"Deforestation": a word that only bureaucratic environmentalists can appreciate. They fret, they frown, they try to explain all the different reasons why cutting down individual trees is Not A Good Thing, they get labeled treehuggers, and they get ignored.
Haiti now stands as an example of Deforestation: Worst Case Scenario.
Haiti occupies the western third of the island of Hispaniola, and the Dominican Republic occupies the eastern half. Slopes of more than 20% grade cover over 2/3 of the country, making cultivation difficult.
Jared Diamond opens a chapter in his book Collapse with a visual picture (p.329):
From an airplane overhead, the border looks like a sharp line with bends, cut arbitrarily across the island by a knife, and abruptly dividing a darker and greener landscape east of the line (the Dominican side) from a paler and browner landscape west of the line (the Haitian side).
The Library of Congress Country Profile (23 pg pdf) notes that
Haiti faces a severe deforestation problem. In 1923 forests covered nearly 60 percent of the country; today they cover less than 2 percent.... Deforestation has led to soil erosion, which has decreased agricultural yields and resulted in deadly landslides.
A New York Times video, Haiti's Legacy of Environmental Disaster (can't embed, will autoplay) was largely filmed a few weeks before the 7.0 earthquake. People are living not just day to day, but meal to meal, which means cutting down a tree to make charcoal to sell for a rice meal, and now 97% of the country's forests are gone. "Relying almost exclusively on charcoal for cooking and heating, the Haitian people have literally picked their country apart."
Deforesting a natural-disaster-prone island of extreme poverty creates a vicious cycle. Tree roots knit soil together; without trees, soil erodes. Topsoil washes out of areas suitable for agriculture, so people can't grow their own food. During rains, eroded soil slides down hillsides. Roads and bridges wash out.
Wood can be a resilient building material suitable for construction in earthquake-prone areas. However, without trees for wood, people in Haiti use concrete building blocks. Engineers who've visited Haiti are appalled by shoddy construction practices: contractors add sand to concrete, which makes it weaker, and skimp on rebar due to the high cost of steel. "Mr. Sinclair said he had seen houses where builders put concrete roofs on top of low-grade blocks. 'Then it just pancakes,' he said." Many of the earthquake impact photos I've reviewed in the last few days show concrete masonry unit construction, no rebar, and possibly a thin coat of stucco. (Photo: LA Times) Placing a heavy concrete building on a fragile, deforested hillside without founding the building into the bedrock below the soil is a bad idea anywhere in the world. Here, it's one of many factors in the perfect storm of misery that is this earthquake.
In the short run, the country needs emergency aid (I've given to Doctors without Borders). In the long run, reconstruction should be accompanied by reforestation and, somehow, an end to the vicious cycle of poverty in which the country seems trapped. Update: extreme poverty is inextricably intertwined with deforestation. It's far beyond the scope of this diary -- or my blogging ability in general -- to diagnose causes or cures for extreme poverty. The diary is intended to illustrate the effects of deforestation, not its causes.