From: Thomas mountain (thomascmountain@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Jul 10 2009 - 09:12:18 EDT
Conquering global warming in Africa’s Sahel
By Thomas C. Mountain
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Jul 10, 2009, 00:19
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ASMARA, Eritrea -- Africa’s Sahel has been on the front line of the global warming trend for the past 30 years or more. Al Gore, the nuclear power industry, carbon based green house warming vs solar-based heating cycles, the debate, what little there seems to be, doesn’t really matter to those of us who live in or on the edge of Africa’s Sahel.
What is undeniable is that the droughts we have been experiencing are getting worse as the weather gets more extreme. One thing both sides of the debate on the causes of the global warming trend agree on is that the effects have and are being felt first and worst in Africa’s Sahel.
The Sahel includes where I live, in Eritrea, one of the world’s smallest, newest, most underdeveloped countries. I see and am affected by this phenomenon every day. What gives me hope is how the leadership of this country has been responding to this challenge.
First of all, to fight the global warming trend you have to start universal, community-based water and soil conservation along with reforestation.
This means that everywhere possible you build micro-dams and store the flood waters when the skies finally burst upon you after an extended dry spell. To keep the micro dams from silting up you have to build walls or terraces out of stone to hold back the flood waters from eroding the land. Thousands and thousands of miles or kilometers of terraces to conserve your soil and protect your micro dams.
Along with this you have to continuously plant trees, millions and millions of trees every year.
None of this is in any way high tech. It just takes a lot of hard work and some serious investment in resources by a country’s leadership.
Since independence in 1991, Eritrea’s leadership has been mobilizing the people here to do what is needed, in spite of some pretty massive disasters, both manmade and natural.
It seems like thousands of micro dams have been built, some not so micro. When one drives anywhere in the highlands it is difficult to miss the miles and miles of stone walls that have been built along what most people would call cliffs. Trees are planted anywhere they might survive and all of this done by mainly volunteer work by the Eritrean people.
Every summer all the high school students in the country spend six weeks building these walls and planting trees. The army, mainly composed of our youth doing their national service, is the main contributor to these efforts, building most of the micro dams and continuously engaged in soil conservation and reforestation.
To put matters in perspective, when the Italians first colonized Eritrea over a 120 years ago, 30 percent of Eritrea was covered by forests. At the time of independence in 1991, less than 2 percent of Eritrea was forested. There has been an environmental holocaust inflicted on this country and not mainly the result of global warming. So we are not just having to fight the warming trend but having to undo over a century of manmade ravages.
At independence almost none of the country’s agriculture was irrigation-based, making us especially vulnerable to what has been the worst droughts on record, or at least in memory. Today, 55 percent of our food is grown using irrigation from our dams and micro dams and this percentage is rising every day.
The day is not that far off when we here in Eritrea will be completely self-sufficient in food, come what may, and our songs will not be about the clouds coming and bringing rain but about how we have full stomachs thanks to our micro dams.
As the problems faced for over 30 years here in Africa’s Sahel begin to increasingly be experienced by the rest of the world, one would hope that the bitter lessons learned at such a high price here on global warming’s front line would draw the attention of the world’s leaders. If we can defeat global warming why can’t everyone else?
One thing you can be sure of, and that is you won’t read about this in the western media, which seems to have an unwritten rule that good news from Africa’s Horn is verboten.
Stay tuned to Onlinejournal.com for more news, both good and bad, that the so-called “Free Press in the West” refuses to cover.Thomas C. Mountain, the last white man living in Eritrea, was in a former life, educator, activist and alternative medicine practitioner in the USA. Email thomascmountain at yahoo.com.
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