Right here at the start I'm going to state that, hey, I don't really know what the hell I'm talking about. I'm not an expert on Africa--but I have been a regular reader of multiple newspapers over the last 25-or-so years. And over that quarter of a century I've been reading pretty much the same stories about Africa again and again--you know: regional war, grinding poverty, famine, habitat loss, endangered species in decline, AIDS, "Do They Know It's Christmas," Bono, etc.
Anyway... Thomas Friedman wrote a column about Africa in Wednesday's New York Times. (Can't link--it's behind the TimesSelect firewall.) He focused on Kenya and the impact that climate change is going to have on that long-suffering country. Kenya wasn't in great shape to begin with and climate change is already fucking with the weather there--in ways that are potentially devastating for humans and wildlife. The rainy seasons are changing as "worldwide precipitation" shifts "away from the equator and toward the poles."
Kenya also has to worry about deforestation and poaching, although poaching is now under better control. Kenya's forests have been reduced from 10 percent of the country's land-mass at the time of its independence in 1963 to 2 percent today, while in the same period its elephant population went from 170,000 to 30,000 and its rhino population went from 20,000 to around 500...
Climate change could worsen this.... Africa accounts for less than 3 percent of global CO2 emissions since 1900, the report noted, yet its 840 million people could suffer enormously from global-warming-induced droughts and floods and have the fewest resources to deal with them.
Sounds pretty grim. It makes a guy think that maybe buying RED t-shirts at the Gap and RED Nokia phones isn't enough to save Africa after all.
Friedman's column focused on the plight of wildlife and humans in Africa, and that struck me. When we talk about "saving Africa" we have two goals--goals that, when you pause to consider them for a moment, are in almost direct conflict. We want to save the wildlide--the elephants, the rhinos, the gorillas in the mist, and all the other endangered species on that continent. And what's wiping them all out? Habitat loss and poaching. Basically, humans--Africans--are wiping them out.
The population of Africa in 1900 was roughly 108 million. Today it's 840 million. If we're concerned about saving the elephants and the rhinos and apes then we need to recognize that one of Africa's chief problems is... well, all those Africans. It's the overpopulation, stupid.
But we want to save the Africans too--from AIDS, from genocide in Darfur, from batshitcrazy Robert Mugabe. And we should not only want to save Africans, we should do something about saving Africans. But saving Africans isn't in the best interests of all that African wildlife, our concurrent concern. They're almost mutually exclusive. So what do we do?
It seems to me that we can save Africans and Africa by... getting Africans the hell out of Africa.
Back to Thomas Friedman:
The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just concluded that two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of heat-trapping carbon dioxide has come--in roughly equal parts--from the U.S. and Western Europe. These countries have the resources to deal with climate change and may even benefit from some warming.
Gregg Easterbrook wrote an article in April's Atlantic Monthly titled "Global Warming: Who Loses—and Who Wins?" (You have to be a subscriber to read the article on their website, but you can read letters about it here.) Guess what? We win--the northern hemisphere. Canada wins, parts of the United States wins (Alaska wins), northern Europe wins. Freakin' Siberia wins--that frozen wasteland may become the breadbasket of the world.
In a March column in The Nation on how the west is reacting to falling birth rates, Katha Pollit wrote...
If fears of population implosion result in paid parental leave, improved childcare and more support for mothers' careers, it won't be the first time a government has done the right thing for the wrong reason. But isn't it weird to promote population growth while we wring our hands over global warming, environmental damage, species loss and suburban sprawl? The United Nations projects that in 2050 the world's population will reach 9.2 billion...
Getting a better deal for mothers has been at the forefront of the feminist agenda for decades, although you'd never know it from the way the women's movement is always being accused of attacking women with kids. So it's ironic that what is finally driving at least some governments to act is the desire to boost fertility rates. The aim is to breed the next generation of workers--ethnically correct workers, too, not the troublesome immigrant kind.... [Why] not learn to live with [population decline]? Economically, the problem is a coming dearth of young workers to fund social security and care for an aging population. Yet while demographers fret about those unconceived second and third babies, every country on earth throws away plenty of children who are already here. Poor children, for example--why can't they grow up to be those missing skilled, educated people and productive workers? What about the children of France's Arab immigrants... The Gypsies of Eastern Europe... Vladimir Putin bemoans Russia's free-falling population, but babies are still being stashed in his country's appalling orphanages.... Instead of cajoling or bribing women into gestating the home-health attendants of the future, states should start treasuring the people--all the people--they have right now.
That includes immigrants.
Yes. We've got a birth-dearth in the west. The west has made a mess of the planet and the people of Africa in particular are going to suffer for it. And there are too many people in Africa, eating up habitat and poaching wild animals to survive. So why not... open the doors? Without a doubt tens if not hundreds of millions of Africans would welcome the opportunity to immigrate--legally, with dignity--to, say, Canada, Russia, the United States, Northern Europe. We shouldn't force anyone to leave Africa--um, of course not, never again--but it seems pretty clear that, given the opportunity, many millions of Africans would willingly leave Africa.
And that would be good for Africans, good for Africa, and good--good penance, good environmental policy--for us.