed in eco- (environmental) criticism other types of environmental literature outside the Middle East to be key mediators in environmental upkeep although, unlike the Bedouin, the researched communities are sedentary. The paper details through close reading of the novels how the Bedouin make sense of place by their physical and symbolic engagement with its animate and inanimate components including keen observation and tracking, establishing hunting rules, exchanging stories that happened in specific spots, naming wadis and mountains, and defending their domains against greedy intruders, thus embedding themselves in and becoming embodiments of place. The paper makes clear that the Bedouin’s desert places lie at the core of their identity and function as categories through which they comprehend the world; and that the Bedouin’s sense of place and attendant conservationist praxis are not just “conservation of resources,” but also means and ends sustaining their way of life, which they do not perceive as being separate from the natural environment. Our contention, buttressed by relatively recent anthropological field work, runs counter to long-standing imaginaries—colonial, scholarly, and urban Arab—of the Bedouin as environmentally destructive, who cared only for feeding their animals, and so did not take an interest in maintaining the ecological health of the spaces they roamed because they could always find new pastures. The argument is also salient beyond the academic study of the Bedouin in relation to the environment. It points to a method of understanding local environmental struggles throughout the region, and may even suggest that those advocating local environmental conservation could benefit greatly from awareness of the manner in which communities understand themselves in place. Words: 392