THE GREAT GREEN WALL
July 14, 2022 11:15 PM Subscribe
"The Great Green Wall is one of the most inspirational and urgent movements of our times" but there's also this.
Thanks for posting this! I have read some criticism of the Great Green Wall project before, but not entirely understood what it was about. The blogpost helps me understand the mindset, even if it doesn't convince me that trees are bad.
I live very far away from Africa, but in a place that was partially desert within my living memory, where there are now tall trees with a dense undergrowth. My house I am in right now was moved twice in the 18th and 19th centuries because of desertification, and the cause of that desertification is well-known: part of it was over-cutting of forests, for fuel, construction wood and ship building, and part of it was the subsequent pastoral land-use, where primarily sheep and some goats and some oxen kept new tree growth down.
Our main town was once the richest in the larger region, but in the early 19th century it was not much more than a few shacks built of driftwood and surrounded by sand.
Tree planting started in the late 19. century, but as I said, I can remember there being large dunes just 200 meters from the house, and my granddad planting new trees in them, a couple of acres each year. I'm just pointing this out as a reminder that greening takes a lot of time. I don't know if this has changed precipitation in this area. Maybe? But it has certainly changed the land's ability to hold on to the water when it arrives. When I was a kid, everything would dry out completely in the summer, including our well, so we had to fetch water for the animals in town. The animals would scrape the dirt looking for some moisture or some roots to eat, and that would loosen up the dirt, and the vicious cycle could continue. Now I look out of the window at a wall of green. I like it.
There are things that were lost. The dunes were monumental, and some of the wild life has been replaced with other forms of wild life. My neighbor, who had the last traditional farm, is tearing down his historical barn, I suppose because he can't afford to keep up a useless building. No one I have met misses the lifestyle from back when that barn was built, when children were sent out to herd the animals instead of going to school.
And mistakes were made. The reforesting of the moors and deserts in this country was literally launched as a type of internal colonialism, and was driven by a central state and rich people who wanted to diversify their portfolio or to own land for hunting. One of my elderly neighbors was paid pennies a day to plant during his holidays as a boy. They drained land and plowed it up and created new sources of sand, and new desertification, while they polluted the water with fertilizer and later also pesticides. (I have a neighbor who still does this, to everyone else's rage).
So when I read about the Great Green Wall, I think of all of this and I though I realize things may be completely different in the Sahel, and maybe people there just love subsistence farming in an area that is plagued with draughts and dust storms, I also think they might be more like my ancestors who wanted a better life, if not for themselves, then for their children.
/rant
posted by mumimor at 3:25 AM on July 15, 2022 [27 favorites]
I live very far away from Africa, but in a place that was partially desert within my living memory, where there are now tall trees with a dense undergrowth. My house I am in right now was moved twice in the 18th and 19th centuries because of desertification, and the cause of that desertification is well-known: part of it was over-cutting of forests, for fuel, construction wood and ship building, and part of it was the subsequent pastoral land-use, where primarily sheep and some goats and some oxen kept new tree growth down.
Our main town was once the richest in the larger region, but in the early 19th century it was not much more than a few shacks built of driftwood and surrounded by sand.
Tree planting started in the late 19. century, but as I said, I can remember there being large dunes just 200 meters from the house, and my granddad planting new trees in them, a couple of acres each year. I'm just pointing this out as a reminder that greening takes a lot of time. I don't know if this has changed precipitation in this area. Maybe? But it has certainly changed the land's ability to hold on to the water when it arrives. When I was a kid, everything would dry out completely in the summer, including our well, so we had to fetch water for the animals in town. The animals would scrape the dirt looking for some moisture or some roots to eat, and that would loosen up the dirt, and the vicious cycle could continue. Now I look out of the window at a wall of green. I like it.
There are things that were lost. The dunes were monumental, and some of the wild life has been replaced with other forms of wild life. My neighbor, who had the last traditional farm, is tearing down his historical barn, I suppose because he can't afford to keep up a useless building. No one I have met misses the lifestyle from back when that barn was built, when children were sent out to herd the animals instead of going to school.
And mistakes were made. The reforesting of the moors and deserts in this country was literally launched as a type of internal colonialism, and was driven by a central state and rich people who wanted to diversify their portfolio or to own land for hunting. One of my elderly neighbors was paid pennies a day to plant during his holidays as a boy. They drained land and plowed it up and created new sources of sand, and new desertification, while they polluted the water with fertilizer and later also pesticides. (I have a neighbor who still does this, to everyone else's rage).
So when I read about the Great Green Wall, I think of all of this and I though I realize things may be completely different in the Sahel, and maybe people there just love subsistence farming in an area that is plagued with draughts and dust storms, I also think they might be more like my ancestors who wanted a better life, if not for themselves, then for their children.
/rant
posted by mumimor at 3:25 AM on July 15, 2022 [27 favorites]
Also adjacent are the Ethiopian Church Forests [MetaPrev] covered in NatGeog.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:40 AM on July 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:40 AM on July 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
Kind of surreal to read about all this with only the faintest mention of the fact that much of this region is an active conflict zone controlled by Islamist insurgents (who, as the piece linked at the end of the blog post points out, draw their strength in part from pastoralists who resent state foresters and preferential treatment given by the state to farmers who block transhumance routes).
posted by derrinyet at 3:51 AM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by derrinyet at 3:51 AM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
Thanks for the post! The green wall was completely unknown to me. Is the project a good idea? Is desertification a myth? I hope someone knowledgeable will comment on this.
mumimor: if I may ask - what country are you in?
posted by Termite at 3:57 AM on July 15, 2022
mumimor: if I may ask - what country are you in?
posted by Termite at 3:57 AM on July 15, 2022
Sort of here
The farm used to have land that was buried by this dune, which is interesting now, but at the time, there were so many more than this one dune, which only became remarkable when the others disappeared. Now they are actually cutting down a lot of forest, not to reestablish the sands, but to create a sort of artificial moorland, it's quite labor-intensive, but they are preserving rare flora and fauna. I guess that is what happens when you become rich, as a nation.
posted by mumimor at 5:41 AM on July 15, 2022 [5 favorites]
The farm used to have land that was buried by this dune, which is interesting now, but at the time, there were so many more than this one dune, which only became remarkable when the others disappeared. Now they are actually cutting down a lot of forest, not to reestablish the sands, but to create a sort of artificial moorland, it's quite labor-intensive, but they are preserving rare flora and fauna. I guess that is what happens when you become rich, as a nation.
posted by mumimor at 5:41 AM on July 15, 2022 [5 favorites]
... but when I visit the churchyard, I can feel the energy of all those old guys who were out herding sheep or planting on their bare feet, rotating in their graves at the mere suggestion that their hard work is being dialed back for aesthetics. Time changes.
posted by mumimor at 5:57 AM on July 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by mumimor at 5:57 AM on July 15, 2022 [2 favorites]
I've read about this occasionally for years. My main take away is that deserts (and this project) are vastly more complicated that what's portrayed in film and popular culture.
posted by sammyo at 5:58 AM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by sammyo at 5:58 AM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
A pullquote from one of the links in the above Previously as a counter to the OP's there's also this, because it (the pullquote) matches more closely what I saw living in Burkina Faso for several years in the late aughts/early teens (I did no work on the Great Green Wall project, but I did work in agriculture projects, and the GGW was definitely in the conversation - not like a ton, but it was known and talked about):
In conclusion, the Great Green Wall is a land of contrasts. (But seriously, thanks for posting, it's giving me a lot to think about.)
posted by solotoro at 7:23 AM on July 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
...farmers in Niger and Burkina Faso, in particular, had discovered a cheap, effective way to regreen the Sahel. They did so by using simple water harvesting techniques and protecting trees that emerged naturally on their farms.I did not hear about the GGW displacing farmers or herders there (and there was plenty of that from other programs, agricultural and otherwise, so it was also part of the conversation). That said, one of the other concerns raised in the OP, that many of the trees wouldn't survive without care they weren't terribly likely to get, was definitely an ongoing concern.
Slowly, the idea of a Great Green Wall has changed into a program centered around indigenous land use techniques, not planting a forest on the edge of a desert.
In conclusion, the Great Green Wall is a land of contrasts. (But seriously, thanks for posting, it's giving me a lot to think about.)
posted by solotoro at 7:23 AM on July 15, 2022 [4 favorites]
For anyone interested in this general topic, I recommend Misreading the African Landscape - it is not specifically about the Green Wall, but the history of forest management in Guinea. From the book description:
Islands of dense forest in the savanna of 'forest' Guinea have long been regarded both by scientists and policy-makers as the last relics of a once more extensive forest cover, degraded and degrading fast due to its inhabitants' land use. In this 1996 text, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach question these entrenched assumptions. They show, on the contrary, how people have created forest islands around their villages, and how they have turned fallow vegetation more woody, so that population growth has implied more forest, not less. They also consider the origins, persistence, and consequences of a century of erroneous policy. Interweaving historical, social anthropological and ecological data, this fascinating study advances a novel theoretical framework for ecological anthropology, encouraging a radical re-examination of some central tenets in each of these disciplines.
Unfortunately, it's an expensive book.
posted by coffeecat at 12:05 PM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
Islands of dense forest in the savanna of 'forest' Guinea have long been regarded both by scientists and policy-makers as the last relics of a once more extensive forest cover, degraded and degrading fast due to its inhabitants' land use. In this 1996 text, James Fairhead and Melissa Leach question these entrenched assumptions. They show, on the contrary, how people have created forest islands around their villages, and how they have turned fallow vegetation more woody, so that population growth has implied more forest, not less. They also consider the origins, persistence, and consequences of a century of erroneous policy. Interweaving historical, social anthropological and ecological data, this fascinating study advances a novel theoretical framework for ecological anthropology, encouraging a radical re-examination of some central tenets in each of these disciplines.
Unfortunately, it's an expensive book.
posted by coffeecat at 12:05 PM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
Forests are great, and we should have more of them. A fun fact I learned recently is that some 40% of rain that falls over land originates from transpiration over forests. They're also batteries for atmospheric carbon, and provide habitat (hopefully) supporting biodiversity.
That all said, it is very easy to imagine a project framed as "let's draw a giant green line across the continent" as having problems. I know that lots of the mass tree planting initiatives focused on carbon sequestration are basically mono cropping trees, leasing to homogenous and therefore fragile habitats, planting trees that can't survive on their own, and so on.
Wangari Matthi's Green Belt Movement was much more community focused, and hit a better balance of livelihood and ecology than the mega projects, but at smaller overall scale. Tradeoffs....
posted by kaibutsu at 2:04 PM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
That all said, it is very easy to imagine a project framed as "let's draw a giant green line across the continent" as having problems. I know that lots of the mass tree planting initiatives focused on carbon sequestration are basically mono cropping trees, leasing to homogenous and therefore fragile habitats, planting trees that can't survive on their own, and so on.
Wangari Matthi's Green Belt Movement was much more community focused, and hit a better balance of livelihood and ecology than the mega projects, but at smaller overall scale. Tradeoffs....
posted by kaibutsu at 2:04 PM on July 15, 2022 [1 favorite]
I teach the Great Green Wall as a case study in ecosystem management for environmental and human benefits. I am certainly not an expert on the project, just an environmental scientist who finds it a useful case study.
I agree with the "alternative" view of the Great Green Wall that desertification is a more complicated process, with both anthropogenic and natural systems components, than it is sometimes portrayed in popular media, but the Great Green Wall is also more complicated than portrayed in that blogpost and, as can be seen on their front page, includes goals like gender equity, job creation, food stability, interfaith harmony, and community building that reduces migration out of the region. It is a much more comprehensive plan than "plant trees", and honestly, I think many of the criticisms are well addressed in the full Great Green Wall plan. There is also substantial published literature on the project.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:47 AM on July 16, 2022 [4 favorites]
I agree with the "alternative" view of the Great Green Wall that desertification is a more complicated process, with both anthropogenic and natural systems components, than it is sometimes portrayed in popular media, but the Great Green Wall is also more complicated than portrayed in that blogpost and, as can be seen on their front page, includes goals like gender equity, job creation, food stability, interfaith harmony, and community building that reduces migration out of the region. It is a much more comprehensive plan than "plant trees", and honestly, I think many of the criticisms are well addressed in the full Great Green Wall plan. There is also substantial published literature on the project.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:47 AM on July 16, 2022 [4 favorites]
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But I also had a class back in college that talked about the environmental history of North Africa and from memory it sounded pretty similar to some of that stuff in the second link.
I think there's room for both. Like, the Great Green Wall can be good in some ways and not in others. I don't know what the balance is.
posted by aniola at 11:23 PM on July 14, 2022 [1 favorite]