Across the Middle East and North Africa, environmentalists are coming under attack like never before. Conservation NGOs have been closed or so suffocated that they’re as good as dissolved. Activists and experts have been threatened into silence—or worse. A community that had until recently mostly escaped the fate of much of the region’s civil society has suddenly fallen afoul of the authorities. Its plight mirrors the difficulties faced by environmentalists worldwide. Globally, 197 environmental defenders were killed in 2017, according to the UN Environment Programme, a fivefold increase from a decade ago.

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There’s little mystery to why this is happening. Debilitating droughts, worsening pollution, and soaring temperatures have contributed to severe resource scarcity in the Middle East and North Africa in recent years. And as environment-related unrest has proliferated, with protests in at least a dozen regional countries, people who were previously viewed as largely harmless “tree huggers” have been reappraised as spy-gear-wielding, frontier-traipsing, data-sharing threats. In a sad repetition of the security-state playbook, they, too, must now be co-opted or crushed.

“The intelligence system now feels that environment is a space that they need to be afraid of, because it can unite a lot of opposition voices, a lot of anger,” Kaveh Madani, a senior fellow at Yale University and a visiting professor at Imperial College London, told me. Madani served as deputy head of Iran’s Department of Environment until he was arrested and then fled the country last spring. “Over the years, they’ve seen the problems increase and felt that things were getting out of control.”

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In some ways, environmentalism is almost calculated to stir paranoia. Much of the region’s security apparatus is wary of technology—including the generally low-tech gear that researchers use. Iraqi conservationists complain, for example, that binoculars arouse suspicion: “No one believes that these are for bird-watching,” Laith Al-Obeidi, an ornithologist at Nature Iraq, an NGO whose employees have frequently been harassed, told me. In Egypt, environmentalists have told me that possession of everything from telephoto camera lenses to GPS devices can be enough to spark aggressive questioning. With drones more or less prohibited for private use across the Middle East, environment groups say that some projects, such as tracking animal-migration patterns, are almost doomed to failure from the outset.

Authorities across the Middle East also take a dim view of those who spend time in distant, sparsely populated borderlands. That damns most wildlife experts. Sudan’s leading naturalist, Abubakr Mohammad, fled to Britain in November after being arrested for what he estimates to be the 15th time in a decade of documenting fast-disappearing flora and fauna. “I was always detained for being in, on my way, or coming from a remote area,” he says.