Reading Wallpaper’s brief article, it’s obvious – for what it’s worth – that they’ve never been to Wadi Rum. Unlike similar desert tourism hubs in, say, Oman or the UAE, Wadi Rum has no “five-star camps”. Staying there is a basic affair, either in vast, ramshackle tourist camps sleeping 150 people in army-style two-man canvas tents, pitched in orderly rows a few hundred metres off the road – or with bedouin guides in their own smaller, cosier camps in the deep desert, sporting rudimentary washing facilities and blankets under the stars. There is no “mixing [of] luxury travel with tribal customs”. The former doesn’t exist; the latter are homogenised and packaged for outsider consumption so as to be more or less indiscernible.

For years, since British climbers Di Taylor and Tony Howard introduced low-impact tourism to Wadi Rum after 1984, the bedouin and the Jordanian authorities have tussled over how to develop the area while maintaining its cultural and environmental integrity.

Now, perhaps, this scheme points a new way forward. Have a look at Wallpaper’s slideshow of images. All very striking. Especially this one – your private infinity pool.

It would be easy to decry the whole idea. A pool in the desert?! The global elite landing helicopters in Rum to spend a week being massaged and waited on hand & foot by Egyptian and Filipino lackeys?! Hacking huge chunks out of Rum’s epic mountainscape in order to accommodate “pure concrete forms” and “sheets of glass and water”?!

But I’m not going to decry it. I’m going to welcome it, with reservations. If it is placed discreetly, if it is environmentally sound, if it feeds local and global interest in imaginative, innovative tourism development in Wadi Rum (and Jordan as a whole) – and, above all, if it is managed so that it injects money into impoverished local communities in Jordan, then I’m all for it. If it is another Qasr Al Sarab or Zighy Bay – well, I’m not sure Jordan needs it.

Intriguingly, Wallpaper says the scheme is both “competition-winning” and “in development by a private client”. Since Princess Haya of Jordan married Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, I have heard speculation about investment by the Al-Maktoum in desert tourism in Wadi Rum. Similarly, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, emir of Abu Dhabi, has also been involved in Wadi Rum recently, donating oryx for a wildlife reintroduction programme there.

A scheme for tourist lodges on such a grand scale, employing a global ‘starchitect’, in a desert environment cherished by the bedu, bears the imprint of UAE influence… I wonder who that “private client” is. Anyone?

There is, for example, no UAE Ministry of Tourism. Instead, each individual emirate – Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah – handles its own promotion, often without regard to what their near-neighbours are doing.

Al Qassemi draws comparison with the spectacularly successful ‘Incredible India‘ and ‘Malaysia: Truly Asia‘ campaigns, within which individual regions are free to market themselves, but always under the banner of the global tagline.

This raises interesting questions. The US is another federal country without a national tourism promotion strategy. The big names, such as Florida, New York and California, have massive tourism budgets, and therefore dominate the inbound industry – whereas the likes of Nebraska, Idaho and Oklahoma don’t, and so often miss out. Would a US Tourism Office even out the numbers and spread tourism more widely – or is it just that more people find California interesting than Oklahoma? Tough call.

In the UAE, though, it’s pretty clear to me that there is huge benefit to be gained from devising a promotional brand which encompasses the whole country. Sharjah, Fujairah and – as I’ve blogged previously – Ras Al-Khaimah have a huge amount to offer in terms of landscapes, culture and diversity that could significantly boost the rather monolithic concept of tourism currently put forward by Dubai and Abu Dhabi. There’s no logical reason why they should be denied a slice of that pie.

But the most interesting line in Al Qassemi’s piece is this: “Frankly, I have no doubt that if Emiratis were responsible for the UAE’s tourism campaigns we see on television, the name of the country would have appeared.”

Al Qassemi has a track record of saying the unsayable – his piece from 2008 “Welcome back our long-gone neighbours“, to name just one, knocked me (and lots of people I know) sideways – and this fits that bill perfectly. It’s hard to gainsay it.

To English ears, the UAE is the country with perhaps the world’s most unwieldy name, as well as its least memorable acronym: you can imagine teams of expat marketing and PR consultants, brought in to advise Dubai and Abu Dhabi on tourism strategy, tutting and shaking their heads and then saying ‘let’s just forget about the whole UAE thing, eh?’.

Those chickens have come home to roost, with a vengeance. The name Dubai – though not quite a laughing-stock – has lost much of its shine… and, without a national identity to back it up, there is no safety-net. Hence Sheikh Mohammed’s ‘Vision 2021‘ idea to develop a unified identity for the whole country.

Yet to Emiratis, of course, their nationality is a key determinant of identity, along with family, tribe and a host of others – much like the multiple layers of identity in apparently unified Western countries (I’m thinking, in the UK, not just of English/Scottish/Welsh identity, but northern/southern, urban/rural, middle/working class, and so on). It seems those expat consultants conveniently forgot about that.

When it comes to tourism promotion, local knowledge and local perspectives matter. Can you imagine the UK bringing in a team of, say, Korean media specialists to advise on 2012 Olympics promotion? Not a chance: marketing and PR to aid specific markets can help, but the overall strategy would always be home-grown.

So should it be in the Emirates. After a chaotic generation of transition, which has left the country wildly unbalanced in terms of economy, politics, culture and demography, it’s time to do some nation-building. That means easing citizenship laws, building railways and working out what it really means to be Emirati. Interesting years ahead.

The whole thing actually went very smoothly – ushered into the studio, a little preamble, polystyrene tea provided, and we just launched into it. Whether I made any sense or not is a different matter – judge by clicking here to go to the programme page, where there is a Listen button (and then please tell me what you think by coming back here and leaving a comment).

If you just want my bit, fast forward to about 18’50″ into the show – but I was on with FT journalist Michael Peel, who was plugging his book A Swamp Full of Dollars, about oil and corruption in Nigeria, and writer Jo Tatchell, who was plugging her book A Diamond in the Desert, a portrait of Abu Dhabi – both with fascinating stories to tell. It’s well worth listening to the whole half-hour.

A great experience, which I enjoyed very much. Presenter Sandi Toksvig was the height of charm, claiming extreme tiredness as the excuse for fluffing her script several times (smoothed over in the final edit), and ending the show – once we got there safely – with a juicy obscenity. Wonderful. I love radio. Am trying to do more of it.

A bit of background: oryx once roamed widely from Egypt to Syria to Oman. They were a prize target for hunters, who celebrated the chase in epic poems: oryx became symbols of grace and fortitude, mythologized like bulls in Spanish culture or stags in British culture. The arrival of 4WD vehicles and automatic weapons in the 1940s meant that hunters could finally outpace the oryx – and in twenty years, they massacred virtually the whole population. A few breeding pairs were saved and flown to Phoenix, Arizona, to form the nucleus of a ‘World Herd’, from which all surviving oryx are now descended.

Since then various countries have brought in reintroduction programmes, but almost none meets international guidelines. Oman could not control poaching at its huge reserve on the Jiddat al-Harasis plain, reduced the boundaries and was struck off UNESCO’s World Heritage Site list. Dubai has a desert reserve, centred on the Al-Maha luxury hotel. Abu Dhabi has crammed hundreds of oryx (along with giraffe and heaven knows what else) onto the small Sir Bani Yas island and called it a wildlife park with – predictably – a luxury hotel. They’re repeating the theme at a desert reserve in the south, due to open later this year with another luxury hotel, Qasr al-Sarab. Jordan’s habitats have been destroyed by overgrazing of sheep and goats; its oryx have remained penned in a small reserve at Shaumari for the last 30 years.

Only in Saudi Arabia, where there is much less pressure for tourism development, has oryx reintroduction worked, at the immense Uruq Bani Maarid reserve in the Empty Quarter.

Now Abu Dhabi has struck a deal with Jordan to release oryx at Wadi Rum. Twenty animals were flown over earlier this year for acclimatization, and the enclosure gates were opened yesterday. Abu Dhabi newspaper The National sent a journalist – her report is here.

All looks great, eh? Nice, feel-good story.

Unfortunately, this is not good journalism. Jordan’s RSCN nature conservancy society has been conducting experiments in oryx release at Wadi Rum for the last 7 years – but Wadi Rum is not an oryx habitat. It’s too sandy and too mountainous: the oryx always roamed south and had to be brought back. Several died from broken legs sustained on the scree slopes. The RSCN eventually called a halt and pulled out. Then the semi-autonomous Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority (a commercial body, not a conservation organization) stepped in to try and boost local income through increased tourism to the area. It is they, not the Jordanian government in Amman, who have struck the deal with Abu Dhabi: this oryx release is a laudable effort, but it has little or no scientific basis. It is economic. I have talked to several conservationists, including independent scientists with no axe to grind, who are well aware the release will fail.

The article is also littered with factual errors. Sheikh Zayed did make a contribution to saving the species from annihilation, but the real work had been done years before with the establishment of the World Herd. Oryx conservation projects are not ‘planned’ for Saudi Arabia, but have long been under way there.

And why did they send someone with poor Arabic? “Aion elmaha” – or, more properly, “ayoun al-maha” – does not mean ‘beautiful eyes’, but ‘the eyes of the oryx’.

As for a professional journalist recycling the sentimentality of the father standing with his hand on his son’s shoulder – well, there’s no accounting for taste.

A lazily written story, presented as if it’s the conclusion – save oryx, breed oryx, release oryx, job done.

In truth, this is just the start. What is now involved is a pouring of resources into making sure the oryx survive: manpower, cars, data collection, analysis, maintenance of GPS collars and monitoring equipment, perhaps intervention, enforcement of anti-poaching laws, environmental education for local people, development of tourism strategies… the list goes on! This is why poor countries like Jordan can’t afford to do it alone – and why a highly-placed source within the Jordanian conservation community told me that, given a choice, he’d prefer to drop the whole oryx programme and focus attention on something less expensive and more likely to succeed.

But the oryx has become a popular symbol of conservation (see logo), like the panda or the tiger – despite the fact that conservation science has moved on from spotlighting big mammals and is now devoted to broader, but less sexy, preservation of habitats (which ensures survival of hundreds of species together).

Once the oryx was allowed to be eliminated in the wild, reintroducing it means we have now become entangled in a never-ending story of management and control, pretty much in perpetuity – rather like with the bison in North America.

The Wadi Rum release is an interesting experiment, but it is not a “success story”. I’m disappointed in the usually excellent National, leaving its readers so ill-informed.

UPDATE (12 Sept 09): To their credit, The National sent the same reporter back to cover the story again a short time later – her second story, published 6th Sept, covers the issues much more clearly and accurately, I think. Thanks (and kudos) to her and the newspaper.

UPDATE 2 (also 12 Sept 09): My article on the conservation status of the Arabian oryx throughout the Middle East and Arabian Peninsula was published last week in Saudi Aramco World magazine – click here to read it. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below…