Dust and Smoke
Sat Aug 18, 2007 at 11:23:10 AM PDT
Dust and smoke. From desert and fire.
Everyone south of the Sahara in Africa knows them intimately. From Abidjan to Mombassa, Africans understands what these twinned hazes mean to their lives, their futures. Dual signs of the destruction of the savanna—born of the over-use of farmland and of wood burned as fuel—they’ve become omens, precursors of the desert sands certain to follow. Signals, they are, that life in the villages will only get harder as time passes. Global warming? Africans have been living with it for quite a long time.
The African farmers aren’t stupid, just pessimistic. Like most others over the continent, they know that their agricultural methods destroy their land, diminishing the productivity of their fields each year; they see rains carrying off what little top soil remains and watch winds sweeping up the rest. They leave the soil vulnerable, yet do not change their ways—they know they cannot do that and survive in the short term. Though understanding full well that each field should lie fallow every seven years (along with other needs of the soil), they are so poor that they haven’t the margin today to allow the future that gain. Cotton demolishes soil, they agree, but what other cash crop that can successfully replace it?
African women face similar problems. They cannot spare the money for stoves that run on bottled gas, and the charcoal they could afford destroys the forests nearly as fast as their own wood-gathering does. The branches they use for cooking and for making millet beer must be carried home from farther and farther away each year, and the women don’t like the burden. Better stove-building methods conserve wood in the brewing of millet beer, but cookfires are kept old-fashioned and simple—and inefficient—in part because the efficient mud stoves do not light the compounds at night the way three-rock stoves do. Without the light from cookstoves, more money has to be spent on kerosene and lanterns. It’s cheaper, if more difficult, to walk a little farther each day. Here again, poverty contributes to the destruction of the land, contributes, ultimately, to further poverty.
And contributes to the destruction of the wildlife.
My post as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the late 1980s was on the edge of a park meant to be a home for the few remaining elephants in Togo, the country where I was posted. Those elephants were all killed soon after I left.
Why? What happened?
It’s all part and parcel of a story of poverty and the destruction it brings about, a story much larger than I could ever write—but that I experienced a small part of there, on the edge of the great African savannah.
Even the little story I want to tell is too big for a post here. If you want to read more of it, visit my blog. Even if you don’t want to do that, please be aware of the consequences of what we humans are doing—and that it isn’t a question of simply making our cars more efficient.
We have a lot of work to do, if we are going to save this planet—not to mention the people and animals on it.
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