Monday, March 19, 2012

Conservation vs relationship - Part 1

Chamaeleo senegalensis
Most of us, at least those of us who haven't numbed our love of beauty and life, like the idea of land conservation.  Throughout our lives we've watched with sadness as countless landscapes around us were decimated by the seemingly unstoppable machinery of industry.   An oak tree, however majestic, however old, however life sustaining, has less value in our current economic system than the land it stands on would if you cut it down and put a house on it.  We fear that unless we put fences around whatever patches of natural landscape are left, beauty will be expunged from the face of the earth in our lifetime, and the ecosystems that support life on earth will collapse.

I, too, find the idea of land conservation attractive.  But I've also come to recognise that it is only a half good, a partial solution.  In order to create "nature preserves" we must define that nature as excluding humanity.  And by deeming man and his impact as unnatural, and all else as natural, we do both man and earth a great disservice: we exclude man from participating meaningfully in the story of life.

Of course, our interactions with this story are inevitable.  We can not escape the fact that we are fully dependent on this earth for our food, clothing, water, warmth, and all of the resources that we use to construct our habitations, our tools, and our entertainment systems.  And as long as that is all that defines the relationship, our environmentalist subculture are heroes for minimising this interaction.  As long as we are basically consumers who treat the rest of the world like our proverbial pantry, our interaction with the the rest of Creation will be a primarily negative one, and limiting this interaction becomes a noble goal.

I've seen few signs of this attitude toward natural resources changing.  If you are reading this, you have probably been encouraged your whole life to consume in ways that are less damaging to the environment, but probably rarely encouraged to interact with it in meaningful ways.  Think about it: in the west, "interacting with nature" usually means hiking along a trail and looking at nature.  The fact that you're probably trying to figure out what interacting with nature even looks like betrays the fact that we, as a culture, have greatly distanced ourselves from actual relationships with it.

"Wow! Look at all this nature!"
If we step back, however, and look at what our relationship with Creation was meant to be, then building fences between "us" and "nature" becomes nothing short of criminal.  It's a little like putting kids into an orphanage to protect them from their living, but indifferent or cruel, parents.   We, who are called the stewards of Creation, are prevented from actual stewardship, restricted to mere visitation rights.  The fact that this has been deemed necessary for the sake of the rest of Creation is indeed a sad reflection of our failings as a species.

Here in Senegal, like in much of the developing world, relationships with nature are still more intact than they usually are in the west.  While many farmers are giving up farming and moving to the city, others still trim trees to feed their cows, who poop on the fields, which produce next year's millet crop.   Yet even this relationship can become consumeristic.  If a farmer only cuts down trees, harvests grasses, and extracts other resources, without also tending the forests, the grasslands, and the soil, he's treating it only as a pantry.  It's not a relationship - it's a dependency.  And most Senegalese have much more reason to be tempted into this type of relationship than you or I do.  Often, harvesting those resources as fast as he can is the only way a Senegalese farmer sees to keep his children from starving to death.[1]

A farmer told me last week that when he was a kid, this land was so thickly forested that nobody dared walk through the area alone, for fear of wild animals.  Since then, the forest has been cut down, the land farmed to exhaustion, and finally the sand itself has been dug out by hand and sold for construction.  Since this picture was taken, even the dry grass on the "tree islands" has been cut and sold.
And so in all places, rich and poor, we see a need for fences to protect, at least until tomorrow, what would otherwise be destroyed for today's use.  In the developed west, we can easily afford to do this; nobody is dependent on the natural resources of Yosemite National Park to make a living.[2]  Here in Senegal, however, we can't.[3]  And that, ironically, might be our saving grace.  For it forces us to restore our relationships with the land, rather than just avoiding them all together.[4][5]   This will probably be a painful and difficult process, but in the end, I see hope for healthier community-land relationships than are possible through building fences alone.

This photo is of a fence protecting a plot of land from Africa's most efficient natural resource extractor - the domestic goat.

 
Part 2 will be about that land on the other side of the fence.

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[1] - Certainly, this is an oversimplification.  Often resources are also extracted for profit or prestige.  But the fight for survival is real for many of Senegal's rural dwellers.
[2] - There once were, but this was no longer the case by the time we designated it a park.  Now, there are still people making their living off of Yosemite National Park (I'm related to several of you), but this living is not based on resource extraction or exchange.
[3] - There are plenty of natural reserves in the developing world, including right here in Senegal: most for ecotourism purposes or (I suspect) because of international pressure.  But any scrap of land that isn't fenced and guarded is used by someone for something.  There is very little "unutilised" land like we see in the western US. 
[4] - Actually, it forces us into a situation where doing so is most beneficial.  Results still depend on desire and effort.
[5] - Incidentally, financial poverty has the same effect on human-human relationships.  Money buys independence, which allows you to avoid difficult relationships.  If you don't get along with your family, you can buy a bigger house, or better yet, move away from them.  Being poor takes away those choices, and thereby supplies ample opportunity to work out those relationships instead of avoiding them. However, being forced to live in close proximity with people doesn't automatically mean you'll learn to get along with them.  This is very visible here in Senegal, too: many women live in continuous strife with their abusive husbands or fathers-in-law, or the contentious other wives of their husband (Muslims are allowed up to four). 

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

A year later, across the sea, two trees.

"The most important thing for a farmer is, you have to love trees." [1]

 Most of us don't think of trees when we think of farms, but here in Sahelian Africa, where I'll be living until July, trees are vital to life.

There are few trees left.


A baobab watches the Sahara desert blow by in the wind.
The countryside around M'bour, Senegal is generally denuded of trees.  There are many reasons for this.  Most Senegalese cook all of their food over wood or charcoal fires.  Add to this the demand for lumber, animal feed, and field space, and most trees have been found to be more useful dead than alive.  Those that regrow from seed or roots are usually eaten by roaming cattle or hacked down to build a fence.  Among the Sereer people who inhabit the countryside around here, however, there are two exceptions[2]:

The baobab (Adansonia digitata) is a highly revered tree[3]:  the bark is harvested repeatedly for fiber, the fruit is delicious, and the leaves are a nutritious vegetable.  Added to this, the trunk isn't fleshy, so cutting it down for lumber wouldn't work anyway.

The kad (Faidherbia albida) is so useful that the Sereer have integrated this tree into their agro-pastoral systems for centuries.  While most trees leaf out in the rainy season and loose their leaves in the dry season, this tree does just the opposite!  That makes it an ideal companion tree to millet fields and cow pastures.  In the rainy season, when crops can utilise all the sun they can get, the tree looses its leaves, fertilising the crops below.  In the long dry season, new leaves and nutritious seed pods appear, providing shade for the maturing crop below and a source of fodder for the cattle herders.  Over the centuries, Sereer farmers would carefully manage this tree, nurturing new seedlings that sprouted in their fields, and maintaining them through careful pruning.  Since the 1970's, however, social shifts have all but ended this practice; today, almost all of the remaining kad trees are adults, and their numbers are slowly diminishing.

Kad trees (and a baobab, 2nd from the left).  Note the heavy pruning for cattle forage.
 Together, these two species make up over 90% of tree numbers in Sereer-managed landscapes.[4]  Since this is a managed landscape, we can ask: Is this a functional and successful system?  In some ways, the answer is yes.  Every living tree in the landscape is utilised.  Sereer herdsmen are still pruning the kads to feed their cattle, and every single baobab shows signs of recent bark harvests.  By and large, though, it is also failing.  Few Sereer are still able to make their entire living off of farming.  The number of cattle this system can support is falling, and most of the remaining millet fields are severely depleted.  The lack of young kads in the landscape is a reflection of a dramatic population shift: farmers are leaving millet farming and seeking jobs in the cities. 

Perhaps the landscape has failed the farmers.  Perhaps the farmers have failed the landscape.  In any case, there are fewer and fewer trees, more and more dust, and less and less harvest.

What am I doing in Senegal? Well, this week I'm picking up a chainsaw and cutting some wood to make charcoal.  And thoroughly enjoying it.  But more on that next week.[5]

A Sereer family's dwelling
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[1] Opening statement by the Senegalese founder of a local agriculture training school, when introducing his school and philosophy to us.  He couldn't have endeared himself to us any faster.
[2] Four, if you include villages and towns: mango and neem trees have been widely planted around habitations.
[3] I mean this in a literal sense as well as a figurative one.  I don't yet fully understand the full dynamics of Sereer relationships with Baobab as a whole, but they fear the evil spirits that inhabit one of the trees I camped under last week so much that they wouldn't get near it after dark.
[4] This would have been my estimate, but here's a source (pdf) that substantiates that number.
[5] Inshallah!