Walt Whitman, in his “Salut au Monde,” speaks in praise of the Red Mountains of Madagascar. He cannot be blamed for his failure to mention that these mountains- even 150 years ago- were melting irreversibly into the sea. A natural leveling process to be sure, but one which, in the modern world's neglect and disregard, has accelerated to an astronomical degree. This not a casual word choice: astronauts orbiting over Madagascar have observed that as the red rivers fan out into the ocean blue, it appears the island is bleeding itself to death.
On the ground, it is not difficult to connect the dots. Deforestation is rampant. Communities- a small cluster of houses, a single house- are surrounded by rings of destruction, protruding stumps and bare ground. In the dry season, one cannot scan any horizon without the interruption of smoke pyres; land is being cleared for rice cultivation, or just for the hell of it. Come the cyclone rains those charred and scarred hillsides are simply gone, swept into rivers choked with mud and debris, rivers that sweep away their banks and hemorrhage their red sediment out to the sea.
Rice fields are silted, limited top soil lost, local fisheries interrupted. To all this, people offer only a fatalistic shrug: we gotta get by, gotta eat. This is by all means a valid point, but also a terrifying one on an island of exploding population growth. Someone once told me: “We [Malagasy] think only of today, never tomorrow.”
The same might be said of the powers that be, though a PCV must be very careful treading this particular ground. [Peace Corps is a working partner of the Malagasy government]. Suffice to say that wide-scale and highly profitable logging and mining operations, nearly all foreign-owned and operated, double, triple, quintuple the damage wrought by any Malagasy environmental ethos.
It is difficult at times- in the face of such wanton and senseless destruction- to maintain optimism, difficult to feel so small and helpless, so limited of scope, so feeble of effort, a Lorax among a sea of stumps. Forgive, but I am not alone in succumbing to this bleak outlook. The island's default travel guide offers this among its opening quotes: “My advice is to see Madagascar before the Malagasy people finish with it.” That is a travel guide, hardly a genre known for peddling pessimism.
So yes, sometimes it feels quite hopeless: the scale of destruction is so vast (almost 90% of Madagascar's primary forest is already lost), the cultural mindset that permits it so deep-rooted, that one struggles to find the rays of light. Frankly though, after an inordinately depressing series of paragraphs, I feel honor-bound to deliver them to you. The Lorax is not always the bearer of bad news.
Thus I offer you this: over the past month, three large-scale reforestation projects were undertaken in my area. Though “organized” (in the most flexible and generous sense of the word) by Madagascar National Parks and various other agencies, the community was undeniably the force behind the effort. They raised the trees in pepinieres, turned out in droves to climb hillsides and muck through the mangrove mud, high-fived over tree-holes, killed cows and picnicked and were generally jubilant in their environmental efforts. It was refreshing. It was astounding. It was, for someone who was spent the past year among stumps and gullied hillsides and thick muddy rivers wondering if anyone else cared, genuinely inspiring.
So take heart. Madagascar may be bleeding but it ain't dead yet.
what kind of trees are you planting?
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