{picture="TimHortonsDisposableCup" caption="Does this say globalwarming awareness to you?"
{if {no (send to: education_pages);
yes (Great answer, now here the read dirt (topic exporation pages));}else{
from newton andrew hide details
11:10 pm (0 minutes ago)
to Andrew Newton
date Jan 15, 2007 11:10 PM
subject Re: Keyword Notification - SEO World Championship
mailed-by gmail.com
<-start: saving the earth->
It may not be on the news.
It may not be in your paper.
But its on every ones Mind.
What is the truth?
Where is it best fixed first?
-I say in YOUR car
-I say Heavily Subsidised Brand Transit
What are the best charoties?
Who are the greatest pioneers?
Related Links:
charities:
organizations:
THE ENVIRONMENT IS YOUR HOME
<-end->
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from SEO World Championship hide details
1:00 pm (10 hours ago)
reply-to info@seoworldchampionship.com
to adverteasement@gmail.com
date Jan 15, 2007 1:00 PM
subject Keyword Notification "globalwarming awareness2007" - SEO World Championship
- Hide quoted text -
On 1/15/07, SEO World Championship wrote:
We are happy to inform you that the official keyword phrase
for the SEO World Championship 2007 has been released.
The selected keyword combination is:
"globalwarming awareness2007"
We wish all contestants good luck!
Best regards,
GetUpdated Internet Marketing
www.seoworldchampionship.com
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from "newton andrew" hide details 10/24/06
to ‹'removed name 01292007' at request of the authoeƒ›
date Oct 24, 2006 2:35 AM
subject Re: [BCEN LW:] RE: Haiti ...a civilization dies
mailed-by gmail.com
wow. just came across this in my clogged in-box. I don't even know what to say
- Hide quoted text -
On 7/5/06, ‹removed name 01292007 at request of the authorƒ› wrote:
- Hide quoted text -
If you got a minute...
I think there's a 10% chance the world of the future will be overwhelmingly awesome,
and a 90% chance it'll look a lot like Haiti. But it'll be one or the other.
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Arthur Caldicott" < arthurcaldicott@sqwalk.com>
Date: May 16, 2006 12:51:45 PM PDT (CA)
To: < landwatch@lists.onenw.org>
Subject: [BCEN LW:] RE: Haiti ...a civilization dies
Reply-To: < arthurcaldicott@sqwalk.com>
===== A message from the landwatch mailing list =====
This story about Haiti is a re-enactment, some three hundred years later, of
Easter Island.
Ronald Wright describes the collapse of civilization, local ecology, and
eventually of human beings on Easter Island in his important book, A Short
History of Progress. Here are a few excerpts:
"Pollen studies of the island's crater lakes have shown that it was once
well watered and green, with rich volcanic soil supporting thick woods of
the Chilean wine palm, a fine timber that can grow as tall as an oak. No
natural disaster had changed that: no eruption, drought, or disease. The
catastrophe on Easter Island was man.
"Trees were cut down faster than they could grow, a problem worsened by the
settlers' rats, who ate the seeds and saplings. By ad 1400, no more tree
pollen is found in the annual strata of the crater lakes: the woods had been
utterly destroyed by both the largest and the smallest mammal on the island.
"We might think that in such a limited place where, from the height of
Terevaka, islanders could survey their whole world at a glance, steps would
have been taken to halt the cutting, to protect the saplings, to replant. We
might think that as trees became scarce, the erection of statues would have
been curtailed, and timber reserved for essential purposes such as
boatbuilding and roofing. But that is not what happened. The people who
felled the last tree could see it was the last, could know with complete
certainty that there would never be another. And they felled it anyway."
The Easter Island story is so much of the story of Haiti. "Fools' paradise",
the Easter Island section from Short History is excerpted in a Times
Literary Supplement, here:
http://plambeck.org/archives/tlsart.pdf
Wow. What do the rest of us human beings do, watching this thing unfold on
Haiti? Wouldn't it be a profound thing if we could get our act together, the
Haitians could get their act together, and together we could engage in an
ecological restoration project of truly biblical scale. Obscenely rich
philanthropists could finance the whole thing. Or ExxonMobil could.
Maybe not. Ah well, we can get some beer, fold out the deck chairs, and
watch 'em all die.
Arthur
-----Original Message-----
From: Loren Duncan
Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 9:23 AM
To: landwatch@onenw. org; Bcenvirowatch
Subject: [BCEN LW:] Ashes to ashes...dust to dust...a civilization dies
===== A message from the landwatch mailing list =====
This is a long one, but worth the peek into the future if climate, oil,
water, food, become unavailable for much of the world.
Cheers, Loren
From: "Dr.Syed.S. Ahmed"
Date: Sun May 14, 2006 8:34pm(PDT)
Subject: Fwd: With 99% of forests gone,Haiti struggles in grip of a
profound
--- In Fresh_Water@yahoogroups.com, "Dr.Syed.S. Ahmed" wrote:
With 99% of its forests gone and its once fertile soil washing away into the
ocean, Haiti struggles in the grip of a profound ecological crisis with many
people reduced to eating weeds, bark and "bread" made of clay. In a six-part
special report, Haiti: The eroding nation, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel
paints a nightmarish - and tragic - portrait of the ecological devastation
of Haiti and its social, political and health consequences. Below are some
excerpts.
* * * * *
Part 1 - "The world doesn't have any idea how bad this situation is
getting."
The floods that blight the seaside slum known as God's Village in
Port-au-Prince arrive with a vengeance, even on days when the rains are
light. Waves of coffee-colored mud slide off the mountains into canals
heaping with garbage. Sewers overflow and stone walls topple. The waters
rise above sandbags and the rusting auto chassis that line a canal. Drowned
pigs, dogs and rats float in the fetid mix - a reddish-brown swirl seeping
into the sea as though the very land is hemorrhaging.
"The mud, it comes fast and hard, but this one isn't so bad - we've had much
worse," says Boss Nirva, wading through the muck that swamps his shanty. "It
didn't even rain hard here. This is the consequence of what happens in the
mountains up there, the lack of trees and all. We're always at the mercy of
the floods."
In Creole they are called lavalas - "cleansing floods" that rush down from
the mountains like an avalanche from June to November. But the floods no
longer cleanse in Haiti, an eroding nation whose very soil is vanishing
beneath its people's feet. A quest for fire has destroyed trees and forests,
turning once-lush mountains into yellowing, naked rocks. Rivers and lakes
are dying, and tons of mounting garbage and contaminants are breeding
disease.
Perverted by poverty and environmental destruction, the natural cycle that
once nourished the land is spiraling out of control. By every measure,
Haiti's 8 million inhabitants are living in a state of profound ecological
crisis, an ongoing catastrophe little noticed by world leaders preoccupied
by wars and conflicts in much larger lands.
Less than 1 percent of Haiti remains covered in forest. In the last five
decades, more than 90 percent of its tree cover has been lost - an area
three times the size of the Everglades. The resulting erosion has destroyed
an estimated two-thirds of the country's fertile farmland since 1940, while
its population has quadrupled.
The United Nations calls Haiti a "silent emergency," noting its vital
statistics rival those of sub-Saharan Africa:
* Haiti has the third-highest rate of hunger in the world, behind Somalia
and Afghanistan.
* Its people have less access to clean water and sanitation than residents
of Ethiopia or Sierra Leone.
* Its malnutrition rate is higher than Angola's, and life expectancy is
lower in Haiti than in Sudan.
* A greater percentage of Haitians live in poverty than citizens of the
war-ravaged Congo.
The links between environmental and health problems in Haiti are complicated
but undeniable. Yet few nations are working closely with Haitian officials
to help solve them. Even the United States, Haiti's largest benefactor, has
suspended aid to the government because of concerns about fraudulent
elections in 2000. And almost no one believes Haiti can solve its own
mounting problems.
"The world doesn't have any idea how bad this situation is getting here;
nobody's paying any attention to Haiti," says Alain Grimard, a senior
diplomat with the United Nations Development Program based in Haiti. "And at
the heart of it is the very severe environmental crisis in this country. The
Haitian case is really quite unique in the world now; you have too many
people living on land that can no longer support them."
Despite more than two decades of rampant deforestation, Haiti has stayed
afloat with billions of dollars of international aid. The Haitian exile
community from the United States and elsewhere sends an estimated $800
million every year in cash, food and clothing to relatives on the island.
"If you stopped that food aid overnight, the population would probably be
cut in half to 4 million," says Simon Fass, author of Political Economy in
Haiti: The Drama of Survival. "The rest would starve to death.
"You have a society in which everyone is trying to get out. But nobody wants
them to get out. Yet nobody wants them to starve. If it were someplace far
away, like Somalia or Ethiopia, then that would be fine. But it's too close.
So what you end up with is a sort of 'Haiti World,' where everyone stays
alive on welfare from abroad."
The harsh environmental and economic conditions driving Haitians to leave
can be traced through the nation's complex 200-year history of political
turmoil and class conflicts. The legacy of slavery - followed by
international isolation and a succession of corrupt, predatory governments -
has created a culture where few have faith in government or large-scale
enterprises, such as environmental protection initiatives. Despite
international efforts during the last 20 years, and a U.S. invasion in 1994
that restored President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power after a 1991 coup,
Haiti has been unable to nurture democracy, economic growth or sustainable
environmental programs.
Crop harvests are shrinking, malnutrition rates are growing and the
population has outstripped the land's ability to sustain it. One
example: The production of rice, a key component in the Haitian diet, has
fallen dramatically during the past decade. One in three Haitian children
are malnourished, leaving many with telltale reddish-orange hair.
Famine-like conditions plague many parts of the country. Eating weeds and
bark to stave off hunger, once an off-season practice among poor farmers, is
now common year-round. Many have turned to eating clay, a folk remedy once
common among pregnant women.
"Who knows when the end point will come, when it all just collapses?"
Grimard says. "Every year the situation grows so bad you can't see how it
will last much longer. Last year we forecast different crisis points - the
price of oil, the price of food - and things have surpassed those."
But while Haitians are resilient, survival has its limits.
"People don't want to leave here, but in the end we have to eat, we have to
survive," says Liberus Mesadieu, a schoolteacher and farmer who lives
outside of Bombardopolis, a small town in the country's bleak northwest. In
this region, farmers are so desperate that they are digging up the roots of
long-gone trees to make charcoal - the only crop that brings a steady
income.
While Mesadieu is acutely aware that uprooting trees is threatening his
ability to raise other crops, "the choice is between a tree and my
children," he says. "Which would you pick?"
Haiti's problems begin in the mountains.ThestormsoftheCaribbean
darken the sky nearly every afternoon during the rainy season. Purple clouds
swell like bruises around the peaks, and cool breezes scatter the garbage
that fills city streets.
As night falls, torrents of wind and rain sweep over remote villages and
vast mountainside shantytowns lit only by slender veins of lightning. The
heavy drops hit the soft soil hard, sending water down barren slopes so
steep that peasant farmers must hang by ropes to till tiny plots of land.
Water - both as bringer of life and herald of death - informs the proverbs,
poems and folklore of the Haitian people. Every year, dozens, sometimes
hundreds, die in floods triggered by storms that do little damage elsewhere
in the Caribbean.
The flash floods are a powerful metaphor in this former slave colony, where
rebellions have often emerged in the rugged mountains and fallen down upon
the cities. The floods give their name to the nation's democracy movement,
the Lavalas Family, which brought Aristide to power and ushered in the
country's first freely elected government in 1990.
With nothing to absorb the rain - no trees, shrubs or terraced hillsides -
water and topsoil wash over the stunted crops. The runoff sweeps into deep
ravines that erosion has carved through the mountains, filling rivers and
streams with silt that is carried out to sea.
Haiti's geography compounds its environmental problems. The country,
one-fifth the size of Florida, has few plains and is more mountainous than
Switzerland. The terrain rises from sea level to peaks of 5,000 feet in just
a few miles, creating a variety of micro- climates.
Tropical islands, under natural conditions, typically have a thick veneer of
topsoil and foliage. That top 10 percent of the soil contains most of the
nutrients that nourish plant life. But in Haiti, that layer has largely
vanished. With 99 percent of its natural tree cover gone, millions of tons
of topsoil are washed away by the rains annually or left to fry under the
Caribbean sun.
An estimated 400 small rivers and streams have silted up and disappeared
over the last two decades. Twenty-five of the country's 30 watersheds are
bare, with just 10 percent of rainfall penetrating the ground - a quarter of
what is typically needed to replenish water supplies and aquifers.
Occupying one-third of the island of Hispaniola, Haiti was once so thick
with magnificent timbers in deep, rich soil it was known as the "Pearl of
the Antilles," the string of Caribbean islands to which it belongs. Now it
ranks last in the world for access to drinkable water, according to the
Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in the United Kingdom. The northwestern
part of the country is an expanding desert, with cacti and vast dusty
expanses that resemble Arizona.
With the natural cycle crippled, the country's ecological devastation
affects every aspect of politics, culture and economy.
The erosion has turned the nation's highways into muddy roads with only
occasional sections of pavement. It can take a day to drive 60 miles through
mud-slicked mountain passes.
Health care also is compromised, as food, water and medicine cannot easily
be transported from one part of the country to the other. When silt collects
in waterways, disease spreads.
"For every 100 deaths of children under 5 years old, more than 50 had
symptoms linked to typhoid, dysentery bacilli and various parasites that
infest the fetid water," a report for the Canadian International Development
Agency concluded in 1998.
"Haiti's roads are a threat to public health," says Dr. Paul Farmer, a
Harvard Medical School professor who runs a clinic in Cange, a town in the
rugged Central Plateau. "There are terrible accidents all the time, and it's
not easy on us, either; we have to move medical supplies and staff along
that road."
Farmer blames such conditions for the loss of many patients, including
15-year-old Isaac Alfred, who had contracted typhoid from dirty water. He
had to be transported from his village to Farmer's clinic - an eight-hour
drive. "Microbes had bored holes through his intestines and when he was at
the clinic, hooked up to morphine and antibiotics, he was in excruciating
pain," recalls Farmer. "By the time Isaac reached Cange, he received medical
treatment, but it was too late."
Farmer has seen how Haiti's deteriorating environment is contributing to the
nation's crisis. "As topsoil is washed off of the treeless mountainsides,
crop yields drop," he says. "Hunger ensues. Then they end up in my hands,
with tuberculosis or AIDS if they're adults, and with kwashiorkor
[malnutrition] or diarrhea if they're kids."
Dr. Guillaume Lionel, 34, who runs a clinic in God's Village, says the
biggest danger posed by the floodwaters is the contaminants they carry. Once
the sun begins to bake the pools of dirty water, bacterial and viral agents
from human waste and other pollutants become airborne. Many children and
adults in Haiti die not only from drinking dirty water but also from
waterborne contaminants and infectious respiratory diseases.
"We haven't had a huge flood lately, but on a daily basis the lavalas dump
the bodies of animals, sometimes a person, right in the canal that goes
through the center of this village," says Lionel. "The carcass slowly
becomes dust and it hits the kids the worst because in these tight places,
where everyone lives so close to one another, kids just touch everything."
The environmental conditions also have undermined agricultural efforts.
Dramatic political unrest has ensued as small farmers struggle to survive.
In the Artibonite Valley, the nation's rice basket, agricultural officials
are often targets of angry farmers whose canals have become so clogged with
sediment that rice can no longer be grown in the surrounding arid fields. A
Haitian government study in 1998 estimated that 37 million tons of topsoil
washes away every year, most of it in the Artibonite.
Some international efforts have hurt more than they've helped. After the
restoration of democracy by U.S. troops in 1994, the International Monetary
Fund and other institutions required Haiti to lift price supports in return
for hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid. Rice farmers were buried
by a glut of cheap food imports. Even if farmland conditions allowed them to
grow rice, it became too expensive. In the past two decades, exports of
American rice - known here as "Miami rice" - to Haiti have grown to 200,000
tons a year, making the nation one of the largest consumers of American rice
in the world.
"Some days you wonder why you're even out here," says Nevres Cadet Claudius,
60, overseeing laborers farming his tiny strip of land in the Artibonite.
"You grow and grow but the price you get for rice is less and less. Nobody
cares for us, not the government, not the world. We need fertilizers, better
tools, investment to compete in the world."
Unrest over these conditions has caused Jean Willy Jean-Baptiste, the local
head of the Development Organization of the Artibonite Valley, to travel
with shotgun-toting bodyguards as he surveys the agricultural lands under
his control. Angry farmers and opponents of the government's policies have
shot at him three times this year. The wall outside his office compound is
covered with graffiti calling for Jean-Baptiste's death.
"They are farmers who cannot grow food," he explains, standing beside a
silt-filled canal. "The capacity of the canals here to irrigate the land has
been cut in half. If there's no water in the canals, you cannot grow rice.
If you can't grow rice, then you cannot feed your family, pay for your
children to go to school, buy drinking water."
In the small village of Fabius, which hasn't seen water in the surrounding
canals in several years, farmers are resorting to violence to settle
squabbles over how to share limited water resources. "The zones here are
always in conflict now. The Artibonite is a very real hot zone because we
have people taking their machetes to solve their irrigation problems,"
Jean-Baptiste says. "Sometimes one fight over a canal leads to 10 or 12
deaths. It's neighborhood vs. neighborhood because one place is getting
water, but further down the canal it's dried up."
Mercily Dukern, 39, who grew up in Fabius, remembers when the canals were
waist-deep in water. "Look at my fields, they're just dead," he says. "We've
pretty much given up on getting water here for growing again anytime soon.
Whatever water collects in these ditches, people here need to drink. We're
all just waiting for God's mercy, waiting for his help."
As topsoil washes away in Haiti's rural areas, tens of thousands of economic
refugees have flooded its cities. Port-au-Prince is growing at a rate faster
than the world's mega-cities and has a greater share of the national
population than any other city in the Western Hemisphere. About a third of
the country's population - some 2.8 million people - live in the capital
city.
"The farm families come here looking for a better life, but it's a life in
hell," says Jacques Hendry Rousseau, a Haitian demographer for the
International Organization of Migration. "These people have no urban skills,
and the one skill they do have - growing food - is of no use in the city."
The population density in the capital city's largest slum is among the
highest in the world. As many as 1,500 people live on every two acres of
land in Cite Soleil and other shantytowns. Conditions are so crowded that
many dwellers pay to sleep in shifts. Mothers and fathers often sleep
standing up in shacks that have less than 8 square feet of space for 10 or
12 people.
"It's the lack of space - there's literally no space at home or on the
streets or anywhere - that's what's hardest," says Baby Lumeus, 35, of God's
Village, who is paid by residents to keep children from falling into a foul
swamp on Port-au-Prince's waterfront. "One of these days we'll all be dead
when the big rains hit, the water comes rushing down the mountain and we're
all pushed out to sea."
Hundreds of thousands of poor Haitians have overtaken the city's waterfront
in vast slums with names like the Eternal City, God's Village and Tokyo. "In
any other capital city in the world, the waterfront is where the rich live,"
says Helliot Amilcar, a geologist who specializes in coastal development at
the Haitian Ministry of Environment. "Here, it is where the poorest of the
poor live."
The slums are hotbeds of crime and political discontent, and home to gangs
of young men who hire themselves out as political muscle known as chimere.
They use military titles and often mark territory with the names of American
hip-hop artists like Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg. To escape these
conditions, refugees from Cite Soleil have moved up into the steep mountains
surrounding the capital city, building homes on sheer, treeless slopes that
often collapse during heavy rains. In early October, at least 15 people were
killed when mudslides buried homes in Cite Bourdon, the slum at the mouth of
the Bois de Chien canal.
"There's really no place else to live; people here want to avoid the worst
slums like Cite Soleil," says Jean-Claude Fenelon, 36, bathing with several
other men and women in a stream that runs through Cite Bourdon. A native of
the Central Plateau region, he came to Port-au- Prince 10 years ago because
his plot of land barely grew anything. "When I was growing up in the Central
Plateau, you'd see people coming from Port-au-Prince all the time," Fenelon
recalls. "They looked good. They were clean, wore nice clothes. They even
smelled good. So you think good things happen here, but looks can be
deceiving."
Haiti's deplorable living conditions have promoted the spread of preventable
diseases that have been contained or eradicated in many other countries.
Polio, eliminated from the Western Hemisphere in 1994, re-emerged on the
island in 2000. The Pan American Health Organization said only 30 percent of
Haitian children had been fully vaccinated against measles, polio, mumps and
rubella in the 1990s. Since then, inoculation rates have declined. HIV/AIDS
kills 30,000 Haitians and orphans an estimated 200,000 children each year.
That gives Haiti the highest per-capita AIDS death rate in the hemisphere
and one of the highest in the world.
In city streets, Rousseau and other demographers have observed a large
increase in the number of street children - known as kokorats or grapiays
(leftovers) - orphaned by AIDS or other diseases. "There's no reliable
numbers on these children because the situation in Haiti is so complex it's
hard to tell anymore what a street child is," says Rousseau. "The collapse
of the countryside and the urban environment, the sheer overpopulation, has
resulted in a complete breakdown of the Haitian family. In such an
environment, a child who survives past the age of 5 is usually on his own."
A growing number of Haitian refugees are fleeing for the relative stability
and economic opportunity of the Dominican Republic, which shares the island
of Hispaniola with Haiti. The 223-mile frontier between the two nations has
become a teeming border area where Haitians and Dominicans compete for food
and work. On the Dominican Republic side, trees are clustered tightly in
rich tropical foliage. Roads are paved, houses are painted in bright
tropical blues, yellows and greens, and there are numerous automobiles. But
in Haiti, the mountains are bare and coffee-colored. Trees exist in solitary
clusters so small they would hardly shade a family picnic. Houses are
ramshackle huts, where they exist at all. The roads are muddy trails or
worse.
"On one side there's order, and on the other side there's really no
authority at all," says Calixte Aldrin, a Haitian environmentalist who
specializes in border issues. "I don't even know if you can call what's on
the Haitian side an environment anymore. It's just barren, scalded land that
doesn't grow much."
As Haiti deteriorates, the Dominican Republic has grown increasingly
alarmed. Earlier this year, the chief of the armed forces described Haiti as
a security threat.
The World Bank estimates that at least 6 percent - more than 500,000 - of
the Dominican Republic's 8.4 million people are Haitian immigrants. Some
experts think the number is at least twice that figure. Many Haitians are
literally without any country: They have no records of their birth in Haiti
and live as illegal workers in the other nation.
"I supposedly have rights here because I was born here, and my mother was
Dominican," says Violine Philogene, a 16-year-old Haitian farmworker who
lives in a shack outside the Dominican border town of Dajabón. "But the
truth is that I cannot get any papers here, and I have no rights. I'm
Haitian, but I'm really just nothing, nobody, on either side of the border.
But the life is better here."
Ronald Joseph, a local congressman in Ouanaminthe, a northern Haiti border
town, estimates that the area's population has grown from about 5,000 a
decade ago to about 120,000 people today. All have fled the interior for a
better life in the Dominican Republic. The average income of Dominicans is
five times that of Haitians - $2,000 a year compared to less than $400 in
Haiti. "The misery is just increasing here," he says. "The only commerce is
what you can make on the Dominican side."
Louis Louis-Jeune, a 19-year-old Haitian who lives in a shack on farmland
outside another border town, La Ceiba, says he often journeys to farm and
construction jobs in Dajabón or the capital city of Santo Domingo. But he
and other Haitians are on continuous guard for sweeps by soldiers and
policemen. He recently was robbed of $150 by soldiers before being dumped
over a section of border hundreds of miles from his hometown.
"The yucca grows too small in Haiti," says Louis-Jeune, referring to the
cassava root that is a staple of Caribbean cuisine. "Nothing at all really
grows there anymore, so I came here basically to save my life because there
just wasn't any food where I grew up, and my family was too large.
"I had to leave in order to live."
* * * * *
Part 2 - "We know that this is destroying the land, but charcoal is what
keeps us alive."
The men in Bombardopolis, Haiti hunt their trees in packs. Fanning out in
groups of four or five with handmade axes, picks and crowbars, they may
happen upon a mango tree, a vital fruit producer, that no longer earns its
keep. Down it comes. Or they may bring down a gayoc - an extremely rare
hardwood tree once prized for the medicinal quality of its resin. When a
tree cannot be found, men turn on the stumps of timber long gone and dig,
hack, poke and pry the wood out of the ground.
They then dig a pit in the wet, brown soil and set the wood - trees or
stumps - ablaze. The burning pile is covered with mud, grass and leaves in a
mound from which smoke rises. Joining milky white tendrils from other
mounds, the resulting haze wafts over denuded mountainsides that look like
scar tissue on the once-verdant landscape.
A week passes and the men known as charbonniers dig up the "black gold" -
charcoal - the product that fuels this poor nation's cities while devouring
what's left of its countryside. Sold by charbonniers to urban residents -
for use in home cooking, bakeries and dry cleaners - charcoal has been the
chief source of energy for decades, accounting for 85 percent of energy
consumption. Electricity has never penetrated the rural interior where half
the country's 8 million people live. Oil prices have risen dramatically in
the last two years, making the dwindling forests the only fuel option for
most Haitians.
But with every downed tree, this nation's natural legacy is going up in
smoke. Charcoal production is the engine driving Haiti to the brink of
environmental collapse. "We're not fools; we know that this is destroying
the land, but charcoal is what keeps us alive," said Liberus Mesadieu, a
34-year-old farmer, as he hacked at a tree stump, sweat staining the old
Domino's Pizza delivery shirt on his back. "This area used to be dense with
trees, but we uprooted them all for the wood."
Added his neighbor, 44-year-old Delius Alcius: "Cutting trees leads us to
more misery. If we didn't have to cut the trees, the soil would be richer
here. But to make money here, you have to take all the wood to make the
charcoal."
The practice is not only decimating once-lush forests. The dearth of wood
for homes has led to mining of rock and sand from Haiti's mountains to make
cement, which intensifies erosion problems. In Port-au-Prince, at least
7,900 acres of land has been mined to build small homes in the expanding
slums, according to the United Nations.
As trees disappear, so do parts of the culture. The nation's artists no
longer have enough wood to make sculptures. Indigenous dishes are
disappearing as certain fruits and vegetables become more rare and harder to
grow, and cheap imports like breakfast cereal replace them.
Rural farmers don't use charcoal; the product evolved to meet the growing
demand for fuel in Port-au-Prince and other large cities, as people fled the
countryside for urban areas. Yet as more trees fall in rural areas to meet
the demands of the cities, ever more young men and women leave the
countryside for urban slums, escalating the nation's deforestation.
The economics of charcoal production are so favorable that even when
conventional crop harvests are good, they pale in comparison to the money a
farmer can make burning trees. To raise lima beans during a single harvest
on 3 acres of land, Mesadieu must work with three other farmers and buy the
seed for about $15 - the equivalent of 500 gourdes in Haitian currency. A
good harvest yields 60 pounds of beans, earning 900 gourdes, or $28. The
profit: $13, or $3.25 for each partner. But in a single week, one charcoal
pit yields at least three bags, earning 375 gourdes, or $11 in total. If he
finds a way to transport it to local markets, he can make nearly twice that
amount.
The impact on local economies is similar to that of the coca industry in
Colombia, where food crops are forsaken for the environmentally damaging
plants and practices that provide the key ingredient in cocaine. In
Bombardopolis, charcoal has become a form of currency. Heaping bags of it
lean against homes, an outward reflection of wealth. Farmers take out loans
against it and use the bags to pay for food or school.
But the area around the village is almost treeless, and farmers say the next
generation won't even have charcoal to fall back on. "For the first time,
people are really talking about leaving" Bombardopolis, said Alcius,
explaining that he must harvest charcoal to buy medicine for his ailing
wife. "You never saw that before because it was too hard a trip to make to
the Dominican Republic. And finding a boat for the United States is very
difficult."
The United States, foreign governments and international charities have been
sponsoring reforestation projects in Haiti for decades. But the
multimillion-dollar efforts are overwhelmed by Haiti's political instability
and staggering poverty. The Atlanta-based CARE organization has extensive
nurseries and tree-planting programs in Haiti's northwest, but its
agriculture specialists concede that weaning farmers off charcoal is an
immense task. Their nurseries produce 300,000 seedlings a year, usually
fruit trees like mango and citrus, as well as forest trees like eucalyptus
and cedar.
"You can't force people to keep trees on their land, if for no other reason
than there's no government enforcement around here," said Wilbert Pierreval,
CARE's reforestation chief in Bombardopolis. "One guy will tell you he needs
this tree for money to send his wife to a hospital, another will say it's
for school. What we can do is suggest they not cut down one tree and then
give them 10 seedlings to grow some more trees."
Bombardopolis and three other nearby villages are famine zones with 180,000
people at risk, according to the United Nations World Food Program. It is a
region so poor that young men climb up stone walls to study textbooks under
the single light at a local CARE compound.
In a report last December, the United Nations noted: "Most of the households
can hardly afford one meal a day ... others live on coconuts or mere tea.
Because of lack of income and hunger, some parents can no longer maintain
their children in school. Others are just too hungry to commute to school.
In some areas, part of the able population [mostly males ages 14 to 40] are
migrating to the cities and abroad, hence diminishing the agriculture labor
base.
"Young girls who migrate to urban areas in search of food are forced by
circumstances to engage in prostitution, putting them at the risk of early
pregnancy or contracting HIV/AIDS. Some young schoolgirls have returned to
their villages with babies, hence creating additional burden for their
parents."
Environmental experts date the charcoal boom to the early 1960s, when world
coffee prices fell so low that Haiti could no longer compete in the coffee
market. The country was in the early years of the Duvalier dictatorship,
which ruled brutally for three decades. Haitian farmers began ripping up
their coffee plants to replace them with crops that would fetch a better
price.
"Coffee was being exported, but during the Duvalier years there were lots of
high taxes on it and lots of exploitative practices by the government -
predatory practices," explained John Currelly, an agronomist with the Pan
American Development Foundation in Haiti. "More and more of it was smuggled
out, and less and less of it was actually harvested. And the techniques for
growing it were very bad. It was just part of the whole disintegration of
Haitian society during that time."
Because coffee beans grow on a bush that doesn't have to be replanted every
year, it holds tropical soil very well. Coffee also grows well with
surrounding tree cover, so there is no need to clear forests. But as farmers
grew desperate, they began moving to other crops - including corn, peanuts
and bananas - to support their families. But those crops were unsuitable for
Haiti's mountainous terrain. "Geography plays a key role: It tells you what
you can plant and what you can't," explained Currelly. "What you cannot
plant on highly sloped fields is corn. Or peanuts, which you have to pull up
out of the ground in order to harvest them."
In the village of Figuiers, 79-year-old Fabius Augustin recalls the day an
entrepreneur named Thomas showed up to tell farmers about the charcoal
industry in the 1960s. Thomas taught them how to make charcoal and set up a
system of middlemen to bring the product to markets in Gonaives, six hours
away. "Everybody here overnight went crazy," said Augustin, a local minister
regarded as a village elder. "They began chopping down trees everywhere, and
nobody paid much attention to planting new ones. There was shade all over
here. It was a dark, thick jungle. But look at it now: It's a desert."
Local officials oversaw the thriving trade but protected larger forests
controlled by the government or large landowners. But that system broke down
with the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in 1986. Tree harvesting,
charcoal production and wood transport exploded overnight. Charcoal
production spread into previously protected forests. The expansion moved
into new forests, flooding the market and keeping wood cheaper than
alternatives such as fuel oil. The devastation intensified in 1991, after
Haiti's first democratically elected government was overthrown in a coup.
An international trade embargo later that year so ransacked Haiti's economy
that peasants who could not afford seed or fertilizer turned to trees to
survive. Some 65 million trees that the United States Agency for
International Development had planted during the 1980s were chopped down for
wood fuel.
In June 1994, the embargo was extended to include mangoes. For the first
time, farmers turned their axes against fruit trees. Many peasants believe
that mangoes and other trees are homes to ancestral spirits. They also are
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