The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight..

From: The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight - Thom Hartman pgs. 36-41

Glimpsing a Possible Future in Haiti and Other Hotspots

Quote: "Christopher Columbus not only opened the door to a New World, but also set and example for us all." - George H.W. Bush (b.1924), 1989 speech.

If you fly over the island of Hispanoala off Haiti, the island on which Columbus landed, it looks like somebody took a blowtorch and burned away anything green. Even the ocean around the capital of Port-au-Prince is choked for miles with the brown of human sewage and eroded topsoil. From the air, it looks like a lava flow spilling out into the sea.

The history of this small island is, in many ways, a microcosm for what's happening in the whole world.
When Columbus first landed on Hispaniola in 1492, almost the entire island was covered by lush green forest. The Taino "Indians" who lived there had an idyllic life prior to Columbus, from the reports left to us by the literate members of Columbus's crew, such as Miguel Cuneo.
When Columbus and his crew arrived on their second visit to Hispaniola, however, they took captive about sixteen hundred local villagers who had come out to greet them. Cuneo wrote: "When our ships...were to leave for Spain, we gathered...one thousand six hundred male and female persons of those indians, and of these we embarked in our ships on February 17, 1495...For those who remained, we let it be known [to the Spaniards who manned the island's fort] in the vicinity that anyone who wanted to take some of them could do so, to the amount desired, which was done."
Cuneo further notes that he himself took a beautiful teenage Carib girl as his person slave, a gift from Columbus himself, but that when he attempted to have sex with her, she "resisted with all her strength." So in his own words, he "Thrashed her mercilessly and raped her."

It was a common reward for Columbus's men for him to present them with local women to rape. As he began exporting Taino as slaves to other parts of the world, the sex-slave trade became an important part of the business, as Columbus wrote to a friend in 1500: "A hundred castellanoes [a Spanish coin] are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten [years old] are now in demand."

While Columbus once referred to the Taino Indians as cannibals, there was then and today no evidence that this was so. It was apparently a story made up by Columbus-which is to this day still taught in some U.S. schools-to help justify his slaughter and enslavement of the people. He wrote to the Spanish monarchs in 1493: "It is possible, with the name of the Holy Trinity, to sell all the slaves which it is possible to sell....Here there are so many of these slaves, and also brazilwood, that although they are living things they are as good as gold.

However, the Taino turned out not to be particularly good workers in the plantations that the Spaniards and later the French established on Hispaniola: they resented their lands and children being taken, and attempted to fight back against the invaders. Since the Taino were obviously standing in the way of Spain's progress, Columbus sought to impose discipline on them. For even a minor offense, an Indian's nose or ear was cut off, so he could go back to his village to impress the people with the brutality the Spanish were capable of. Columbus attacked them with dogs, skewered them on poles from anus to mouth, and shot them. Eventually, life for the Taino became so unbearable that, as Pedro de Cordoba wrote to King Ferdinand in a 1517 letter, "As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth....Many, when pregnant have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery.

Eventually, Columbus, and later his brother Bartholomew Columbus, whom he left in charge of the island, simply resorted to whiping out the Taino altogether. Prior to Columbus's arrival, most scholar's place the population of Haiti/Hispaniola at around 300,000 people. By 1496, it was down to 110,000, according to a census done by Bartholomew Columbus. By 1555, every single one was dead. (Today not a single Tanio is alive: their culture, people, and genes have vanished from the planet.)

As the transplanted population of slaves brought from Africa grew in Haiti, people began cutting down forests to create farmland and to use trees as firewood for cooking and for boiling water. As a result, today trees cover less than 1% of Haiti. The denuded land, exposed to rainfall and runoff sped up by the slope of the country's hills, has been so thoroughly eroded that it has mixed with sewage and carried the stain a full four miles out to sea from port-au-Prince. Millions of people are crowded into cities, where they provide a ready pool for ultra-cheap labor for multi-national corporations, as well as cheap domestic help and inexpensive child and adult prostitutes for the American and European managers of those corporations and the occasional tourist.

The legacy of Columbus is that life in Haiti is more than poor; it is desperate. As much as 16 hours a day are spent by the average country-dweller in search of food or firewood, and an equal amount of time is spent by city-dwellers in search of money or edible garbage. Diseases ranging from cholera to AIDS run rampant through the overcrowded population. While Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, it is not unique. The Dominican Republic, which shares the island, is moving in the same direction, as is much of the rest of Central and South America.

The Philippines: Children hunting for garbage to eat

When I was in the Philippines in 1985, Father Ben Carreon, an activist priest and the author of a popular column for the Manila Times. took me to one of that city’s huge garbage dumps. The smell was awful, the air thick with insects, as mountains of rotted garbage stretched off into the distance.
We stood in the hot afternoon sun, and Father Ben said, "Look carefully at the piles of garbage."
I squinted in the bright light, looking at the distant piles, and noticed something. "They're moving!" I said.
"No, it's the children on them that are moving," he said. "Thousands of them. Their families live all around here, and the children spend their days scavenging for garbage that their family can eat."
Father Ben's response to his discovery years ago that there were armies of children living among the garbage dumps was to begin a scholarship program to put the "garbage dump kids" through grade school and high school. Hundreds have graduated from high school and dozens to college as a result of his efforts. "Still, it's only a drop in the sea," he said to me a few years after we first met. "The task is enormous."

Nepal: Walking four hours to find the day's wood

Similar stories are playing out all over the "developing" world. Nepal has given up 30% of its forest cover to fuel-wood gathering and subsistence farming in just the past few decades. For the thousands of years that tribal people lived there, elaborate hillside terraces had provided a ready and predictable supply of food for the nation’s population. Today, most of those terraces are crumbling under the force of rains that race down Nepal's steep slopes, no longer slowed by forests. Women in Nepal, as in most developing countries, are the ones primarily responsible for gathering firewood as well as growing or gathering and preparing food. Because of the rapid deforestation of Nepal, studies cited by Dr. Sharon L. Camp of the Population Crisis Committee indicate that Nepalese women have recently had to add between one and four hours to their normal ten-hour workday just to walk to and from the increasingly distant sources of wood. Within the now visible future, these sources, too, will be exhausted, and Nepal will probably travel the road Haiti has gone down.

Western Africa: the wood was used up, erosion set in, now it's desert

The western Africa nation of Burkina Faso (formally known of Upper Volta) is another interesting example. With 18 percent of the country's GNP supplied by foreign aid, Burkina Faso counties to experience a population explosion, with the average woman having 7.2 children. Self-sufficient for tens of thousands of year, the country is now capable of producing only 40 percent of its own food needs. Wood for fuel is being burned almost five times faster than it can regrow, and woman spend up to half their waking hours just searching for water. As erosion speeds up and soils become exhausted, the farmers of Burkina Faso have become good customers for the international fertilizer companies, who control a multibillion-dollar annual business. But this is a short term solution at best, and so the desert has claimed much of the country's land in just the past 40 years.
In 1984, famine killed over a million people across Africa, and Burkina Faso was one of the countries hardest hit. In a 1992 speech, Dr. Camp quoted Burkinabe farmer John Marie Zawadogh, half of whose land had become desert. He said: "In my father's time, millet filled all of the granaries and the soil was deeper than your body before you reached rock. No we have to buy food in all but the wettest years and the soil is no deeper than my hand...When we were boys, the forest was all around us, too thick to penetrate. Gradually more and more of it was cleared around the compounds, until one clearing met the next and made the great openness you see now."

The United States is no different; it has lost a third of its topsoil since 1950. Yet most people seem unaware that there is a problem here or anywhere else in the world. Why?



We Notice Rapid Changes, Not Slow One…

In 1976, my wife Louise, and I bought an 80-acre farm in northern Michigan, thinking that the time might come when it would be necessary for us to grow our own food. We had lived in Detroit when the Arab oil embargo of 1973 happened, followed by the teamsters’ strike over the rise in gas prices and the economic controls that Nixon enforced in an attempt to avoid an economic disaster. For a week or so in 1973, there was little to no food on the shelves of stores in Detroit, and I remember waiting in line for four hours to buy a five-gallon ration of gasoline. It was clear to us even then that the system was fragile, and that big cities could be death traps is an economic collapse were to happen.

Things improved when the Arabs turned the spigot back on. In 1978, when Louis and I started the New England Salem Children’s Village in New Hampshire, we sold the farm in Michigan to help us support ourselves. But I keep remembering that glimpse behind the veil in Detroit, that horrifying look at what a city could be like in just the first few days after the trucks stopped rolling and the pumps ran dry.

A friend who loves seafood once told me that it is possible to cook lobsters slowly. “If you put them in a pot of cold water and then turn on low heat, as it warms up they just go to sleep and then get cooked,†he said. “it makes for a lot less thrashing around, as you normally see when you drop a live lobster in a pot of boiling water.†The latter method is preferred among lobster aficionados, however, because quick-cooking produces a more flavorful meat, or so I am told.

Not unlike lobster, we tend to not notice changes in our “water†as long as they happen gradually. For an American, dropping into the “hot spot†of Haiti or Burkina Faso creates a shock of realization: the entire planet is in the same pot, and while there are local spots hotter than others, our pot is warming worldwide.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Alric @ Dec 9 2006, 05:28 PM) [snapback]359919[/snapback]</div>

Alric, I agree he worded that incorrectly but he does state that they share the island later in the passage.

Good catch though. I just didn't want to edit anything since it is a direct quote and not my own words. I also want to thank you for making me aware of RealClimate.org some time ago. I really enjoy that site.

I forgot to post the title of the "chapter": Glimpsing a Possible Future in Haiti and Other Hotspots

My reason for posting this is:

A: Some people have no clue about real history and I hope that this is as eye opening for those people as it is for me any time I read something that totally contradicts what I learned in school as a child. It was a total shock to learn about California Native Americans and the trials they faced. I'm Spanish as well so imagine how that made me feel.

B: To see the connection with their tortured landscape and the cost in terms of living standards it has cost them. Obvisouly there are many factors at work but it is an example of how some people have to live due to environmental degredation.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(fshagan @ Dec 10 2006, 12:08 PM) [snapback]360099[/snapback]</div>

After reading it on here I wished I had spent the time writing the other two portions that led to the end summary of the article. In fact I may just add it in anyway. Since I was reading the book and typing it out I got a little tired.

The point of the article IMO was to paint the picture of human greed, lack of compassion for another people or culture and a lack of understanding of the natural environment. Then the subsequent effects of such negligence. The vast majority of our problems come from population and consumption. Lower both of those and we wound't have near the problems that we do now.

 

Ok, I added the missing 3 portions to that chapter. I simply didn't have muc time yesterday and got tired of typing. I thjink the added portions make the point much better.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(fshagan @ Dec 10 2006, 05:49 PM) [snapback]360182[/snapback]</div>

In some ways I do believe that human greed and lack of compassion are related to overcrowing. I also agree that exploitation of resources is not the root of the problem. A lack of resources is linked to a lot of social issues though. In that respect people are concerned with getting their share by any means necessary (looks at the current war for example) and due to a lack of accountability or "community feeling" people will do things that they would not normally do. Take for example, road rage. Driving on the freeway many people are very quick to yell, cuss, make rude gestures, or even resort to violence. Take that same exact situation and make it happen in the neihborhood of those individuals and I would be willing to be they think about the consequences of their actions before they act. Personally I am much quicker to blow where I feel that I am anyomous and that nothing will come of my actions then I would be in a situation where I knew I would have to deal with my actions at a later date. So if I get cutoff around the corner from my house I would be less likely to flip the person off for the simple fact that MAYBE it was my neighbor and maybe he didn't mean to do it, and then I would have to deal with feeling like a butthead when I saw him next. That is how a lot of tribal issues were kept to a minimum. People didn't want to do bad because they would be shuned by the rest of the tribe and lose face. In our large crowded communities we lose that. I've heard and read the same conclusions by a number of ethicists and Native American experts. Not that that we are subject to the same rules but we are human and very little has changed in that respect from 100+ years ago.

As for laws.. I agree and disagree. I cannot see how having zero laws would solve anything and to the contrary I think it would make things much worse. But I don't see how making more laws would be any better than where we are now. People break laws every day and the more we have the more that get broken. I would say that maybe stricter enforcement and punishment for the laws would be the only thing to try next? Of this I am not very well versed so I would enjoy hearing your thoughts.

 

I can agree on both accounts.