Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Nature Laid Waste: The Destruction of Africa
It was long shrouded in mystery, called "the Dark Continent" by Europeans in awe of its massive size and impenetrable depths. Then its wondrous natural riches were revealed to the world. Now a third image of Africa and its environment is being laid before us - one of destruction on a vast and disturbing scale.Using "before and after" satellite photos, taken in all 53 countries, UN geographers have constructed an African atlas of environmental change over the past four decades - the vast majority of it for the worse.
In nearly 400 pages of dramatic pictures, disappearing forests, shrinking lakes, vanishing glaciers and degraded landscapes are brought together for the first time, providing a deeply disturbing portfolio of devastation.
The atlas, compiled by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) at the request of African environment ministers, and launched yesterday simultaneously in Johannesburg and London, underlines how extensively development choices, population growth, regional conflicts and climate change are impacting on the natural world and the nature-based assets of the continent.
The satellite photos, some of them spanning a 35-year period, offer striking snapshots of environmental transformation in every country.
The purpose of the atlas is to inspire African governments to improve their records as environmental custodians, and as such, its language and tone are studiously neutral, generally referring to environmental "change" rather than destruction. But although there are some examples given of change for the better, the vast majority of the case studies are of large-scale environmental degradation, and the atlas compilers freely accept that this represents the true picture.
They write of "the swell of grey-coloured cities over a once-green countryside; protected areas shrinking as farms encroach upon their boundaries; the tracks of road networks through forests; pollutants that drift over borders of neighbouring countries; the erosion of deltas; refugee settlements scattered across the continent causing further pressure on the environment; and shrinking mountain glaciers."
For its visual impact, the atlas takes advantage of the latest space technology and Earth observation science, including the 36-year-old legacy of the US Landsat satellite programme, demonstrating the potential of satellite data in monitoring ecosystems and changes to them.
The "before and after" shots show vividly just how vast the changes have been, not only since the first Landsat satellite in 1972, but on much shorter timescales. Deforestation is shown not only as mass forest disappearance in countries such as Rwanda, but also as the insidious spread of logging roads through once entirely untouched rainforests in countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the replacement of natural forest by bright green rubber and palm plantations in Cameroon.
Urban spread is illustrated not only by the dramatic expansion of the Senegalese capital Dakar over the past half century, from a small urban centre at the tip of the Cape Verde peninsula, to a metropolitan area with 2.5 million people spread over the entire peninsula, but by the rapid development of a small town like Bangassou in the Central Africa republic, now beginning to affect the nearby forest.
Shrinkage of mountain glaciers is shown only in the well-known case of Mount Kilimanjaro, but also in the disappearing glaciers in Uganda's Rwenzori mountains, which decreased by 50 per cent between 1987 and 2003. And to the well-known cases of the drying up of Lake Chad, and falling water levels in Lake Victoria, the atlas adds new cases of disappearing water bodies like the drying up of Lake Faguibine in Mali, as well as many examples of desertification, unsustainable large-scale irrigation and degraded coastal areas.
Put it all together and you have a picture that is hard to credit, so enormous is the destruction. Statistically, the atlas finds that deforestation is a major concern in no fewer than 35 African countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria and Malawi, among others. Africa is losing more than four million hectares of forest every year - twice the world's average deforestation rate.
That problem is closely followed in significance by major loss of biodiversity [wildlife] which is occurring in 34 countries, such as Angola, Ethiopia, Gabon and Mali. Land degradation is similarly a major worry for 32 countries, including Cameroon, Eritrea and Ghana, with some areas across the continent said to be losing more than 50 metric tonnes of soil per hectare per year.
The atlas shows that erosion, as well as chemical and physical damage, have degraded about 65 per cent of the continent's farmlands. In addition, slash-and-burn agriculture is adding to the number of wildfires which are naturally caused by Africa's high prevalence of lightning.
Rapidly rising populations account for one of the principal pressures on the natural resource base. Between 2000 and 2005, the atlas says, Africa's population grew by 2.32 per cent annually - nearly double the global rate of 1.24 per cent per year. Twenty of the 30 fastest growing countries in the world are in Africa, including Liberia, which has the highest annual growth rate - 4.8 per cent - of any country in the world. In the next half century Africa will have twice the population growth rate of any other region. This means that more and more land must be devoted to agriculture, but as the amount of available land is limited, the amount available per person is swiftly shrinking. The atlas points out that in 1950 there were 13.5 hectares of land per person in Africa, but by 1990 this had shrunk to 4.7 hectares per person and by 2005 to 3.2 hectares per person - while on present population growth estimates, by 2050 the amount will be 1.5 hectares per person.
And now, it says, climate change is emerging as a driving force behind many of these problems and is likely to intensify the "already dramatic transformations" taking place. Although Africa's 965 million people produce only 4 per cent of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions, they are likely to suffer disproportionately from the consequences of global warming, not least because African nations' ability to adapt to climate change is relatively low.
One of the key points the atlas makes is that environmental degradation is likely to have a higher human cost in Africa than in other regions, as people on the continent live in closer relation to the natural world than elsewhere: they are often directly dependent on the environment.
It was for African governments themselves to address the problem, said Marion Cheatle, chief of UNEP's Early Warning Branch, who introduced the atlas in London. "In many places you have a problem of policies being enforced. Not that policies and legislative instruments [to protect the African environment] are not in place, but very often they're only on paper, and they don't have the management to follow that really should be in place."
© 2008 The Independent
Related coverage: Africa most vulnerable to global warming effects, U.N. says
28 Comments so far
Show AllFor those who might want the book, the actual title is "Africa : Atlas of Our Changing Environment" ISBN: 9789280728712. I found it offered at a website called earthprint.com
http://www.earthprint.com/product/d51f6ab5-fed1-45e4-ae83-f400def37e38.aspx
Africans are typically not the slightest bit interested in preserving their natural landforms, water, and ecosystems.
The solution? A return to white minority rule.
You have to go to the root. Preditory Capitalism is destroying the world, as well as the soul of many nations.
Ariel, you think the white man is saving the world?
You have to go to the root. Preditory Capitalism is destroying the world, as well as the soul of many nations.
Ariel, you think the white man is saving the world?
You have to go to the root. Preditory Capitalism is destroying the world, as well as the soul of many nations.
Ariel, you think the white man is saving the world?
Riley, he's done a better job then any other.
The environmental issues in Africa have more to do with continuing colonial influence than local influences.
1) Agribusinesses, mining operations (and other large scale extraction interests) continue to influence land use policies and slave issues throughout Africa. Agribusinesses deplete soils and devastate natural vegetation in favor of mono-cropping for export. This is beyond any doubt the major farming and forestry issue throughout Africa, not local production for local consumption.
2) People who live close to nature have a much smaller ecological footprint than those who depend to enormously inefficient supply chains to obtain their food and other products. Africa's environmental problems begin in places like London, New York and Berlin.
Today, humanity's Ecological Footprint is over 23% larger than what the planet can regenerate.
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?content=footprint_overview
3) Urbanization all over the world including Africa, India and Central and South America is directly linked to corporate land grabs. And, there is no question that when people are thrown off the land, obtaining sustenance becomes less ecologically sustainable.
In many instances, the World Bank and other lending institutions offer government and/or private loans to setup a situation that results in loss of property for locals and consolidation of resources into the hands of the world's elite.
Such shortsighted policies translate into massive destruction planet wide for the sake of totalitarian power and opulence for a few.
4) Overpopulation is not a problem. The real problem is over-concentration of resources. Once resources have been concentrated, sustainability is impossible. Waste, devastation, and finally depletion are the result.
Furthermore, planned destruction of ecosystems to drive people into urban areas and off their ancestral lands is an ancient script practiced since before the time of the Egyptians. It was practiced by the Incas, the Spaniards and is practiced today by mega corporations run by English, American, and other European interests.
Fecund ecospheres are destroyed so that they cannot support independent communities. Such devastation was the reason behind deforestation in Vietnam, burning the rainforests in South America, and devastating the lands of Africa.
5) While climate change may be a major concern, the use of technology (HAARP) to determine rainfall may have more to do with the continuing desertification of Africa.
HAARP: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO409F.html
6) The idea that the proxy governments of Africa can exercise control over international corporate abuse of the land and people of Africa is absurd. African governments today, like those in South and Central America, are ruled by secret services that directly answer to the international corporate elite.
African population growth is one of the biggest problems facing the continent this century. All other continents have gone through this stage in the past. White population explosion has found outlets in America, Australia and elsewhere. Black population explosion will not find such an outlet. It also happens at a very bad time of depleting resources and global warming.
It is up to African and World leaders and institutions to do what they can to curb such massive growth via 1) women empowerment, 2) generalized education, 3) free and wider spread contraception, 4) economic incentives, 5) etc. If the World bank, IMF, G8, etc are willing to contribute money to help Africa, then they should invest part of it into policies that can tune down the demographics. I gave examples in the past of countries that have actively pursued such policies (Tunisia, China and more recently India).
Here's a (stunning) example: Kenya's population is now 35 millions. 80 years ago it was .... 2.8 millions. What can any continent do in situations like this?
There was a program about Ghana on PBS a few weeks ago. The cheapest and most abundant source of protein there is usally fish. When there is overfishing, at least partly by foreign commercial fleets, the Ghanians rely on "bush meat". Hunters kill and sell just about anything that moves, and wildlife is decimated right now.
I think "superstition" is partly a cause of Africa's population explosion. To please the religious right, the Reagan and Bush administrations had a lot of strings attached to economic aid to ensure birth control and abortion were NOT practiced or at least not funded by the US. (There has to be someone who can explain this better than me.)
A lot of Africans are Catholics, too. Not the American do whatever you like as long as you eventually marry in the church, pay a tithe...type. Catholic Africans take their religion and the Pope seriously and don't practice birth control.
Its amazing Africa's population grows at all, between the AIDS epidemic and Darfur/Sudan type genocidal wars.
middleground,
The issue of population can not be correctly understood outside deterministic culture and ecological factors.
Attempting to see it in terms divorced from these determinants is a perspective advanced by those who wish to justify the genocidal programs (civil wars fomented and funded by Western secret services, AIDS, etc.) launched throughout Africa.
More than anything, this spin is being used to thwart active interest and participation by environmentalists and humanitarians in the First World. It is a disinfo argument created by military think tanks and spun out through a number of pseudo liberal groups.
In the examples you have given, Tunisia, China, etc. we have police states that are run on military models that have decimated environments, tied the national communities into the world marketplace and further destroyed the possibility of sustainability.
These countries are models of nothing except corporate interference with resulting (and highly predictable) inequities and despair.
In India, the major problem is continuing encroachment by international corporations including Monsanto (behind the latest wave of land grabs and urbanization) with typical destruction of the environment as the result.
Management is centralized offshore, non-responsive to local needs (including ecological needs) and very brutal.
No amount of interference by self-serving Western programs to maintain and extend dominance can restore a natural balance in any of these places, including population balances.
The only answer is almost too simple: land reform.
Once people have recovered their ability to manage their own lives by natural feedback (non-imperial, social and ecological) mechanisms, family planning at the individual level will follow in a manner most conducive to the well-being of the local ecosphere and planetary biosphere.
Before human insanity embarked upon the empire program to control all things, nature managed untold numbers of specie populations including human. We did NOT get here by overrunning our resource base due to overpopulation, we got to this naturally disassociated state by launching ill-fated military social experiments… more of the same will only further destroy the remaining fragments of the biosphere.
The answer is to recover our natural sense… not try and control more of the natural world… right down to every creature's sexuality and parent child relations.
The natural world is filled with a complexity of excitation and suppression triggers... by removing ourselves form this interactive system, we have lost the natural compasses including those that regulate sexuality.
(BTW, human herbivores have a completely different developmental cycle (including sexual) than those estranged from their own natures. Typically, a practicing human herbivore enters puberty 4 years later than a western style meatarian. And this is just one of many fundamental differences between a naturally aware human and a corporate entrained one. There is also the stomach brain which is extremely impaired by current Western lifestyles. http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_105441.html)
The Human Plague.
Overpopulation is first PROMOTED and then decried by imperial powers. In the end, it always serves to justify warfare (and produce the soldiers and prostitutes required to keep it going) and control paradigms.
Look at China. Remember Mao's determination to build the People's Army?
In Argentina today, the church is attempting to stimulate childbirth because of 'under-population'... but the ecosystems there are fully decimated due to control models that have already created vast deserts.
I think the presence of religious influences to CONVINCE people it is their duty to have children illustrates the truth; no one feels very excited about bringing children into the world if they (or the world around them) cannot support them... so other means have to be devised.
Other species have stopped having babies due to environmental decline. And all over the world, those who have the freedom to choose are looking around and saying, no thanks... no kids, no place for them...
Without TV and religious promotions, there would probably be a precipitous drop in child birth worldwide.
Remember predatory capitalism is almost always preceded by military intervention. Once you invade a materialistically impoverished country and destroy whatever defenses or political organization they have, then they our at the mercies of the invading countries for their so-called security. This usually means arms to dictators for your natural resources. When your means of production is destroyed then you need imports. When you don't have enough for these manufactured imports, you become a debtor nation. After world war one European powers drew borders in the middle east and Africa without respect to ethnicity, causing continual conflict to this day. No wonder why African's have no lasting political structures or mechanism's for their environmental preservation. We live in a interconnected world. We must demand human rights and civil rights for ourselves if humanity is to survive. May peace and compassion be upon you.
Americans and British interventions creating or helping to fuel civil wars and anarchy that results, is responsible for many of their woes. South America and Africa should delink themselves from the world econonomy led by Anglo-American vulture capitalism and WTO Free Trade policies. Easier said than done of course, and Africom and Southcom will have something to say about that.
African voices (link here):
Africa is endowed with rich communities of people, bountiful resources and diverse ecology. Yet:
African children die of hunger, malnutrition and preventable diseases because of neoliberal trade policies and patent systems that force Africa to produce cash crops for export and that refuse poor people access to medicines and healthcare.
Young people are denied the right to education and forced to migrate to unfriendly lands by debt conditionalities that oblige governments to privatise educational systems.
Women die in childbirth, are pushed into insecure work in the informal economy, and are trafficked into new forms of slavery because of desperate economic conditions produced by systemic trade deficits, external indebtedness and structural adjustment.
African men, deprived of the dignity of decent work by neoliberal economic policies, are driven to violence and war over resources.
African communities are forced away from their land and blocked off from the basics of life by multinational resource extractive industries and the construction of mega-dams.
Africa's monetary wealth continues to flow out of the continent in the form of debt and interest payments, profit repatriation of multinational corporations and capital flight.
The ecological fabric of Africa - the source and means to life, food, water, fuel and medicine - is systematically destroyed to fuel production for production's sake and to sustain the consumerist lifestyles of rich, northern countries.
We have come to the crucial recognition that impoverishment, enrichment and ecological destruction are interlinked. Transatlantic slavery and 500 years of colonialism, had instituted a system of plunder of human and natural resources that enriched colonial powers at the cost of decimating and dehumanising African people.
Moreover, the current context of neoliberal economic globalisation, in complicity with patriarchal structures and militarisation, has further undermined African sovereignty, wresting away African people's communal ownership and control over productive means, natural and biotic resources. In concentrating these resources, especially capital, in the hands of powerful nations, international financial institutions and multinational corporations working in collusion with African elites - the agents of empire - the socio-economic disparities between Africa and rich nations continue to widen at alarming rates. Driven by motives of endless economic expansion and profit maximisation - rather than provisioning for life and care of community and ecology - neoliberal models of wealth creation are threatening the entire web of life.
We, therefore:
Denounce neoliberal economic globalisation;
Remind the countries of the North of the wealth that was built and sustained on the continued extraction and plunder of Africa's resources as well as on the exploitation of African people;
Reclaim African communities' sovereignty over decision-making processes, productive means and resources; and
Affirm that African people are creditors of a tremendous economic, socio-cultural, and ecological debt.
lets talk footprints:
"It said that despite over-consumption of resources in some countries, Africa's overall ecological footprint at 1,1 hectares of land and sea -- still behind the continent's total biocapacity of 1,3 hectares per head of population."
http://www.polity.org.za/article.php?a_id=135289
In other words, if only Africans had been utilizing African resources, environmental destruction would likely be negligible or even non-existent.
"And the African figures are still well below the global average footprint of 2,2 hectares per person which, with 1,8 hectares available, is running at a rate suggesting humanity will need two planets by 2050."
http://www.polity.org.za/article.php?a_id=135289
The average for English citizens ranges between 5 and 5.5 hectare acres.
So, Africans on average use 1/5 the resources that the English do but the English are publishing scary accounts of Africans destroying the ecology of Africa.
Does anyone else see the hypocrisy and cruelty behind these sorts of spin articles?
First the rapist commits the rape... and then the rapist wonders what can be done to control the sexual appetite of the rapee...
...don't you just love empire culture?
"The cheapest and most abundant source of protein there is usally fish. When there is overfishing, at least partly by foreign commercial fleets, the Ghanians rely on "bush meat". Hunters kill and sell just about anything that moves, and wildlife is decimated right now."
The saddest legacy of military culture is the widespread belief that animal protein is necessary to human health.
Animal protein is not only NOT necessary, it is debilitating (http://allinharmony.org):
1) It is not broken down completely the way plant proteins are since we are not designed to consume animal protein... humans are natural herbivores.
2) What is broken down into amino acids creates acidic conditions that must be offset by calcium... generally leached from our bones and teeth.
So, eating meat is a HUGE environmental issue and also a pre-condition of many diseases such as cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, kidney stones, Alzheimer's, autism, acne, obesity, etc.
If people were allowed the truth about meat-eating (instead of being told corporate sponsored lies) and its harsh affects on human health, such tragedies would surely never have existed.
Finally, in Africa, most large animal populations were decimated not by Africans but by elite European hunting clubs sponsored by such groups as the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) founded by Prince Bernhard.
Hey iaNWO:
I don't think a Ghanian villager cares too much about amino acids and calcium. He's just hungry and poor. Worse off are the Sudanese living with drought and genocide.
Rich white South Africans hate those pesky baboons that don't understand they should stay away from their American style suburban sprawl McMansions.
Poachers tempted by huge sums paid by foreign organized crime for ivory and rhino horns, human encroachment, and just plain desperate hungry people are the threats to African wildlife today.
Yeah, what most of you said.
Stop Euro/American imperialism. Support individual choice in birth control. Deal with global warming. Quit looting Africa. Protect forests and wildlife.
This ain't gonna happen until we in the "advanced" countries get our shit together.
Until we learn to control our greed, and our vicious ruling class, Africa and the rest of the world is screwed.
It's up to us.
If your starving to death and/or poor as hell your going to destroy the forests for food and money.
Popultion control is severely needed in these parts if its not already blindly obvios, or at least airborne aids.
"If your starving to death and/or poor as hell your going to destroy the forests for food and money."
Really? Then why all over the world do we see the poorest of the poor fighting to protect the remains of nature against loggers, miners, the cattle industry and the spread of GMO's?
You need to investigate the real culprits of environmental decline and the private armies, debt schemes and criminal 'lawmakers' they employ to rout the locals...
Rich people always want to have an excuse to kill some poor person's child (and use all those fancy weapons)... but there is none! It is the rich with their armies and games of deception that have depleted this world of its natural abundance, including Africa.
Consumption figures don't lie. It is the military state that dictates policies of scarcity for some and rapacious gluttony for others… but access to all of it is tightly (though secretly) controlled in this fascist 'knowledge based' but completely inefficient global marketplace.
Just the other day I was moved by a turbaned man almost weeping because he could not feed his family.
But then it was revealed that this lover had 10 (ten) children.
You fill in the rest about what should be done with his genitalia.
I cannot help but recall a recent National Geographic program in which they discussed the eventualy demise of the Inca nation. They were highly developed people but they expanded in numbers so rapidly and so altered their landscape that they literally proliferated to oblivion.
The Earth can only take so much exploitation, plundering and mass destruction before it collapses.
I'm reminded of that age-old quote:
"We have met the enemy and the enemy is us."
"I cannot help but recall a recent National Geographic program in which they discussed the eventually demise of the Inca nation. They were highly developed people but they expanded in numbers so rapidly and so altered their landscape that they literally proliferated to oblivion."
WOW! The Incas certainly did NOT proliferate to oblivion. They were conquered by the Spanish.
Incan water systems and many other forms of government continue to this day... just in new hands.
But did the Incans lay waste to the environment?
Yep.
Empires do that for a reason... to make living outside their control impossible... and Argentina and other places have the vast deserts to prove it... deserts that exist where nature designed vast alluvial plains.
But what the Incas established, the Europeans have greatly expanded, gross inequities between the elite and disenfranchised with ongoing policies to rout All independent communities by decimating the environments that support them.
"Just the other day I was moved by a turbaned man almost weeping because he could not feed his family.
But then it was revealed that this lover had 10 (ten) children.
You fill in the rest about what should be done with his genitalia."
How are you doing launching this policy in Salt Lake City?
There are always a few who have extremely large families. I have known a few members of such families, all Americans. But, that is NEVER the norm.
itsaNaziWorldOrder
Good posts, I have not read each post for word, but what I have read sound like you are on the right track and had to do some hard fighting to get your point across.
Well done and thank you.
From above, "the population of Kenya is now 35 millions. 80 years ago it was 2.8 millions." At this rate of growth, in another 80 years it will have 350 millions. And will have to wage war on its neighbors and on nature for sustenance, or rather, will have been waging war on its neighbors and on nature for 60 years. Of course, nature itself will destroy Kenya if this rate of growth pertains.
And contrary to what 'itsanaziworldorder' indicated, it has been Western modern medicine and science and agriculture that enabled this population growth. If the natural systems still prevailed, the population would be about a tenth of what it is. Is this good or bad? Tribal people in the past had a lot of children because nature killed a lot of children, and lives were far shorter, more precarious, and more miserable. Tribal-think has not yet changed for much of Africa. Or a lot of the world, for that matter. And 'land reform' wherein everyone gets an acre to starve on, is not the answer. Just ask Zimbabwe.
Is itsanaziworldorder suggesting that Africa go back to the tribal days before electricity and medicine? Prepare for a mass die-off. And also prepare for more tribal war, as we have seen in Rwanda, and see now in Darfur. And see Olduvai Theory for a treatise on the de-evolution of humanity as life-support systems crash.
There is plenty of blame to go around in assessing Africa's plight. But what a Paradise Kenya could have become had its population not exploded beyond regional carrying capacity, and especially if it had had a decent socialist government. Now, they are fighting for scraps. With the rest of the world.
Overpopulation is a critical issue everywhere, especially in places that are underdeveloped, because it becomes harder and harder to elevate everyone's standard of living. And that is what I hope for them. If you look at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, on the DR side of the line there is a lush jungle, and on the Haitian side, you see a denuded land, stripped bare as if by locusts, as Haiti's population exploded beyond the carrying capacity of its land, and the poor cut all the trees down to burn for fuel. This cannot be blamed solely on the developed countries (DR is not a rich country and still was able to maintain its forest, as Costa Rica has also), although the developed countries share some of the blame. And they are themselves cutting down the remaining 'trees' in the form of oil supplies, denuding the planet of cheap energy.
The opinions of some scientists are that the natural world can support a fully-developed population of about 2 billion people at a time indefinitely, a figure the world has already blown past. Maybe we can find a way to power down and support the 7 or 8 billion we will have. Maybe. But supporting the population would have been a lot easier and better for everyone with 2 billion.
And population growth is exponential. So do we stop at 16 billion people in a generation? Or 32 billion? Or 64 billion in this century? See the YouTube video, ARE HUMANS SMARTER THAN YEAST?, and the answer to that question seems to be NO. My point is that Itsanaziworldorder has no science behind the population claims made, just wishes and indignation.
Just because one group does something contrary to reason and life, does not mean another group cannot be criticized for themselves doing something else contrary to reason and life. Just because one side is greedy in its way, does not mean the other side is not greedy in a different way. And as long as both sides have variants of the same selfishness, there will be hell to pay.
And isn't this what the White race tought them? Profits before people or anything else? We Whites certainly don't have the right to call the kettle black. We destroy one continent at a time.