During the 1990 Gulf Crisis, more than 4100 Bedouin families entered Jordan and about half of them walked the 1000 kilometres from Kuwait. Almost nobody knows about this migration because it was illegal. They were illegal immigrants and smugglers, having not paid the 5 dinar import fee for each of their animals. They brought 1.8 million sheep, goats, and camels into rangeland already overgrazed and fully occupied by resident tribes.
Jordan is the eye in the storm of the Middle East. It is the closest country to a democracy, the most open socially, the most peaceful, the most religiously pluralistic, and the most lawful. Too often, news about the Middle East that mentions “tribes” contains “lawless” in the same sentence. It’s true in Jordan that tribal law is strong and exists alongside government law, but that does not make it lawless. Tribal leaders in Jordan are struggling to adapt their laws and customs to the 21st century.
On August 2, 1990, when Saddam Hussein’s bombs began falling on Kuwait, Sheikh Al-Kuwaiti called his clan leaders together. (This is not his real name; I used a pseudonym for the Sheikh’s name and tribe’s name to protect their identity.) This took some time because many were scattered with their families and flocks across the arid rangelands. By the time they met, their situation was dire: tanks and troops were everywhere and their sheep and goats couldn’t graze. There was talk of other countries attacking to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait; clearly, their animals could not survive in a war zone. Without their livestock, Bedouins are nothing. Saddam had ordered all able-bodied men to join the Iraq army on pain of death. Without her husband and sons, a Bedouin wife and mother struggles because she can’t show her face in public and would have no financial support. It takes the whole family to raise and market sheep and care for the goats, donkeys, and camels. No honourable man would leave his wife, mother, or daughters to such a fate. They must go. But were?
In the first days of the war, 1.4 million people, mostly foreign workers and students, fled Kuwait for Jordan, the only safe haven. Most booked a flight to Queen Alia airport, took a ferry to Jordan’s port of Aqaba on the Red Sea, or bought a bus ticket to Amman via Iraq to the Jordanian border outpost at Ruwayshid. Other Bedouins from Kuwait and Iraq had hired trucks to drive their animals to Jordan, and tens of thousands per day arrived at Ruwayshid. But these options were not open to the Al-Kuwaiti tribe. They were “bidoon jinseya,” people without citizenship in any country, a relic of the formation of the modern Gulf States. They could not legally enter any other country. The Sheikh made a decision that saved his tribe from destruction, but at a high cost: they would walk. They were Bedu, after all: people of the desert.
Travelling at night and hiding in wadis by day, they followed the ancient migration routes to avoid capture by the Iraqi army and the Saudi border patrols. Under the August sun, the trek took about six weeks for some and longer for those who veered south through Saudi Arabia or north through Syria to avoid the Jordan-Iraq border.
Only the Al-Kuwaiti know what rigours they faced, and they rarely speak of it to outsiders because of legal issues. Jordanian veterinarians working for the Ministry of Agriculture reported that their animals were starving and carried high disease and parasites burdens. The toll on the humans can only be guessed.
In 2002, my colleagues and I began interviewing the Al-Kuwaiti and other tribes and studying the ecology as part of Jordan’s claim against Iraq for damages to 7.1 million hectares of arid rangeland and wildlife habitat caused by the overgrazing. The land was already overgrazed before they arrived, but the doubling of the livestock population in just a few months forced the starving animals to eat every living plant, even pulling up shrubs to gnaw at the roots. Wildlife, such as the goitered gazelles, a species unique to the region, virtually disappeared. The Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (www.rscn.org.jo/) had started a captive breeding program for the Arabian oryx, which had been extirpated from the wild about 1973, and was about to begin releasing them back to the wild when the war broke out. But with such severe overgrazing, there was no suitable habitat left to release them into. The release was put on hold, and the program began winding down. When we surveyed the eastern desert in 2002 (our team included Jordani ecologists and engineers, British environmental economists and American lawyers), there were large areas with no shrubs at all, but with dead stumps of bushes proving that what was now bare desert had previously been a brushy, shrub-steppe grassland. By then, Jordan had granted citizenship to about 2000, but most of the Al-Kuwaiti were still living in tents.
Of course, this influx of livestock and people did not only affect the rangeland and the wildlife that live there. It also affected the resident Bedu, who had had to compete with the newly arrived Kuwaiti and Iraqi Bedu for grazing land. They also had to find a way to integrate them into the Bedu society, a process not easily accomplished for a tribal society with deep attachments to their lands and traditional affiliations and animosities among tribes.
In 2005, as a result of our work, the United Nations Compensation Commission awarded Jordan $161 million damages for the overgrazing. In 2006, we went back to help design the rangeland rehabilitation program and met with Sheikhs of all the desert tribes to seek their input. The damage to the Bedu, however, still persists and I believe is irrecoverable. The overgrazing was so severe that, along with other factors, the average number of sheep per family fell from about 400 to around 20, and many men were forced to leave the livestock business and seek wage employment. This tore the social fabric and disproportionately affected women, who for cultural reasons often cannot work outside the home. Before the Gulf Crisis, virtually all women were “employed” in managing the family livestock business. After it, those whose families could no longer make a living raising sheep were “unemployed” in that they had nothing to do and contributed little to the family’s livelihood. Many girls began to think about school or employment, causing tension with the traditional-minded men.
Even so, the Bedouin traditions are strong and their culture persists. Outside of the cities, about 98% of the population identify themselves as “Bedu,” and identify with one of the 40 or so Jordanian tribes. Almost all have at least a few sheep or goats, while those better off still count their wealth in camels. More than 60% are semi-nomadic, spending at least one season away from their homes in search of pasture, and 5–10% are fully nomadic, with no permanent homes. They have a deep attachment to the land and love the lifestyle. Nor are they without power. Land tenure and other issues pressured the government to apportion seats in Parliament by area. One consequence is that the tribes have strong, possibly even controlling representation. A family might have no money, but the tribe does and the Sheikh controls it. He and the clan leaders decide who can buy a new truck for the livestock, how the families will share it, which bright students will go to university, and what they will study.
Once, in 2002, to interview a clan chief in a remote part of the desert we had hired a local guide to find him and needed a good 4x4 to navigate the trackless desert. As we sat in his tent on killims (rugs of woven goat hair dyed in the beautiful patterns of his tribe), sipping tea, this man and his family appeared to be the personification of poverty. There was no furniture, no equipment that couldn't be easily loaded onto a camel, and the tent showed the wear of decades. He and his sons wore the traditional white robe and Hashemite-patterened kafiya, or man's shawl, and their dress also reflected the toil of life in the desert. His wife and daughters, of course, stayed in the private part of the tent. A hundred or so sheep and a few goats grazed outside and a lamb came into the tent, and was petted by the youngest son while we talked. Then his other son drove up in a new Lincon Escalade and got out wearing a business suit. Such are the contrasts of modern Bedouin life.
The rangeland restoration program is now underway. A new, large nature reserve is under development in the northeast, and a captive breeding program for the endangered Arabian oryx has been rejuvenated. The government is encouraging families to keep fewer sheep and goats to that the rangeland can recover, and is attempting to develop alternative sources of livelihood for them. How these tribes, clans, and families respond to the new reality will determine Jordan’s political, social, and economic future.
References
My Jordanian colleagues and I published the outline of this story in a journal article about the Arabian oryx [Harding, L.E., Omar Abu Eid, et al. (2007). "Re-introduction of the Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx) in Jordan: war and redemption." Oryx 41(4): 478-487].
Details of the UNCC claims and compensation awards can be found at http://www.uncc.ch/.
Information on the Bidoons of Kuwait is available at numerous Web sites including http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2001/nea/8268.htm, http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travel-and-living-abroad/travel-advice-by-country/country-profile/middle-east-north-africa/kuwait?profile=all, http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/(Symbol)/1fae9818c5381a0a8025673e00390939?Opendocument.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Sorrow Returns to the Khyber Pass
The Khyber Pass! A name that evokes mystery of exotic locales and world-shaping events, a high mountain pass separating great cultures, both dividing and connecting East and West, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Traders on the Silk Road traversed it. Darius the Great, King of Persia from 522 to 486 BC, took his army through it. So did Alexander the Great in 326 BC. In 1220 Genghis Khan led his Mongol army through it to conquer Arabia. Britain fought three wars over it from 1839 to 1919. History records dozens of other conquerors crossing the Khyber, the latest being the United States in 2001.
Rudyard Kipling immortalized it in “Ballad of the King’s Jest”:
“When spring-time flushes the desert grass,
Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass.
Lean are the camels but fat the frails,
Light are the purses but heavy the bales,
As the snowbound trade of the North comes down
To the market-square of Peshawur town.”
Kipling set the one of the central events in his book, Kim, in the Khyber Pass and called it "a sword cut through the mountains." The book describes “the great game,” the cold war between Britain and Russia for imperial hegemony in Afghanistan. Winston Churchill, then a young newspaper correspondent, in 1897 said of the Khyber Pass, “Each rock and hill along the pass had a story to tell!"
When war erupted there again this fall, the headline (“More than 100,000 flee from offensive: anti-Taliban fighting drives residents out of Khyber district into Peshawar”, The Vancouver Sun September 15, 2009), awakened a deep memory--no, not a memory, only a dream, one I've held for 47 years. I have never been there. This was a deja vu: In December, 1979, when Russia seized Afghanistan, I read that one of their invasion routes was eastward from Kabul through the Khyber Pass. It evoked the same memory, of a story I'd read in high school. I could not remember where I had read it, but now with the power of the InterNet I found out. I discovered a pdf file of the story at http://mrspollifax.com/downloadfiles/sorrowridesafasthorse.pdf, “Sorrow rides a fast horse.” It is a short story by Dorothy Gilman Butters in the Ladies Home Journal, September, 1962. I was a junior in high school. Since my Mom did not subscribe to that magazine, we must have read it in English class. I can still repeat the pivotal event of the story from memory, and it still brings tears to my eyes:
A mother, grief-stricken from the death of her husband, takes her two children on a whirl-wind trip around the world. In the Khyber Pass, her family and their elderly guide are captured by bandits. Their leader speaks to the guide, who translates. They don't want just the money, the food, and the donkeys. They want the woman and the children. The guide says sadly, “It must by your qismat—your fate—to stop here.” She seems to awake, as if from a dream, and says harshly, “My qismat? Tell this man I must travel like the wind—that is my qismat. Tell him that Sorrow rides behind me on a fast horse—if he listens closely, he may hear the hoof beats. Tell him that if he captures me, he will capture Sorrow as well—because where I go Sorrow goes and where I stop, Sorrow will stop.”
The bandits confer. Their leader finally makes a statement. The guide translates: “He says it has been a hard year, with many people dead in their village. Sheep have sickened and died. He says they do not wish for more Sorrow. If Sorrow follows behind you then you must leave these mountains at once. You must not stop even to sleep.” To ensure their prompt departure, the bandits guide them through the Khyber Pass.
Ever since reading this story at age 15 (now I'm 62), I have wanted to see the Khyber Pass for myself. Sadly, it seems that I waited too long. At least for now, it is ruined by war, too dangerous for tourists. As foreign armies rage back and forth across the pass, the local people have again greeted sorrow.
Rudyard Kipling immortalized it in “Ballad of the King’s Jest”:
“When spring-time flushes the desert grass,
Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass.
Lean are the camels but fat the frails,
Light are the purses but heavy the bales,
As the snowbound trade of the North comes down
To the market-square of Peshawur town.”
Kipling set the one of the central events in his book, Kim, in the Khyber Pass and called it "a sword cut through the mountains." The book describes “the great game,” the cold war between Britain and Russia for imperial hegemony in Afghanistan. Winston Churchill, then a young newspaper correspondent, in 1897 said of the Khyber Pass, “Each rock and hill along the pass had a story to tell!"
When war erupted there again this fall, the headline (“More than 100,000 flee from offensive: anti-Taliban fighting drives residents out of Khyber district into Peshawar”, The Vancouver Sun September 15, 2009), awakened a deep memory--no, not a memory, only a dream, one I've held for 47 years. I have never been there. This was a deja vu: In December, 1979, when Russia seized Afghanistan, I read that one of their invasion routes was eastward from Kabul through the Khyber Pass. It evoked the same memory, of a story I'd read in high school. I could not remember where I had read it, but now with the power of the InterNet I found out. I discovered a pdf file of the story at http://mrspollifax.com/downloadfiles/sorrowridesafasthorse.pdf, “Sorrow rides a fast horse.” It is a short story by Dorothy Gilman Butters in the Ladies Home Journal, September, 1962. I was a junior in high school. Since my Mom did not subscribe to that magazine, we must have read it in English class. I can still repeat the pivotal event of the story from memory, and it still brings tears to my eyes:
A mother, grief-stricken from the death of her husband, takes her two children on a whirl-wind trip around the world. In the Khyber Pass, her family and their elderly guide are captured by bandits. Their leader speaks to the guide, who translates. They don't want just the money, the food, and the donkeys. They want the woman and the children. The guide says sadly, “It must by your qismat—your fate—to stop here.” She seems to awake, as if from a dream, and says harshly, “My qismat? Tell this man I must travel like the wind—that is my qismat. Tell him that Sorrow rides behind me on a fast horse—if he listens closely, he may hear the hoof beats. Tell him that if he captures me, he will capture Sorrow as well—because where I go Sorrow goes and where I stop, Sorrow will stop.”
The bandits confer. Their leader finally makes a statement. The guide translates: “He says it has been a hard year, with many people dead in their village. Sheep have sickened and died. He says they do not wish for more Sorrow. If Sorrow follows behind you then you must leave these mountains at once. You must not stop even to sleep.” To ensure their prompt departure, the bandits guide them through the Khyber Pass.
Ever since reading this story at age 15 (now I'm 62), I have wanted to see the Khyber Pass for myself. Sadly, it seems that I waited too long. At least for now, it is ruined by war, too dangerous for tourists. As foreign armies rage back and forth across the pass, the local people have again greeted sorrow.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Chile’s Altiplano: why do African ostriches, camels and flamingos have Chilean relatives?
July 25, 2012 update:
Rémi Wattier, author of a recent paper on phylogeny of American flamingos (see citation at end of post), said:
"Unpublished molecular phylogenies are pointing out that Greater, American and Chilean flamingos are closely related while being divergent from the three last species (Adean, Puna and Lesser flamingos) which are also related together. Therefore speciation before inter-continental migration is the most likely scenario."
A visit to Chile last month (November 2009) gave me a chance to consider questions of biogeography that had been bothering me since I first read Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. Darwin saw what he called “ostriches,” now classified as rheas, but so closely related that they look almost identical and live in similar flat, dry habitats. One bears his name, Darwin’s Rhea. How could the ostrich of Africa be so closely related to the rhea of South America, with ratite relatives also in Australia (Emus) and New Zealand (Cassowaries)? How is it that three species of flamingo live in the two-mile high deserts of northern Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, while the world’s other three species are scattered from the Americas through the Mediterranean and Africa ? Darwin also recognized vicuñas and guanacos (and of course their domesticated descendants the alpaca and llama) as relatives of camels: what biological or geological forces of nature caused camelids to occur in South America and Africa/Arabia and nowhere in between? Finally, what combinations of geology and evolution caused these disparate groups—ratites, camelids and flamingos—to have the same disjunct distribution?
Usually, when mountains rise up, forced by tectonic forces deep in the earth at rates of only millimeters per year, the water running off them finds its way down to lower levels and eventually to the sea, cutting rills that become canyons and then wide valleys along the way. But in the Andes Mountains of northern Chile, western Argentina, Bolivia and southern Peru, something different happened. The land rose as one over a vast area, creating not sharp mountains and deep valley but a high plain, the Altiplano. The land folded a little, creating north-south ridges that prevented the water from running to the oceans, either Pacific or Atlantic. Instead, what little water there was pooled in the depressions and evaporated in the dry air. These eventually filled with silt, creating many broad salt flats. No matter how salty the flats are, the springs feeding them ensure that there is always a gradient of fresh to brackish water. The less salty parts are filled with plants and animals. The plants are microscopic algae and the animals include such tiny arthropods as brine shrimp, brought to each isolated salt flat on the legs of wading birds. These are the habitats of the flamingo and another wading bird unique to Altiplano salt flats, the Andean Avocet.
Although the Altiplano kept rising for so many millennia that it reached heights unequalled anywhere outside of the Himalayas, not all of its rise was gradual. Through this high plain burst volcanoes, not one or two, but hundreds. They showered the land with ash and cinders, colouring it in reds, greys and yellows as if by an artist gone mad.
Although inland from the Atacama desert, where it may not rain for years at a time, the Altiplano is high enough to get a little moisture. Driving from the airport at Calama to my base at San Pedro de Atacama, I passed through one of the driest deserts on Earth. Hardly a living plant grew there and I saw no birds, not even a lizard. The ancient oasis town of San Pedro, still built of mud brick despite the bustle of adventure tourism, is watered by a network of tiny canals running through the town, although the San Pedro River itself was dry when I was there.
North and East of San Pedro, the roads climb to the Altiplano. Unlike the desert drive from Calama, there is some little vegetation—even a patch of trees—but still the land is parched, dry and grey, with shades of brown and red from the volcanic cinders and the dry vegetation. Suddenly at around 3000 meters, the colours dramatically change. Here there is enough moisture for grass and the land suddenly changed from grey and brown to yellow. And what a yellow! The clear air and strong sunlight made this the brightest yellow I have ever seen in a grass. Its brilliance contrasted with the deep blue of the sky and the reds of the volcanoes. I can only imagine what it looks like in spring when the grass is green. This vast grassland is the habitat of the guanacos of middle elevation and vicuñas and rheas of high elevation—we crossed one pass at 5000 meters. I had been afraid that I might go all this way and not see guanacos, vicuñas, rheas or the three species of flamingos, but they were all there in abundance, as well as two dozen other species of birds found nowhere else and unique mammals including the Andean fox, highland tuco-tuco (a relative of the guinea pig), and mountain viscacha (in the chinchilla family).
And everywhere loom volcanoes, many above 6000 meters, most with a little snow, and some even with glaciers. Their melt water sometimes cuts deep canyons before disappearing into the ground, but then it reappears as springs at the edges of the salt flats.
A little research answered some of the biogeography questions. These ratites, camelids, and flamingos diverged from their African counterparts too recently for their disjunct populations to have resulted from the tectonic separation of Gondwana Land into the eastern and western hemispheric land masses we know today, about 100 million years ago (MYA). The rheas and ostriches diverged a mere 65 MYA, much too late for the South America-Africa split, but while Australia, Antarctica and Madagascar were still connected. DNA analysis showed the emus to be the base of the ratite tree, and the high diversity of tinamous, a sister clade to the ratites that occurs only in South America, suggests a long history there. Ostrich ancestors may have gone from there (or Australia) to Antarctica, and thence to Madagascar, where ratite relatives (Elephant Birds) have also been found.
The camelids have a different story: their family evolved in North America and then dispersed to South America and Asia, thence to central Asia (the Bactrian Camel) and Arabia/Africa (the Dromedary) after which, during the Pleistocene, all North American and east Asian species went extinct.
The flamingo story has not yet been unravelled. They are one of the most ancient of avian lineages, having separated from (probably) grebe ancestors in the Middle Eocene around 40 MYA. Currently they are classed in two genera, Phoenicopterus, with two species in Africa and two in the Americas, and Phoenicoparrus, the two species of which (Andean Flamingo and Puna or James’ Flamingo) are restricted to the Altiplano. One can imagine how the migratory Chilean Flamingo, Phoenicopterus chilensis, might have reached Chile: it is closely related to Africa’s Greater Flamingo, Phoenicopterus roseus, and the American Flamingo, Phoenicopterus ruber, which occurs from the Caribbean to the Galapagos. From there it is a few short hops following the coastal lagoons and Altiplano lakes loaded with brine shrimp and other macroscopic animals to Chile. Once there, during Pleistocene glacial advances, it may have gotten isolated and diverged a little from its American counterpart. But the Andean and Puna Flamingos? They are quite different: although nomadic within the Altiplano, they do not migrate to the coast like the Chilean Flamingos. Their bills are differently constructed and they are vegetarians, filtering diatoms and other microscopic algae and blue-green algae from the water. In this they are unlike every other flamingo except the Lesser Flamingo, which I had previously seen in Namibia and feeds in flat, briny lakes in eastern and southern Africa. It also feeds on algae and blue-green algae. The Lesser Flamingo, although currently classed as a Phoenicopterus species, was formerly classed in a third genus, Phoeniconaias because of morphological differences that are different from other Phoenicopterus species, but similar to the two Phoenicoparrus species. Is its morphological and dietary similarity to the Andean and Puna Flamingos a coincidence of evolutionary convergence? Or are they more related to each other than to the Greater and American species? This is not known, but if so, it would imply two dispersals: one that populated both the Americas and Africa with ancestral flamingos, and a later one that saw a lineage evolve to filter microscopic plants instead of macroscopic animals, with a subsequent dispersal from Africa to South America or vice-versa. This is speculation. No one knows. It is why science is so exciting: so many mysteries still to explore.
Travel Notes
I stayed at the Hotel Tambillo, http://www.hoteltambillo.cl/, tambillo@sanpedroatacama.com. A great, inexpensive hotel with a shady courtyard surrounded by high adobe walls. It has a restaurant and the proprietor, Veronica, is full of helpful information about the town and all the roads and places of interest. I hired a mountain guide (Ivan Mery, rutacien@gmail.com) for one day to reach a place near the Bolivian border that I doubted that I could find by myself, and am glad I did.
Key References
Darwin, C. R. (1839). Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836, describing their examination of the southern shores of South America, and the Beagle's circumnavigation of the globe. Journal and remarks. 1832-1836. London, Henry Colburn.
Haddrath, Oliver and Allen J. Baker (2001). "Complete mitochondiral DNA sequences of extinct birds: ratite phylogenetics and the biogeographical vicariance hypothesis." Proc. Royal Society B 268(939-995).
Kadwell, M., M. Fernandez, et al. (2001). "Genetic analysis reveals the wild ancestors of the llama and the alpaca." Proc. of The Royal Society B 268: 2575-2584.
Cui, Peng, Rimutu Ji, et al. (2007). "A complete mitochondrial genome sequence of the wild two-humped camel (Camelus bactrianus ferus): an evolutionary history of camelidae." BMC Genomics 8: 241.
Olson, Storrs L. and Alan Feduccia (1980). Relationships and Evolution of Flamingos (Aves: Phoenicopteridae). Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press.
Morgan-Richards, Mary, Steve a Trewick, et al. (2008). "Bird evolution: testing the Metaves clade with six new mitochondrial genomes." BMC Evolutionary Biology 8: 20. Geraci, J., Béchet, A., Cézilly, F., Ficheux, S., Baccetti, N., Samraoui, B., and Wattier, R. Greater flamingo colonies around the Mediterranean form a single interbreeding population and share a common history. Journal of Avian Biology.
Usually, when mountains rise up, forced by tectonic forces deep in the earth at rates of only millimeters per year, the water running off them finds its way down to lower levels and eventually to the sea, cutting rills that become canyons and then wide valleys along the way. But in the Andes Mountains of northern Chile, western Argentina, Bolivia and southern Peru, something different happened. The land rose as one over a vast area, creating not sharp mountains and deep valley but a high plain, the Altiplano. The land folded a little, creating north-south ridges that prevented the water from running to the oceans, either Pacific or Atlantic. Instead, what little water there was pooled in the depressions and evaporated in the dry air. These eventually filled with silt, creating many broad salt flats. No matter how salty the flats are, the springs feeding them ensure that there is always a gradient of fresh to brackish water. The less salty parts are filled with plants and animals. The plants are microscopic algae and the animals include such tiny arthropods as brine shrimp, brought to each isolated salt flat on the legs of wading birds. These are the habitats of the flamingo and another wading bird unique to Altiplano salt flats, the Andean Avocet.
Although the Altiplano kept rising for so many millennia that it reached heights unequalled anywhere outside of the Himalayas, not all of its rise was gradual. Through this high plain burst volcanoes, not one or two, but hundreds. They showered the land with ash and cinders, colouring it in reds, greys and yellows as if by an artist gone mad.
Although inland from the Atacama desert, where it may not rain for years at a time, the Altiplano is high enough to get a little moisture. Driving from the airport at Calama to my base at San Pedro de Atacama, I passed through one of the driest deserts on Earth. Hardly a living plant grew there and I saw no birds, not even a lizard. The ancient oasis town of San Pedro, still built of mud brick despite the bustle of adventure tourism, is watered by a network of tiny canals running through the town, although the San Pedro River itself was dry when I was there.
North and East of San Pedro, the roads climb to the Altiplano. Unlike the desert drive from Calama, there is some little vegetation—even a patch of trees—but still the land is parched, dry and grey, with shades of brown and red from the volcanic cinders and the dry vegetation. Suddenly at around 3000 meters, the colours dramatically change. Here there is enough moisture for grass and the land suddenly changed from grey and brown to yellow. And what a yellow! The clear air and strong sunlight made this the brightest yellow I have ever seen in a grass. Its brilliance contrasted with the deep blue of the sky and the reds of the volcanoes. I can only imagine what it looks like in spring when the grass is green. This vast grassland is the habitat of the guanacos of middle elevation and vicuñas and rheas of high elevation—we crossed one pass at 5000 meters. I had been afraid that I might go all this way and not see guanacos, vicuñas, rheas or the three species of flamingos, but they were all there in abundance, as well as two dozen other species of birds found nowhere else and unique mammals including the Andean fox, highland tuco-tuco (a relative of the guinea pig), and mountain viscacha (in the chinchilla family).
And everywhere loom volcanoes, many above 6000 meters, most with a little snow, and some even with glaciers. Their melt water sometimes cuts deep canyons before disappearing into the ground, but then it reappears as springs at the edges of the salt flats.
A little research answered some of the biogeography questions. These ratites, camelids, and flamingos diverged from their African counterparts too recently for their disjunct populations to have resulted from the tectonic separation of Gondwana Land into the eastern and western hemispheric land masses we know today, about 100 million years ago (MYA). The rheas and ostriches diverged a mere 65 MYA, much too late for the South America-Africa split, but while Australia, Antarctica and Madagascar were still connected. DNA analysis showed the emus to be the base of the ratite tree, and the high diversity of tinamous, a sister clade to the ratites that occurs only in South America, suggests a long history there. Ostrich ancestors may have gone from there (or Australia) to Antarctica, and thence to Madagascar, where ratite relatives (Elephant Birds) have also been found.
The camelids have a different story: their family evolved in North America and then dispersed to South America and Asia, thence to central Asia (the Bactrian Camel) and Arabia/Africa (the Dromedary) after which, during the Pleistocene, all North American and east Asian species went extinct.
The flamingo story has not yet been unravelled. They are one of the most ancient of avian lineages, having separated from (probably) grebe ancestors in the Middle Eocene around 40 MYA. Currently they are classed in two genera, Phoenicopterus, with two species in Africa and two in the Americas, and Phoenicoparrus, the two species of which (Andean Flamingo and Puna or James’ Flamingo) are restricted to the Altiplano. One can imagine how the migratory Chilean Flamingo, Phoenicopterus chilensis, might have reached Chile: it is closely related to Africa’s Greater Flamingo, Phoenicopterus roseus, and the American Flamingo, Phoenicopterus ruber, which occurs from the Caribbean to the Galapagos. From there it is a few short hops following the coastal lagoons and Altiplano lakes loaded with brine shrimp and other macroscopic animals to Chile. Once there, during Pleistocene glacial advances, it may have gotten isolated and diverged a little from its American counterpart. But the Andean and Puna Flamingos? They are quite different: although nomadic within the Altiplano, they do not migrate to the coast like the Chilean Flamingos. Their bills are differently constructed and they are vegetarians, filtering diatoms and other microscopic algae and blue-green algae from the water. In this they are unlike every other flamingo except the Lesser Flamingo, which I had previously seen in Namibia and feeds in flat, briny lakes in eastern and southern Africa. It also feeds on algae and blue-green algae. The Lesser Flamingo, although currently classed as a Phoenicopterus species, was formerly classed in a third genus, Phoeniconaias because of morphological differences that are different from other Phoenicopterus species, but similar to the two Phoenicoparrus species. Is its morphological and dietary similarity to the Andean and Puna Flamingos a coincidence of evolutionary convergence? Or are they more related to each other than to the Greater and American species? This is not known, but if so, it would imply two dispersals: one that populated both the Americas and Africa with ancestral flamingos, and a later one that saw a lineage evolve to filter microscopic plants instead of macroscopic animals, with a subsequent dispersal from Africa to South America or vice-versa. This is speculation. No one knows. It is why science is so exciting: so many mysteries still to explore.
Travel Notes
I stayed at the Hotel Tambillo, http://www.hoteltambillo.cl/, tambillo@sanpedroatacama.com. A great, inexpensive hotel with a shady courtyard surrounded by high adobe walls. It has a restaurant and the proprietor, Veronica, is full of helpful information about the town and all the roads and places of interest. I hired a mountain guide (Ivan Mery, rutacien@gmail.com) for one day to reach a place near the Bolivian border that I doubted that I could find by myself, and am glad I did.
Key References
Darwin, C. R. (1839). Narrative of the surveying voyages of His Majesty's Ships Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836, describing their examination of the southern shores of South America, and the Beagle's circumnavigation of the globe. Journal and remarks. 1832-1836. London, Henry Colburn.
Haddrath, Oliver and Allen J. Baker (2001). "Complete mitochondiral DNA sequences of extinct birds: ratite phylogenetics and the biogeographical vicariance hypothesis." Proc. Royal Society B 268(939-995).
Kadwell, M., M. Fernandez, et al. (2001). "Genetic analysis reveals the wild ancestors of the llama and the alpaca." Proc. of The Royal Society B 268: 2575-2584.
Cui, Peng, Rimutu Ji, et al. (2007). "A complete mitochondrial genome sequence of the wild two-humped camel (Camelus bactrianus ferus): an evolutionary history of camelidae." BMC Genomics 8: 241.
Olson, Storrs L. and Alan Feduccia (1980). Relationships and Evolution of Flamingos (Aves: Phoenicopteridae). Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press.
Morgan-Richards, Mary, Steve a Trewick, et al. (2008). "Bird evolution: testing the Metaves clade with six new mitochondrial genomes." BMC Evolutionary Biology 8: 20. Geraci, J., Béchet, A., Cézilly, F., Ficheux, S., Baccetti, N., Samraoui, B., and Wattier, R. Greater flamingo colonies around the Mediterranean form a single interbreeding population and share a common history. Journal of Avian Biology.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Following Charles Darwin in Chile
Entering the port of Valparaiso by boat, I marvelled to see the same sight that Charles Darwin saw after rounding Cape Horn and its ferocious storms on the HMS Beagle. On the first day after his arrival at Valparaiso, in the middle of the Austral winter July 23, 1834, he wrote:
“When morning came, every thing appeared delightful. After Tierra del Fuego, the climate felt quite delicious—the atmosphere so dry, and the heavens so clear and blue, with the sun shining brightly, that all nature seemed sparkling with life. The view from the anchorage is very pretty. The town is built at the very foot of a a range of hills, about 1,600 feet high and rather steep…In a north-easterly direction there are some fine glimpses of the Andes.”
On the 150th anniversary of his publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 (24 November 2009), it is well to remember that he didn’t go just to the Galapagos. Some of his greatest insights into the mechanisms of evolution were in Chile and retracing his journey there makes for a fascinating vacation. Following Darwin through the exciting city of Santiago and the wine region of the Maipo Valley adds additional delights.
Darwin spent two and a half years in Chile (December 17, 1832 to June 29, 1835), fully half of his round-the-world voyage, and one whole year in just in the Valparaiso-Santiago area (July 23, 1834 to June 29, 1835). From the Beagle’s base in Valparaiso, he made numerous trips around central Chile and seems to have thoroughly enjoyed every minute—as do visitors today.
Darwin described Valparaiso as a “picturesque” town consisting of “one long, straggling street… parallel to the beach [with] low, whitewashed houses with tile roofs.” Today it has grown into a sprawling city and bustling seaport, but just across the bay, the village of Viña del Mar, long a resort favourite of Chileans, retains the small town charm that Darwin appreciated. On my last visit I found a quaint, clean hotel, conveniently a few steps from an empanada stand on the main street.
From nearby hills, Darwin got a better view of the Andes and the highest mountain outside of the Himalayas at 6962 metres (22,841 ft). We begin to realize that, besides becoming the world’s first and foremost evolutionary biologist, he had the soul of a poet:
"…the volcano of Aconcagua is particularly magnificent... the Cordillera [range of mountains] owe the greater part of their beauty to the atmosphere through which they are seen. When the sun was setting in the Pacific, it was admirable to watch how clearly their rugged outlines could be distinguished, yet how varied and how delicate were the shades of their colour.”
The “range of hills” Darwin saw beyond Valparaiso is topped by pyramidal form of La Campana, the “Bell of Quillota.” After so long at sea, Darwin couldn’t wait to stretch his legs and within days of his arrival he was riding to Quillota to climb La Campana.
Of all the areas he saw in Chile, he seemed to like the town of Quillota and its fertile valley the most:
“…The valley of Quillota…was exceedingly pleasant, just such as poets would call pastoral: green open lawns [actually, alfalfa fields], separated by small valleys with rivulets, and the cottages, we will suppose of the shepherds, scattered on the hill-sides… Any person who had seen only the country near Valparaiso, would never have imagined that there had been such picturesque spots in Chile… The little square gardens are crowded with orange and olive trees, and every sort of vegetable. On each side huge bare mountains rise, and this from the contrast renders the patchwork valley the more pleasing. Whoever called Valparaiso ‘the Valley of Paradise’ must have been thinking of Quillota.”
Quillota today is just as pretty. A city of 75,000, it retains its Spanish colonial character with continuous, low buildings surrounding the Church of St. Martin and the Convent of Santo Domingo. An archaeological museum contributes to the community’s culture by sponsoring poetry recitals. It nestles against La Campana National Park.
Following Darwin’s route, my companions and I took a trail to a high waterfall, “la cascada” on the maps. The photo of La Compana at the head of the blog was taken on this trail. Climbing up gradually through semi-desert, it passes a forest of giant palm trees, the endemic Chilean Wine Palm. It intrigued Darwin because “its stem is very large, and of a curious form, being thicker in the middle than at the base or top”—and because its sap can be made into wine, sugar, or a sweet, sticky desert that he called “treacle.” Its edible fruit and tastes like coconut. The world’s largest palm by weight and volume, its stem reaches 1.5 meters or more (five feet) wide and a height of 30 metres, with a crown up to nine meters across.
Darwin, camped near the peak of La Campana, noted that:
“The evening was fine, and the atmosphere so clear, that the masts of the vessels at anchor in the bay of Valparaiso, although no less than 26 geographical miles distant, could be distinguished clearly, as little black streaks. A ship doubling the point under sail appeared as a bright white speck… The setting of the sun was glorious; the valleys being black, whilst the snow peaks of the Andes yet retained a ruby tint. When it was dark, we made a fire beneath a little arbour of bamboos, fried our charqui (or dried strips of beef), took our maté, and were quite comfortable. There is an inexpressible charm in thus living in the open air. The evening was calm and still; the shrill noise of the mountain bizcacha, and the faint cry of the goatsucker, were only occasionally to be heard.”
We saw and heard the Mountain Viscacha, too. In his Origin of Species, Darwin used the distributions of the various species of these rodents in the Chinchilla family as an example of natural selection for different habitats.
Darwin, a keen observer of local customs, compared the Huasos, Chilean horsemen, with the gauchos of Argentina. In cattle country around La Campaña, I’ve often encountered them, always in their traditional broad-brimmed straw hats, knee-length leather boots, and colourful scarves. In the village of Batuco, we had to pull the car into a driveway so they could drive the herd through town. In Omué, as picturesque a town as one can imagine at the base of La Campaña, at night we saw horses tied to a cantina’s hitching rack; in the morning we met the fathers riding to the school with one or two children astride, or driving the whole family into town in a one-horse buggy.
Leaving Quillota, Darwin made the first of several excursions into and ultimately across the Andes. In one(April 1835), he went southward to the capital, Santiago, up the now-famous wine region of the Maipo Valley, up the Maipo River to a hotsprings resort, across a high pass and down to Mendoza, Argentina, and back to Chile by a more northerly pass. Afterwards, he remarked, “My excursion only cost me twenty-four days, and never did I more deeply enjoy an equal space of time.” I felt the same after each of my trips. Both of these passes, where Darwin struggled on horseback leading laden mules, I drove on a good highways past ski resorts.
Before mooring at Valparaiso, Darwin had already worked out how repeated earthquakes had caused some areas to sink and others to rise, throwing marine sediments laden with sea shells far above sea level. He had already theorized that the islands of Tierra del Fuego had been formed by the sinking of a mountain range. Now, he considered his finding thick layers of marine sediments with shells of extinct species at elevations up to 4,270 metres (14,000 feet), and other geological evidence, as proof that the Andes were formed by a slow and gradual rise of land over uncounted eons. Moreover, his finding along the coast of masses of marine shells of currently living species, elevated in sediments 120–150 metres (400–500 feet) above sea level, proved that this part of the coast of South America is still rising.
Darwin recalled, looking back at La Campana early one morning from the Andes:
“These basins or plains, together with the transverse flat valleys (like that of Quillota) which connect them with the coast, I have little doubt, are the bottoms of ancient inlets and deep bays, such as at the present day intersect every part of Tierra del Fuego, and the west coast of Patagonia. Chile must formerly have resembled the latter country, in the configuration of its land and water. This resemblance was…seen with great force, when a level fog-bank covered, as with a mantle, all the lower parts of the country: the white vapour curling into the ravines, beautifully represented little coves and bays; and here and there a solitary hillock peeping up, showed that it had formerly stood there as an islet.”
I was fortunate to see almost the exact same view as I crossed a ridge above the low-lying clouds, the Bell of Quillota rising above as if an island in the sea. These ideas were central to his theory that natural selection enabled individuals with some slight variation that gave it an advantage in a new environment to persist and its progeny to procreate more than those lacking the variation; and that over many generations, repeated selection for that characteristic could, in the time scale of the formation of mountains, evolve into new species.
Travel Notes
Hotel Hispano Restaurant, Plaza Parroquia 391, Viña del Mar. Tel: (56) (32) 268-5860, Fax (56) (32) 247-7096; a single for one night was $45.00 CAD.
My favourite hotel when not on business was Hotel Presidente, at Eliodoro Yanez 867, in the Presidente district of Santiago. A single was $145 USD in 2006. Tel: +(56) (2) 235-8015, email: infohp@presidente.
Nearby is the excellent restaurant, El Otro Sitio (“The Other Place”) at Antonia Lopez de Bello 53, is consistently rated as one of the top Peruvian restaurants in Santiago. Tel: 777-3059
In Olmué, a delightful hotel with a fine restaurant is the Hosteria Aire Puro (“Hotel of Pure Air”), Av. Granizo 7672, Tel: (56) (33) 441381, email: infor@hosteriaairepuro.cl, www.hosteriaairepuro.cl. The price for a chalet for three for one night was $94.00 CAD.
A nice restaurant in Valparaiso was the Café Journal, Cochrane 81, Tel: (56) (32) 259 6760. Lunch for four was $45.00 CAD. It has a sister restaurant in Viña del Mar.
“When morning came, every thing appeared delightful. After Tierra del Fuego, the climate felt quite delicious—the atmosphere so dry, and the heavens so clear and blue, with the sun shining brightly, that all nature seemed sparkling with life. The view from the anchorage is very pretty. The town is built at the very foot of a a range of hills, about 1,600 feet high and rather steep…In a north-easterly direction there are some fine glimpses of the Andes.”
On the 150th anniversary of his publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 (24 November 2009), it is well to remember that he didn’t go just to the Galapagos. Some of his greatest insights into the mechanisms of evolution were in Chile and retracing his journey there makes for a fascinating vacation. Following Darwin through the exciting city of Santiago and the wine region of the Maipo Valley adds additional delights.
Darwin spent two and a half years in Chile (December 17, 1832 to June 29, 1835), fully half of his round-the-world voyage, and one whole year in just in the Valparaiso-Santiago area (July 23, 1834 to June 29, 1835). From the Beagle’s base in Valparaiso, he made numerous trips around central Chile and seems to have thoroughly enjoyed every minute—as do visitors today.
Darwin described Valparaiso as a “picturesque” town consisting of “one long, straggling street… parallel to the beach [with] low, whitewashed houses with tile roofs.” Today it has grown into a sprawling city and bustling seaport, but just across the bay, the village of Viña del Mar, long a resort favourite of Chileans, retains the small town charm that Darwin appreciated. On my last visit I found a quaint, clean hotel, conveniently a few steps from an empanada stand on the main street.
From nearby hills, Darwin got a better view of the Andes and the highest mountain outside of the Himalayas at 6962 metres (22,841 ft). We begin to realize that, besides becoming the world’s first and foremost evolutionary biologist, he had the soul of a poet:
"…the volcano of Aconcagua is particularly magnificent... the Cordillera [range of mountains] owe the greater part of their beauty to the atmosphere through which they are seen. When the sun was setting in the Pacific, it was admirable to watch how clearly their rugged outlines could be distinguished, yet how varied and how delicate were the shades of their colour.”
The “range of hills” Darwin saw beyond Valparaiso is topped by pyramidal form of La Campana, the “Bell of Quillota.” After so long at sea, Darwin couldn’t wait to stretch his legs and within days of his arrival he was riding to Quillota to climb La Campana.
Of all the areas he saw in Chile, he seemed to like the town of Quillota and its fertile valley the most:
“…The valley of Quillota…was exceedingly pleasant, just such as poets would call pastoral: green open lawns [actually, alfalfa fields], separated by small valleys with rivulets, and the cottages, we will suppose of the shepherds, scattered on the hill-sides… Any person who had seen only the country near Valparaiso, would never have imagined that there had been such picturesque spots in Chile… The little square gardens are crowded with orange and olive trees, and every sort of vegetable. On each side huge bare mountains rise, and this from the contrast renders the patchwork valley the more pleasing. Whoever called Valparaiso ‘the Valley of Paradise’ must have been thinking of Quillota.”
Quillota today is just as pretty. A city of 75,000, it retains its Spanish colonial character with continuous, low buildings surrounding the Church of St. Martin and the Convent of Santo Domingo. An archaeological museum contributes to the community’s culture by sponsoring poetry recitals. It nestles against La Campana National Park.
Following Darwin’s route, my companions and I took a trail to a high waterfall, “la cascada” on the maps. The photo of La Compana at the head of the blog was taken on this trail. Climbing up gradually through semi-desert, it passes a forest of giant palm trees, the endemic Chilean Wine Palm. It intrigued Darwin because “its stem is very large, and of a curious form, being thicker in the middle than at the base or top”—and because its sap can be made into wine, sugar, or a sweet, sticky desert that he called “treacle.” Its edible fruit and tastes like coconut. The world’s largest palm by weight and volume, its stem reaches 1.5 meters or more (five feet) wide and a height of 30 metres, with a crown up to nine meters across.
Darwin, camped near the peak of La Campana, noted that:
“The evening was fine, and the atmosphere so clear, that the masts of the vessels at anchor in the bay of Valparaiso, although no less than 26 geographical miles distant, could be distinguished clearly, as little black streaks. A ship doubling the point under sail appeared as a bright white speck… The setting of the sun was glorious; the valleys being black, whilst the snow peaks of the Andes yet retained a ruby tint. When it was dark, we made a fire beneath a little arbour of bamboos, fried our charqui (or dried strips of beef), took our maté, and were quite comfortable. There is an inexpressible charm in thus living in the open air. The evening was calm and still; the shrill noise of the mountain bizcacha, and the faint cry of the goatsucker, were only occasionally to be heard.”
We saw and heard the Mountain Viscacha, too. In his Origin of Species, Darwin used the distributions of the various species of these rodents in the Chinchilla family as an example of natural selection for different habitats.
Darwin, a keen observer of local customs, compared the Huasos, Chilean horsemen, with the gauchos of Argentina. In cattle country around La Campaña, I’ve often encountered them, always in their traditional broad-brimmed straw hats, knee-length leather boots, and colourful scarves. In the village of Batuco, we had to pull the car into a driveway so they could drive the herd through town. In Omué, as picturesque a town as one can imagine at the base of La Campaña, at night we saw horses tied to a cantina’s hitching rack; in the morning we met the fathers riding to the school with one or two children astride, or driving the whole family into town in a one-horse buggy.
Leaving Quillota, Darwin made the first of several excursions into and ultimately across the Andes. In one(April 1835), he went southward to the capital, Santiago, up the now-famous wine region of the Maipo Valley, up the Maipo River to a hotsprings resort, across a high pass and down to Mendoza, Argentina, and back to Chile by a more northerly pass. Afterwards, he remarked, “My excursion only cost me twenty-four days, and never did I more deeply enjoy an equal space of time.” I felt the same after each of my trips. Both of these passes, where Darwin struggled on horseback leading laden mules, I drove on a good highways past ski resorts.
Before mooring at Valparaiso, Darwin had already worked out how repeated earthquakes had caused some areas to sink and others to rise, throwing marine sediments laden with sea shells far above sea level. He had already theorized that the islands of Tierra del Fuego had been formed by the sinking of a mountain range. Now, he considered his finding thick layers of marine sediments with shells of extinct species at elevations up to 4,270 metres (14,000 feet), and other geological evidence, as proof that the Andes were formed by a slow and gradual rise of land over uncounted eons. Moreover, his finding along the coast of masses of marine shells of currently living species, elevated in sediments 120–150 metres (400–500 feet) above sea level, proved that this part of the coast of South America is still rising.
Darwin recalled, looking back at La Campana early one morning from the Andes:
“These basins or plains, together with the transverse flat valleys (like that of Quillota) which connect them with the coast, I have little doubt, are the bottoms of ancient inlets and deep bays, such as at the present day intersect every part of Tierra del Fuego, and the west coast of Patagonia. Chile must formerly have resembled the latter country, in the configuration of its land and water. This resemblance was…seen with great force, when a level fog-bank covered, as with a mantle, all the lower parts of the country: the white vapour curling into the ravines, beautifully represented little coves and bays; and here and there a solitary hillock peeping up, showed that it had formerly stood there as an islet.”
I was fortunate to see almost the exact same view as I crossed a ridge above the low-lying clouds, the Bell of Quillota rising above as if an island in the sea. These ideas were central to his theory that natural selection enabled individuals with some slight variation that gave it an advantage in a new environment to persist and its progeny to procreate more than those lacking the variation; and that over many generations, repeated selection for that characteristic could, in the time scale of the formation of mountains, evolve into new species.
Travel Notes
Hotel Hispano Restaurant, Plaza Parroquia 391, Viña del Mar. Tel: (56) (32) 268-5860, Fax (56) (32) 247-7096; a single for one night was $45.00 CAD.
My favourite hotel when not on business was Hotel Presidente, at Eliodoro Yanez 867, in the Presidente district of Santiago. A single was $145 USD in 2006. Tel: +(56) (2) 235-8015, email: infohp@presidente.
Nearby is the excellent restaurant, El Otro Sitio (“The Other Place”) at Antonia Lopez de Bello 53, is consistently rated as one of the top Peruvian restaurants in Santiago. Tel: 777-3059
In Olmué, a delightful hotel with a fine restaurant is the Hosteria Aire Puro (“Hotel of Pure Air”), Av. Granizo 7672, Tel: (56) (33) 441381, email: infor@hosteriaairepuro.cl, www.hosteriaairepuro.cl. The price for a chalet for three for one night was $94.00 CAD.
A nice restaurant in Valparaiso was the Café Journal, Cochrane 81, Tel: (56) (32) 259 6760. Lunch for four was $45.00 CAD. It has a sister restaurant in Viña del Mar.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Birdwatching at Poyang Lake, China
If China is a waking giant, some parts must still be asleep.
Having a meeting in Qingdao, I decided to add a few more days for bird watching at Poyang Lake, is the largest freshwater lake in China.
Poyang Lake, “the last lake of clear water,” is famous among birders and conservationists. In winter it hosts almost the entire world populations of Siberian cranes and oriental white storks, together with four other species of crane and hundreds of thousands of other waterbirds. It is a National Nature Reserve, a Ramsar site (designated under the under the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance), and an IBA (Important Bird Area) site, and it figures prominently in virtually all of the conservation plans for endangered waterbirds in East Asia. It is only a half day’s drive from Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi Province.
I quickly discovered that, although famous, Poyang Lake not actually easy to get to. Before leaving Canada, I had failed to find on the Internet any accommodations in or near the refuge, in the nearest town, Wu Cheng, or even in Nanchang. There were no ecotours there, and none of the tourist agencies either in Canada or China that I contacted had ever heard of it. Eventually I tracked down the email address of the Director of the reserve, a Mr. Zhang, who promised to help me get to the refuge and “take care of me.” At least, I thought he had, as his emails were not easy to decipher. Moreover, he had not replied to my query as to what I should do upon arrival, since my plane was scheduled to land at 9:30 PM.
I went without hotel reservations anyway, trusting that he would be there. He wasn’t.
The Nanchang flight’s scheduled 9:30 PM arrival was delayed almost two hours. Arriving after 11:00 PM, I found my suitcase missing and no English speakers in the small airport. My few words of Mandarin (a remnant of previous visits to China) and a Chinese-English dictionary helped with tracking the errant bag, which the airline agent finally assured me would arrive by 4:00 PM the next day. Great, I thought, already a day gone from my birdwatching and I’m not even there yet. By now it was midnight and the taxi drivers had all gone home.
The airline agent, seeing me looking uncertainly at the benches, took me by the hand—literally—and walked me two kilometres in a stiff, cold wind (it was December) two kilometres to a small, darkened hotel. He banged on the door. A sleepy, pyjama-clad young woman opened up, turned on some lights, smiled a welcome admittance, and led me to a room.
At dawn I went for a walk and quickly added some birds to my life list, before finding a savoury breakfast waiting for me at the hotel. The same young woman was at the desk. Although she was unable to find a telephone listing for the Nature Reserve, she let me use her computer to send an email to Director Zhang explaining my situation and adding, “If I have not heard from you by 1600 hours, I will hire a taxi and go to the Nature Reserve.”
At the airport, there was no reply from Director Zhang, so I sent another email. Patrons at a nearby restaurant delighted in teasing the foreigner, helped me order a plate of small, bony fish and other exquisitely delicious dishes for lunch, and told me I needed a haircut. Although perplexed, I dutifully went to the barber next door who, while trimming me, mentioned that it was her father who had given me the appearance appraisal.
My missing bag arrived at 2:00 PM, but there was still no reply from Director Zhang. The solicitous airline agent found me a taxi driver who was willing to make the trip to Wu Cheng; however, no one at the airport had ever heard of the Nature Reserve. Someone produced a good map of the county (not, however, showing the Nature Reserve), and we set off for Wu Cheng.
After two hours of rice and corn fields and a few villages where the only industry seemed to be making red mud bricks fired in rudimentary kilns, the road ended in a swampy marsh. The driver spent a long time on his mobile phone, then drove us back to the Nanchang Airport and got new directions. We drove north on a small but paved road parallel to a highway (to avoid the toll), bought supper (rice, fruit, and a different kind of fish) at a roadside stand, passed through a small city, Yong Xiu, and came to a promontory overlooking Poyang Lake.
Now it became obvious why no one knew the way to Wu Cheng. There was no road. The lake rises and falls about 7 meters with the season. At high water, Poyang Lake covers more than 5,000 km2 and Wu Cheng is on an island. As the water level falls, the giant lake shrinks to around 50 km2 and separates into many smaller lakes among which rivers wander, and grass grows on the former lake bed. The lake bed can’t be farmed, and this is why it draws nearly a million water birds from all over northern China and Siberia. Now, at the end of the dry season, we saw a vast sea of grass. Ah, but the cab driver asked local workmen and discovered that a new road was under construction, sort of a causeway across the grassy prairie.
We found it and bounced for an hour in deep ruts, dodging earth movers and graders. As the sun set, Poyang Lake closed in on both sides of the causeway. In it were standing thousands of Eurasian cranes, storks, swans, ducks, geese, and shorebirds. Every species was new on my life list. I began to perk up. An island appeared on the horizon at the end of the causeway.
Finally we reached Wu Cheng. Its only street was unlit and nearly deserted. Electricity had not yet reached this island, but that did not explain why many of the shops were shuttered. I got out and the driver, anxious to get back across the causeway before dark, quickly left.
A cold wind was blowing. I could not see a hotel or restaurant and most shops were closed. A pair of women giggled as I attempted to say “Hello” in Mandarin. My English-Chinese dictionary did not have a translation for “nature reserve,” but they understood “Where is the National Park for birds?” and pointed up the street. Shouldering my bag, I walked.
Past the town, I came to a two-story building behind an elaborate gate with a sign in English and Chinese: “Jiangxi Poyang Lake National Nature Reserve.”
A middle-aged man and young woman were just locking up for the night. The building turned out to be a guesthouse with no guests. I had not been expected, but the man got on his mobile phone to try to contact Director Zhang, whom he knew. Meanwhile, the woman showed me to a room and then walked me back into town to a tiny restaurant and ordered supper and beer. She sat down to eat only when I insisted that she join me. It was the best beer I’ve ever had.
Back at the guest house, the man said that he had telephoned the Reserve Director, who was in his office in Nanchang—there was no Nature Reserve office at Poyang Lake. The Reserve Director apologised for not meeting me at the airport—he had been unavoidably detained. He could not come, but Mr. Wang, an ecologist, would meet me tomorrow. All of this was accomplished with the aid of the English-Chinese dictionary. Things were looking up.
At dawn, I walked up to a huge, four-story, open pavilion with classic, sweeping roof lines, on the highest point of land on the island, evidently a watchtower and navigational aid. Overlooking the confluence of two rivers where a steady procession of tugs towed barges, it gave a view of vast wetlands and lakes stretching to the horizon in all directions. The combined river flows north only a little ways to the mighty Yangtze, but in the wet season, the direction reverses and overflow from the Yangtze floods into Poyang Lake. Villagers pushed handcarts piled high with produce along a short causeway to a jetty where a sampans were tied. Since ancient times until just recently, Wu Cheng was an important town that controlled shipping, the only transportation. Then about 20 years ago, the government built a highway and railroad around Poyang Lake. The town’s population plunged from about 40,000 to 2,000, explaining the deserted nature of the town.
Not for long: in 2008 the Governments of China and several provinces agreed to begin a massive Poyang Lake Project that will dampen the flood-drought cycles. Its central feature will be a dam with shipping locks and a fish passage system within sight of the Wu Chen watchtower, as well as irrigation and flood control works throughout the basin. It will limit the lake’s size to 3000 km2 and open up much of the prairie for farming. How it will affect the waterbirds and other wildlife, such as the rare Yangtze Finless River Porpoise, has not been assessed. While I was there, a scientific expedition searched in vain for another dolphin species, the Yangtze River Dolphin or baiji, throughout the Yangtze system and declared it “functionally extinct.”
In the guest house dining room, I enjoyed a huge breakfast while rare Oriental White Storks flew past the picture window. The guest house man drove me back to the causeway to wait for Mr. Wang. Eurasian and White-naped Cranes flew overhead while wading birds, shorebirds, and waterfowl dotted the lake in huge numbers.
A van drove up and disgorged half a dozen birdwatchers with spotting scopes and binoculars. One was a very petite young woman with a spotting scope and tripod almost bigger that she was.
“This is Mr. Wang,” said the guest house man, clearly losing something in the translation.
Miss Wang, Ecologist, spoke excellent English and knew every bird species. Over the next four days, she took me long hikes across the grassy prairie to an assortment of lakes, each with new bird species. We saw Siberian, Hooded, White-necked, Red-crowned and Eurasian Cranes. We passed farmers herding their water buffalo. Miss Wang arranged for a boat and boatman, who took us up and down the rivers to more distant lakes and marshes. We passed fishing families who live in houseboats on the river and row their children to Wu Chen every morning for school. We watched them using cormorants for fishing. We saw rare mammals, including the finless river dolphin and the Chinese water deer. In the town, we chatted with mothers and their toddlers and farmers bringing chickens and dripping bags of fresh tofu to the market. After an inauspicious start, it was a wonderful trip in a naturalist’s paradise.
Having a meeting in Qingdao, I decided to add a few more days for bird watching at Poyang Lake, is the largest freshwater lake in China.
Poyang Lake, “the last lake of clear water,” is famous among birders and conservationists. In winter it hosts almost the entire world populations of Siberian cranes and oriental white storks, together with four other species of crane and hundreds of thousands of other waterbirds. It is a National Nature Reserve, a Ramsar site (designated under the under the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance), and an IBA (Important Bird Area) site, and it figures prominently in virtually all of the conservation plans for endangered waterbirds in East Asia. It is only a half day’s drive from Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi Province.
I quickly discovered that, although famous, Poyang Lake not actually easy to get to. Before leaving Canada, I had failed to find on the Internet any accommodations in or near the refuge, in the nearest town, Wu Cheng, or even in Nanchang. There were no ecotours there, and none of the tourist agencies either in Canada or China that I contacted had ever heard of it. Eventually I tracked down the email address of the Director of the reserve, a Mr. Zhang, who promised to help me get to the refuge and “take care of me.” At least, I thought he had, as his emails were not easy to decipher. Moreover, he had not replied to my query as to what I should do upon arrival, since my plane was scheduled to land at 9:30 PM.
I went without hotel reservations anyway, trusting that he would be there. He wasn’t.
The Nanchang flight’s scheduled 9:30 PM arrival was delayed almost two hours. Arriving after 11:00 PM, I found my suitcase missing and no English speakers in the small airport. My few words of Mandarin (a remnant of previous visits to China) and a Chinese-English dictionary helped with tracking the errant bag, which the airline agent finally assured me would arrive by 4:00 PM the next day. Great, I thought, already a day gone from my birdwatching and I’m not even there yet. By now it was midnight and the taxi drivers had all gone home.
The airline agent, seeing me looking uncertainly at the benches, took me by the hand—literally—and walked me two kilometres in a stiff, cold wind (it was December) two kilometres to a small, darkened hotel. He banged on the door. A sleepy, pyjama-clad young woman opened up, turned on some lights, smiled a welcome admittance, and led me to a room.
At dawn I went for a walk and quickly added some birds to my life list, before finding a savoury breakfast waiting for me at the hotel. The same young woman was at the desk. Although she was unable to find a telephone listing for the Nature Reserve, she let me use her computer to send an email to Director Zhang explaining my situation and adding, “If I have not heard from you by 1600 hours, I will hire a taxi and go to the Nature Reserve.”
At the airport, there was no reply from Director Zhang, so I sent another email. Patrons at a nearby restaurant delighted in teasing the foreigner, helped me order a plate of small, bony fish and other exquisitely delicious dishes for lunch, and told me I needed a haircut. Although perplexed, I dutifully went to the barber next door who, while trimming me, mentioned that it was her father who had given me the appearance appraisal.
My missing bag arrived at 2:00 PM, but there was still no reply from Director Zhang. The solicitous airline agent found me a taxi driver who was willing to make the trip to Wu Cheng; however, no one at the airport had ever heard of the Nature Reserve. Someone produced a good map of the county (not, however, showing the Nature Reserve), and we set off for Wu Cheng.
After two hours of rice and corn fields and a few villages where the only industry seemed to be making red mud bricks fired in rudimentary kilns, the road ended in a swampy marsh. The driver spent a long time on his mobile phone, then drove us back to the Nanchang Airport and got new directions. We drove north on a small but paved road parallel to a highway (to avoid the toll), bought supper (rice, fruit, and a different kind of fish) at a roadside stand, passed through a small city, Yong Xiu, and came to a promontory overlooking Poyang Lake.
Now it became obvious why no one knew the way to Wu Cheng. There was no road. The lake rises and falls about 7 meters with the season. At high water, Poyang Lake covers more than 5,000 km2 and Wu Cheng is on an island. As the water level falls, the giant lake shrinks to around 50 km2 and separates into many smaller lakes among which rivers wander, and grass grows on the former lake bed. The lake bed can’t be farmed, and this is why it draws nearly a million water birds from all over northern China and Siberia. Now, at the end of the dry season, we saw a vast sea of grass. Ah, but the cab driver asked local workmen and discovered that a new road was under construction, sort of a causeway across the grassy prairie.
We found it and bounced for an hour in deep ruts, dodging earth movers and graders. As the sun set, Poyang Lake closed in on both sides of the causeway. In it were standing thousands of Eurasian cranes, storks, swans, ducks, geese, and shorebirds. Every species was new on my life list. I began to perk up. An island appeared on the horizon at the end of the causeway.
Finally we reached Wu Cheng. Its only street was unlit and nearly deserted. Electricity had not yet reached this island, but that did not explain why many of the shops were shuttered. I got out and the driver, anxious to get back across the causeway before dark, quickly left.
A cold wind was blowing. I could not see a hotel or restaurant and most shops were closed. A pair of women giggled as I attempted to say “Hello” in Mandarin. My English-Chinese dictionary did not have a translation for “nature reserve,” but they understood “Where is the National Park for birds?” and pointed up the street. Shouldering my bag, I walked.
Past the town, I came to a two-story building behind an elaborate gate with a sign in English and Chinese: “Jiangxi Poyang Lake National Nature Reserve.”
A middle-aged man and young woman were just locking up for the night. The building turned out to be a guesthouse with no guests. I had not been expected, but the man got on his mobile phone to try to contact Director Zhang, whom he knew. Meanwhile, the woman showed me to a room and then walked me back into town to a tiny restaurant and ordered supper and beer. She sat down to eat only when I insisted that she join me. It was the best beer I’ve ever had.
Back at the guest house, the man said that he had telephoned the Reserve Director, who was in his office in Nanchang—there was no Nature Reserve office at Poyang Lake. The Reserve Director apologised for not meeting me at the airport—he had been unavoidably detained. He could not come, but Mr. Wang, an ecologist, would meet me tomorrow. All of this was accomplished with the aid of the English-Chinese dictionary. Things were looking up.
At dawn, I walked up to a huge, four-story, open pavilion with classic, sweeping roof lines, on the highest point of land on the island, evidently a watchtower and navigational aid. Overlooking the confluence of two rivers where a steady procession of tugs towed barges, it gave a view of vast wetlands and lakes stretching to the horizon in all directions. The combined river flows north only a little ways to the mighty Yangtze, but in the wet season, the direction reverses and overflow from the Yangtze floods into Poyang Lake. Villagers pushed handcarts piled high with produce along a short causeway to a jetty where a sampans were tied. Since ancient times until just recently, Wu Cheng was an important town that controlled shipping, the only transportation. Then about 20 years ago, the government built a highway and railroad around Poyang Lake. The town’s population plunged from about 40,000 to 2,000, explaining the deserted nature of the town.
Not for long: in 2008 the Governments of China and several provinces agreed to begin a massive Poyang Lake Project that will dampen the flood-drought cycles. Its central feature will be a dam with shipping locks and a fish passage system within sight of the Wu Chen watchtower, as well as irrigation and flood control works throughout the basin. It will limit the lake’s size to 3000 km2 and open up much of the prairie for farming. How it will affect the waterbirds and other wildlife, such as the rare Yangtze Finless River Porpoise, has not been assessed. While I was there, a scientific expedition searched in vain for another dolphin species, the Yangtze River Dolphin or baiji, throughout the Yangtze system and declared it “functionally extinct.”
In the guest house dining room, I enjoyed a huge breakfast while rare Oriental White Storks flew past the picture window. The guest house man drove me back to the causeway to wait for Mr. Wang. Eurasian and White-naped Cranes flew overhead while wading birds, shorebirds, and waterfowl dotted the lake in huge numbers.
A van drove up and disgorged half a dozen birdwatchers with spotting scopes and binoculars. One was a very petite young woman with a spotting scope and tripod almost bigger that she was.
“This is Mr. Wang,” said the guest house man, clearly losing something in the translation.
Miss Wang, Ecologist, spoke excellent English and knew every bird species. Over the next four days, she took me long hikes across the grassy prairie to an assortment of lakes, each with new bird species. We saw Siberian, Hooded, White-necked, Red-crowned and Eurasian Cranes. We passed farmers herding their water buffalo. Miss Wang arranged for a boat and boatman, who took us up and down the rivers to more distant lakes and marshes. We passed fishing families who live in houseboats on the river and row their children to Wu Chen every morning for school. We watched them using cormorants for fishing. We saw rare mammals, including the finless river dolphin and the Chinese water deer. In the town, we chatted with mothers and their toddlers and farmers bringing chickens and dripping bags of fresh tofu to the market. After an inauspicious start, it was a wonderful trip in a naturalist’s paradise.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Thomas Malthus was right
A short version of this was published by The Vancouver Sun, Oct. 1, 2011.
Thomas Malthus said in his famous first “Essay on Population” in 1798, that the geometrically increasing human population must inevitably outstrip the ability of the Earth to provide subsistence to all, which “must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind” —so severely that the growth rate must fall [1]. Then and ever since, nay-sayers have decried the “doomsday” scenarios, insisting that human ingenuity would find a solution. Malthus was right. European countries did not collapse, but only because the Industrial Revolution was fuelled with resources taken from their colonies: Belgium’s congo; The Ottoman Empire’s (then France’s and England’s) Arabia, North Africa and Polynesia; Britain’s eastern and southern Africa, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and America, Germany’s Namibia, Cameroon and Tanganyika; Portugal’s Angola, Mozambique and Brazil; Italy’s Lybia and Sudan; Spain’s Latin American holdings, and so on. Today, some call it economic imperialism; others call it global trade, or more simply, globalism.
What global trade means is this: countries with resources to sell will be able to find those with cash to buy them until the last log is cut, the last bushel of wheat threshed, the last oil well drilled, the last tonne of fish netted, and the last lump of coal burned. Will we learn to ration these meagre resources and distribute them to mutual benefit? Or will we fight over them to the last drop of blood?
Meanwhile, the nay-sayers in last countries with cash will continue to malign modern Malthus’s like Paul Ehrlich [2, 3] and our own David Suzuki [4, 5], saying that for all their gloomy prognostications, we’re still doing fine economically. The question is, who is “we”? In Canada we are fine, for now, but what about the villagers in the aforementioned colonies? Are they all doing fine?
Our politicians and business leaders have not noticed two “state changes” in the global economy. First, depletion of resources has changed global trade from one of countries with resources competing for markets, to countries with money competing for resources. Economic growth was only possible when there were new frontiers to explore, countries to conquer and their resources to exploit. This is no longer the case, and it leaves poor countries no option but to get poorer. Hence, the number of failed states increased year by year, and these directly threaten Canada. I’ll return to this in a moment.
Second, something is bound to upset the world economy, turning countries with money into countries with no money. That “something” could have been anything, or a combination: mad cow disease of 1987–1989 that killed 4.4 million cattle in the U.K. and severely damaged Canada’s livestock industry when just one cow from Canada was caught with it in 2003(15 cases had been confirmed up to April 16, 2009: Canada Food Inspection Agency (http://www.inspection.gc.ca/, accessed May 2, 2009); the millennium computer bug in 2000 (it didn’t materialize), the 2003 SARS epidemic (it passed, but with considerable economic disruption), the 2004 Avian Flu pandemic that has forced the slaughter of hundreds of millions of commercial poultry and has so far killed 257 people (up to April 23, 2009; Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_H5N1, accessed May 2, 2009). It could be another rise in prices as happened in 2007, causing people in 22 countries from Bangladesh to Yemen to riot in the streets because they can no longer afford bread [6], or another phase of the current financial crisis.
Or it could be a rapid escalation of armed conflict drawing in third parties, of which there are many candidates such as Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, etc. etc. The point here is that Canada can no longer be assured of future prosperity. The ability to sell our produce and products, or to buy the resources we think we need in perpetuity, is no longer a given. Too many things can happen and some already have.
The world passed the point where its resources could feed its population about 20 years ago and the population is still going up and the resources going down. The economy cannot grow forever. Nothing can. Millions of Americans who thought so and bought houses and consumer goods on that assumption are now out on the street, bankrupt. The financial institutions that led them into it invented imaginary ways to pretend that such growth would continue and, like many dreams it crumbled and took down Chrysler Canada and GM Canada with it. China and Europe found to their dismay that however strong their own economies, they cannot withstand the meltdown of one of their trading partners’.
Here is why the economy cannot grow in the future like it has in the past.
There is no more farm land. Well, hardly any, and what there is would take a huge effort and expense to develop. The annual expansion rate of world irrigated land has fallen from an average of over 2 percent from 1961 to 1992 to around 1 percent from 1993 to 2002 and began declining after that. But because of population growth, the irrigated area per person has been declining for three decades and in 2003 was 7 percent below the 1978 peak[7]. The reasons for the decline are mainly salinization and falling levels of irrigation water; rising costs of irrigation and urban expansion also contribute. There is no sign that these four capital debits can reverse, and climate change will exacerbate the first two. Even with biotechnology, there are no more large gains to be made in agricultural productivity. From 1961 to 1986, the global grain harvest has nearly tripled, while world population merely doubled. Since then, as the growth in grain production has matched population growth, per capita production has stagnated. Experts agree that the kind of innovations that drove the post-World War II grain production—like irrigation, pesticides and massive production and distribution of fertilizers, are behind us now [8].
There is no more fresh water. Seventy percent of the Earth’s freshwater is used for irrigation. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (www.agr.gc.ca, accessed May 3, 2009) notes that important food producers China, India, Mexico, Australia, Africa, the U.S., and others are now on the brink of serious water shortages. Global water requirements are expected to increase by 40 percent over the next 20 years. If trends continue, by 2025 competition between urban, industrial, and agricultural water uses will curb both economic growth and agri-food production, causing yearly global shortfalls of 350 million tonnes of food. Climate change has already exacerbated shortages in many regions and will get worse.
There are no more fish. The global, wild-caught fish catch has remained relatively stable over the last 15 years, peaked in 2000 and has been declining since then. There is little room for expansion: about 50 percent are being fished at full capacity, 25 percent are underfished, and the remainder are overex-ploited, depleted, or recovering [9]. As a result, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that maximum wild fish capture has already been reached. Moreover, the quality is declining: most of the stocks of the top 10 fished species are being fully fished or are overexploited, and studies have indicated that, even in the most stable fisheries, there have been declines in the most valuable species, such as tuna and salmon. Harvesting the top predators has not only depleted but changed the structure of many of the world’s marine ecosystems, which now produce more biomass of species such as jellyfish that are of little use to humans [10, 11].
In contrast to wild fish, fish farming, or aquaculture, has continued to increase over the last 10 years by more than 3 million tons per year (of a total wild catch plus aquaculture of 160 million tons in 2006) [9]. These gains are not without damage to coastal ecosystems here in North America [12-14], but in tropical regions, the effluent from on-land fish farms and the wholesale destruction of mangrove swamps for shrimp aquaculture [15] wreaks massive damage to coastal fisheries productivity. They also displace farmers and fishers, respectively, who have been working the land and sea sustainably for centuries (more on displaced persons below).
There is no more oil. Experts debate when oil production will peak and begin to decline, but no one doubts that it will. If you think the 2008–2009 rise in oil prices was scary, wait until supplies really start to drop. Agriculture, fishing and global trade depend on oil, to say nothing of our luxurious lifestyles.
All of the above might be okay if the human population would stop growing. Then, countries with the wherewithal like Canada could put our energies into working with poor countries to improve their governance, fix failed states, and get them on a path to self-sufficient food production within the constraints of the Earth’s productivity. But it is not stopping and the crux of the matter is that, since Earth’s population continues to rise while food and other resources remain stable or fall, that means that the per capita availability of resources will fall as long as the human population rises. How much wheat have we sold lately to Zimbabwe? Mozambique? Afghanistan? Democratic Republic of Congo?
If the world population were to rise at any constant rate, it would increase exponentially, as it did from time immemorial until about 1995. Since then, the annual population growth rate has been decreasing, partly because of lowered fertility rates in Europe and North America, but more especially because the death rates have been increasing: Despite vastly increased longevity in developed countries, many more people are dying everywhere else. Why?
It seems that Malthus and Eherlich and other “doomsday prophets” were right. The Earth’s carrying capacity has been reached or surpassed and the areas where Malthus’ “…difficulty of subsistence… must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind” has been occurring for a long time and is expanding. Currently, around 56 million people die per year, a rate that is expected to increase to 90 million by the year 2050 [16]. That is a lot of angry families.
The number of refugees and internally displaced persons may be as high as 184 million, or one out of every 36 persons on Earth [17]. Among them are 16 million refugees (including 4.6 million Palestinians) and 26 million internally dis¬placed people (IDPs-those who, unlike refugees, did not cross an international border). Another 12 million people are stateless— vulnerable because they lack the protection of citizenship, although they are not necessarily displaced. Some 25 million people have been uprooted by natural disasters. And Christian Aid, a London-based advocacy group, estimates that as many as 105 million people (an estimate that should be taken with caution as it may overlap with other categories) are made homeless by development projects, including dams, mines, roads, factories, plantations, and wild¬life reserves [17]. A refugee camp here, a shantytown there, and maybe it wouldn’t affect us here in Canada; but displacement and the resulting social economic upheaval on such a scale directly threatens global economic stability. The is why we need a climate change agreement. It is why we need a more effective convention on biological diversity, better national environmental protection laws, and stronger ocean fish protection agreements. It is why we need to slow down.
End Notes
1. Malthus, Thomas Robert, [First] Essay on Population. 1798, London: Murray.
2. Ehrlich, Paul R., The population bomb. 1968, New York, N.Y.: Ballantine Books. 201.
3. Ehrlich, Paul R. and A.H. Ehrlich, The population explosion. 1990, New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster. 320.
4. Gordon, Anita and David T. Suzuki, It's a matter of survival. 1991: Harvard University Press.
5. Suzuki, David T., Amanda Connell, and Amanda McConnell, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature. 1999: Mountaineers Books. 259.
6. Moroccan Unrest Over Bread Price, in The Arabist, September 27, 2007. 2007: Cairo.
7. Li, Ling, Irrigated Area Stays Stable, November 8, 2007. 2007, Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs Online, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5645, accesed May 2, 2009.
8. Brown, Lester R., Who will feed China? wake-up call for a small planet. 1995, New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
9. McKeown, Alice, Fish Farming Continues to Grow as World Fisheries Stagnate, December 17, 2008. 2008, Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs Online, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5645, accesed May 2, 2009.
10. Hay, Steve, Marine Ecology: Gelatinous Bells May Ring Change in Marine Ecosystems. Current Biology, 2006. 16(17): p. R679-R682.
11. Lynam, C., et al., Jellyfish overtake fish in a heavily fished ecosystem. Current Biology, 2006. 16(13): p. R492-R493.
12. Bjorn, P.A., B. Finstad, and R. Kristoffersen, Salmon lice infection of wild sea trout and Arctic char in marine and freshwaters: the effects of salmon farms. Aquaculture Research, 2001. 32: p. 947-962.
13. Harding, L. E., Levels of organotin in water, sediments, and oysters (Crassostrea gigas) at aquaculture sites in British Columbia. Presented at the 6th Annual Meeting of the North Pacific Science Organization, Pusan, Korea, October 22-26, 1997. 1997.
14. Volpe, John P., et al., Evidence of Natural Reproduction of Aquaculture-Escaped Atlantic Salmon in a Coastal British Columbia River. Conservation Biology, 2000. 14(3): p. 899-903.
15. Naylor, Rosamond L., et al., Effect of aquaculture on world fish supplies. Nature, 2000. 405: p. 1017-1024.
16. U.S. Census Bureau, World Population Information, http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html, accessed 2 June 2009. 2009, International Data Base (IDB).
17. Renner, Michael, Environment a Growing Driver in Displacement of People, September 17, 2008. 2008, Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs Online, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5645, accesed May 2, 2009.
Thomas Malthus said in his famous first “Essay on Population” in 1798, that the geometrically increasing human population must inevitably outstrip the ability of the Earth to provide subsistence to all, which “must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind” —so severely that the growth rate must fall [1]. Then and ever since, nay-sayers have decried the “doomsday” scenarios, insisting that human ingenuity would find a solution. Malthus was right. European countries did not collapse, but only because the Industrial Revolution was fuelled with resources taken from their colonies: Belgium’s congo; The Ottoman Empire’s (then France’s and England’s) Arabia, North Africa and Polynesia; Britain’s eastern and southern Africa, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and America, Germany’s Namibia, Cameroon and Tanganyika; Portugal’s Angola, Mozambique and Brazil; Italy’s Lybia and Sudan; Spain’s Latin American holdings, and so on. Today, some call it economic imperialism; others call it global trade, or more simply, globalism.
What global trade means is this: countries with resources to sell will be able to find those with cash to buy them until the last log is cut, the last bushel of wheat threshed, the last oil well drilled, the last tonne of fish netted, and the last lump of coal burned. Will we learn to ration these meagre resources and distribute them to mutual benefit? Or will we fight over them to the last drop of blood?
Meanwhile, the nay-sayers in last countries with cash will continue to malign modern Malthus’s like Paul Ehrlich [2, 3] and our own David Suzuki [4, 5], saying that for all their gloomy prognostications, we’re still doing fine economically. The question is, who is “we”? In Canada we are fine, for now, but what about the villagers in the aforementioned colonies? Are they all doing fine?
Our politicians and business leaders have not noticed two “state changes” in the global economy. First, depletion of resources has changed global trade from one of countries with resources competing for markets, to countries with money competing for resources. Economic growth was only possible when there were new frontiers to explore, countries to conquer and their resources to exploit. This is no longer the case, and it leaves poor countries no option but to get poorer. Hence, the number of failed states increased year by year, and these directly threaten Canada. I’ll return to this in a moment.
Second, something is bound to upset the world economy, turning countries with money into countries with no money. That “something” could have been anything, or a combination: mad cow disease of 1987–1989 that killed 4.4 million cattle in the U.K. and severely damaged Canada’s livestock industry when just one cow from Canada was caught with it in 2003(15 cases had been confirmed up to April 16, 2009: Canada Food Inspection Agency (http://www.inspection.gc.ca/, accessed May 2, 2009); the millennium computer bug in 2000 (it didn’t materialize), the 2003 SARS epidemic (it passed, but with considerable economic disruption), the 2004 Avian Flu pandemic that has forced the slaughter of hundreds of millions of commercial poultry and has so far killed 257 people (up to April 23, 2009; Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_H5N1, accessed May 2, 2009). It could be another rise in prices as happened in 2007, causing people in 22 countries from Bangladesh to Yemen to riot in the streets because they can no longer afford bread [6], or another phase of the current financial crisis.
Or it could be a rapid escalation of armed conflict drawing in third parties, of which there are many candidates such as Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, etc. etc. The point here is that Canada can no longer be assured of future prosperity. The ability to sell our produce and products, or to buy the resources we think we need in perpetuity, is no longer a given. Too many things can happen and some already have.
The world passed the point where its resources could feed its population about 20 years ago and the population is still going up and the resources going down. The economy cannot grow forever. Nothing can. Millions of Americans who thought so and bought houses and consumer goods on that assumption are now out on the street, bankrupt. The financial institutions that led them into it invented imaginary ways to pretend that such growth would continue and, like many dreams it crumbled and took down Chrysler Canada and GM Canada with it. China and Europe found to their dismay that however strong their own economies, they cannot withstand the meltdown of one of their trading partners’.
Here is why the economy cannot grow in the future like it has in the past.
There is no more farm land. Well, hardly any, and what there is would take a huge effort and expense to develop. The annual expansion rate of world irrigated land has fallen from an average of over 2 percent from 1961 to 1992 to around 1 percent from 1993 to 2002 and began declining after that. But because of population growth, the irrigated area per person has been declining for three decades and in 2003 was 7 percent below the 1978 peak[7]. The reasons for the decline are mainly salinization and falling levels of irrigation water; rising costs of irrigation and urban expansion also contribute. There is no sign that these four capital debits can reverse, and climate change will exacerbate the first two. Even with biotechnology, there are no more large gains to be made in agricultural productivity. From 1961 to 1986, the global grain harvest has nearly tripled, while world population merely doubled. Since then, as the growth in grain production has matched population growth, per capita production has stagnated. Experts agree that the kind of innovations that drove the post-World War II grain production—like irrigation, pesticides and massive production and distribution of fertilizers, are behind us now [8].
There is no more fresh water. Seventy percent of the Earth’s freshwater is used for irrigation. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (www.agr.gc.ca, accessed May 3, 2009) notes that important food producers China, India, Mexico, Australia, Africa, the U.S., and others are now on the brink of serious water shortages. Global water requirements are expected to increase by 40 percent over the next 20 years. If trends continue, by 2025 competition between urban, industrial, and agricultural water uses will curb both economic growth and agri-food production, causing yearly global shortfalls of 350 million tonnes of food. Climate change has already exacerbated shortages in many regions and will get worse.
There are no more fish. The global, wild-caught fish catch has remained relatively stable over the last 15 years, peaked in 2000 and has been declining since then. There is little room for expansion: about 50 percent are being fished at full capacity, 25 percent are underfished, and the remainder are overex-ploited, depleted, or recovering [9]. As a result, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that maximum wild fish capture has already been reached. Moreover, the quality is declining: most of the stocks of the top 10 fished species are being fully fished or are overexploited, and studies have indicated that, even in the most stable fisheries, there have been declines in the most valuable species, such as tuna and salmon. Harvesting the top predators has not only depleted but changed the structure of many of the world’s marine ecosystems, which now produce more biomass of species such as jellyfish that are of little use to humans [10, 11].
In contrast to wild fish, fish farming, or aquaculture, has continued to increase over the last 10 years by more than 3 million tons per year (of a total wild catch plus aquaculture of 160 million tons in 2006) [9]. These gains are not without damage to coastal ecosystems here in North America [12-14], but in tropical regions, the effluent from on-land fish farms and the wholesale destruction of mangrove swamps for shrimp aquaculture [15] wreaks massive damage to coastal fisheries productivity. They also displace farmers and fishers, respectively, who have been working the land and sea sustainably for centuries (more on displaced persons below).
There is no more oil. Experts debate when oil production will peak and begin to decline, but no one doubts that it will. If you think the 2008–2009 rise in oil prices was scary, wait until supplies really start to drop. Agriculture, fishing and global trade depend on oil, to say nothing of our luxurious lifestyles.
All of the above might be okay if the human population would stop growing. Then, countries with the wherewithal like Canada could put our energies into working with poor countries to improve their governance, fix failed states, and get them on a path to self-sufficient food production within the constraints of the Earth’s productivity. But it is not stopping and the crux of the matter is that, since Earth’s population continues to rise while food and other resources remain stable or fall, that means that the per capita availability of resources will fall as long as the human population rises. How much wheat have we sold lately to Zimbabwe? Mozambique? Afghanistan? Democratic Republic of Congo?
If the world population were to rise at any constant rate, it would increase exponentially, as it did from time immemorial until about 1995. Since then, the annual population growth rate has been decreasing, partly because of lowered fertility rates in Europe and North America, but more especially because the death rates have been increasing: Despite vastly increased longevity in developed countries, many more people are dying everywhere else. Why?
It seems that Malthus and Eherlich and other “doomsday prophets” were right. The Earth’s carrying capacity has been reached or surpassed and the areas where Malthus’ “…difficulty of subsistence… must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind” has been occurring for a long time and is expanding. Currently, around 56 million people die per year, a rate that is expected to increase to 90 million by the year 2050 [16]. That is a lot of angry families.
The number of refugees and internally displaced persons may be as high as 184 million, or one out of every 36 persons on Earth [17]. Among them are 16 million refugees (including 4.6 million Palestinians) and 26 million internally dis¬placed people (IDPs-those who, unlike refugees, did not cross an international border). Another 12 million people are stateless— vulnerable because they lack the protection of citizenship, although they are not necessarily displaced. Some 25 million people have been uprooted by natural disasters. And Christian Aid, a London-based advocacy group, estimates that as many as 105 million people (an estimate that should be taken with caution as it may overlap with other categories) are made homeless by development projects, including dams, mines, roads, factories, plantations, and wild¬life reserves [17]. A refugee camp here, a shantytown there, and maybe it wouldn’t affect us here in Canada; but displacement and the resulting social economic upheaval on such a scale directly threatens global economic stability. The is why we need a climate change agreement. It is why we need a more effective convention on biological diversity, better national environmental protection laws, and stronger ocean fish protection agreements. It is why we need to slow down.
End Notes
1. Malthus, Thomas Robert, [First] Essay on Population. 1798, London: Murray.
2. Ehrlich, Paul R., The population bomb. 1968, New York, N.Y.: Ballantine Books. 201.
3. Ehrlich, Paul R. and A.H. Ehrlich, The population explosion. 1990, New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster. 320.
4. Gordon, Anita and David T. Suzuki, It's a matter of survival. 1991: Harvard University Press.
5. Suzuki, David T., Amanda Connell, and Amanda McConnell, The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature. 1999: Mountaineers Books. 259.
6. Moroccan Unrest Over Bread Price, in The Arabist, September 27, 2007. 2007: Cairo.
7. Li, Ling, Irrigated Area Stays Stable, November 8, 2007. 2007, Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs Online, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5645, accesed May 2, 2009.
8. Brown, Lester R., Who will feed China? wake-up call for a small planet. 1995, New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
9. McKeown, Alice, Fish Farming Continues to Grow as World Fisheries Stagnate, December 17, 2008. 2008, Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs Online, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5645, accesed May 2, 2009.
10. Hay, Steve, Marine Ecology: Gelatinous Bells May Ring Change in Marine Ecosystems. Current Biology, 2006. 16(17): p. R679-R682.
11. Lynam, C., et al., Jellyfish overtake fish in a heavily fished ecosystem. Current Biology, 2006. 16(13): p. R492-R493.
12. Bjorn, P.A., B. Finstad, and R. Kristoffersen, Salmon lice infection of wild sea trout and Arctic char in marine and freshwaters: the effects of salmon farms. Aquaculture Research, 2001. 32: p. 947-962.
13. Harding, L. E., Levels of organotin in water, sediments, and oysters (Crassostrea gigas) at aquaculture sites in British Columbia. Presented at the 6th Annual Meeting of the North Pacific Science Organization, Pusan, Korea, October 22-26, 1997. 1997.
14. Volpe, John P., et al., Evidence of Natural Reproduction of Aquaculture-Escaped Atlantic Salmon in a Coastal British Columbia River. Conservation Biology, 2000. 14(3): p. 899-903.
15. Naylor, Rosamond L., et al., Effect of aquaculture on world fish supplies. Nature, 2000. 405: p. 1017-1024.
16. U.S. Census Bureau, World Population Information, http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html, accessed 2 June 2009. 2009, International Data Base (IDB).
17. Renner, Michael, Environment a Growing Driver in Displacement of People, September 17, 2008. 2008, Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs Online, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5645, accesed May 2, 2009.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Wildlife Watching in Vietnam
Stepping out from my room in the guest house at the main ranger station in Cuc Phuong National Park, I paused in the darkness on the tiled veranda. This was my first morning ever in Southeast Asia and I wanted to savour it. A sharp, peaked hill loomed against the stars behind the guest house, brightened on the east side by the looming dawn. In front of the guest house, the terrain dropped away from the hills toward the lowlands. The tropical forest was coming alive with calls of birds that I didn’t know yet, but would soon see: babblers, laughingthrushes, and many others. In a few moments I would meet my guide for a few hours of birdwatching before breakfast. Suddenly there occurred one of the most profound moments of my life. Loud calls, whoops, and yells erupted from the black forest below the station, and were immediately answered by similar cries from the hills above. The calls from below were from several species of gibbons, long-armed swinging apes, and langurs, a type of monkey, that were housed in the Endangered Primate Rescue Center adjacent to the ranger station. The calls from the surrounding hills were from wild gibbons. Like us, gibbons are monagamous and probably mate for life (although this isn't known for certain for all species) and in the morning each pair sings a duet with complementary male and female parts. This is one of the few places in the world where these species can be seen in the wild. All are on the brink of extinction. The ones I heard behind the guest house were white-cheeked gibbons Nomascus leucogenys. Besides the gibbons, 2 species of loris: Nycticebus pygmaeus and N. bengalensis; and 3 species of macaque: (Macaca mulatta, M. assamensis and M. arctoides) live there.
Vietnam has a great variety of monkeys—24 species—and many are rare. Five are endemic to Vietnam (they occur nowhere else) and are among the most endangered primates on Earth. I arranged my trip through the tourism department of Cuc Phuong National Park (www.cucphuongtourism.com). Established in 1960, it is the oldest and largest nature reserve in Vietnam and located only 120 km from Hanoi, the capital. It is also home to the Endangered Primate Rescue Center (www.primatecenter.org) that houses primates confiscated from poachers, conducts research into their biology and life history, and breeds them for release into the wild.
The guide met me with a car and driver at the airport and took me straightaway to Van Long Nature Reserve, stopping for lunch at Ninh Binh, a village on the edge of the vast, fertile, and populous plain of the Red River (Sông Hðng). Soon we stood on a dike overlooking a long, narrow marsh that disappeared in the distance between high, limestone cliffs. A tiny woman ushered us into an equally tiny boat, its gunnels barely inches above the water, and began to row across the marsh. In a moment we turned up a winding creek between limestone cliffs. The sharp-eyed guide pointed to a group of Delacour’s langurs scampering along a cliff, their white rumps, thighs, and cheek whiskers contrasting with otherwise black bodies. On our return at sunset, a brisk headwind slowed our progress and I could see that the boatwoman was struggling. I asked if I might be allowed to row. Surprised, she looked at the guide and said something questioningly that included the word, “American.” The guide shook his head no, and said something that included “Canadian.” She handed me the oars and, carefully so as not to upset the craft, we changed places and I began rowing strongly. She grinned at the guide and they exchanged a few more words. Later he translated them as roughly, “Oh, well, if he is Canadian, of course he can row.”
I saw an amazing variety of birds, most unrelated to anything I had seen before and boasting astonishing colourful plumage: green magpies, blue-winged leafbirds, flamebacks, green-billed malkohas, three kinds of pittas, canary-flycatchers, sultan tits, and many kinds of babblers, fulvettas, yuhinias, flowerpeckers, sunbirds, and many others. The park list is 307 birds long; in three days I added 75 to my life list. After birding and wildlife-watching there and around the main ranger station, the guide drove me to Bong Station, deep in the interior of Cuc Phuong National Park for another couple of nights. That evening, while walking down a dark road from my one-room chalet to the dining hall, I saw a light glinting beside the road, and then another. Could it be a wild cat? a civet? a weasel? But then more lights appeared, not in pairs, and they began randomly moving around, up in the air and everywhere—they were fireflies! Actually, beetles. It was like walking among the dancing stars of Heaven.
I thought I had hired a bird guide, but in the morning, when we paused atop a trail summit, I asked him about mammals. Immediately, he began reeling off a list of mammals known to inhabit Cuc Phuong National Park: serows, a goat-like ungulate, sun bears (Helarctos malayanus), Asian black bears (Ursus thibetanus), two species of deer, red muntjak (Muntiacus muntjac), leaf deer (Tragulus javanicus), wild pigs (Sus scrofa), dhole (Cuon alpinus), racoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides), tiger (Panthera tigris), leopard (Panthera pardus), clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa), Asian golden cat (Catopuma temminckii), leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis), fishing cat (Prionalurus viverrinus ), Owston’s civet (Chrotogale owstoni) and variety of smaller predators including other civets, genets, palm civets, mongooses, and the binturong (Arctictis binturong). In all, 89 species of mammals inhabit the park and more are still being discovered (see http://www.vqgcucphuong.com.vn/English/ for more information). While we talked, a black giant squirrel (Ratufa bicolor), jet black with white cheeks and an orange underside, leapt among the branches nearby.
Unfortunately, many of the species we saw are endangered, some critically so. The whole world population of Delacour’s langurs, for example, may not number more than 200 individuals. Poaching is rife and a new biodiversity protection law offers scant protection. Primates, especially, are highly valuable as meat, alleged health products, and pets; although many are consumed locally, there is a vigorous trade north into China. See http://www.traffic.org/ for more information on illegal traffic in wildlife in Vietnam.
References:
A Guide to the Mammals of Southeast Asia, 2008. Charles M. Francis.
Birds of Southeast Asia, 2005. Craig Robson.
Mittermeier, Russell A., Jonah Ratsimbazafy, et al. (2007). "Primates in peril: the world’s 25 most endangered primates, 2006 – 2008." Primate Conservation 22: 1–40.
Nadler, Tilo, Vu Ngoc Thanh, et al. (2007). "Conservation status of Vietnamese primates." Vietnamese Journal of Primatology 1(1): 7-26.
Vietnam has a great variety of monkeys—24 species—and many are rare. Five are endemic to Vietnam (they occur nowhere else) and are among the most endangered primates on Earth. I arranged my trip through the tourism department of Cuc Phuong National Park (www.cucphuongtourism.com). Established in 1960, it is the oldest and largest nature reserve in Vietnam and located only 120 km from Hanoi, the capital. It is also home to the Endangered Primate Rescue Center (www.primatecenter.org) that houses primates confiscated from poachers, conducts research into their biology and life history, and breeds them for release into the wild.
The guide met me with a car and driver at the airport and took me straightaway to Van Long Nature Reserve, stopping for lunch at Ninh Binh, a village on the edge of the vast, fertile, and populous plain of the Red River (Sông Hðng). Soon we stood on a dike overlooking a long, narrow marsh that disappeared in the distance between high, limestone cliffs. A tiny woman ushered us into an equally tiny boat, its gunnels barely inches above the water, and began to row across the marsh. In a moment we turned up a winding creek between limestone cliffs. The sharp-eyed guide pointed to a group of Delacour’s langurs scampering along a cliff, their white rumps, thighs, and cheek whiskers contrasting with otherwise black bodies. On our return at sunset, a brisk headwind slowed our progress and I could see that the boatwoman was struggling. I asked if I might be allowed to row. Surprised, she looked at the guide and said something questioningly that included the word, “American.” The guide shook his head no, and said something that included “Canadian.” She handed me the oars and, carefully so as not to upset the craft, we changed places and I began rowing strongly. She grinned at the guide and they exchanged a few more words. Later he translated them as roughly, “Oh, well, if he is Canadian, of course he can row.”
I saw an amazing variety of birds, most unrelated to anything I had seen before and boasting astonishing colourful plumage: green magpies, blue-winged leafbirds, flamebacks, green-billed malkohas, three kinds of pittas, canary-flycatchers, sultan tits, and many kinds of babblers, fulvettas, yuhinias, flowerpeckers, sunbirds, and many others. The park list is 307 birds long; in three days I added 75 to my life list. After birding and wildlife-watching there and around the main ranger station, the guide drove me to Bong Station, deep in the interior of Cuc Phuong National Park for another couple of nights. That evening, while walking down a dark road from my one-room chalet to the dining hall, I saw a light glinting beside the road, and then another. Could it be a wild cat? a civet? a weasel? But then more lights appeared, not in pairs, and they began randomly moving around, up in the air and everywhere—they were fireflies! Actually, beetles. It was like walking among the dancing stars of Heaven.
I thought I had hired a bird guide, but in the morning, when we paused atop a trail summit, I asked him about mammals. Immediately, he began reeling off a list of mammals known to inhabit Cuc Phuong National Park: serows, a goat-like ungulate, sun bears (Helarctos malayanus), Asian black bears (Ursus thibetanus), two species of deer, red muntjak (Muntiacus muntjac), leaf deer (Tragulus javanicus), wild pigs (Sus scrofa), dhole (Cuon alpinus), racoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides), tiger (Panthera tigris), leopard (Panthera pardus), clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa), Asian golden cat (Catopuma temminckii), leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis), fishing cat (Prionalurus viverrinus ), Owston’s civet (Chrotogale owstoni) and variety of smaller predators including other civets, genets, palm civets, mongooses, and the binturong (Arctictis binturong). In all, 89 species of mammals inhabit the park and more are still being discovered (see http://www.vqgcucphuong.com.vn/English/ for more information). While we talked, a black giant squirrel (Ratufa bicolor), jet black with white cheeks and an orange underside, leapt among the branches nearby.
Unfortunately, many of the species we saw are endangered, some critically so. The whole world population of Delacour’s langurs, for example, may not number more than 200 individuals. Poaching is rife and a new biodiversity protection law offers scant protection. Primates, especially, are highly valuable as meat, alleged health products, and pets; although many are consumed locally, there is a vigorous trade north into China. See http://www.traffic.org/ for more information on illegal traffic in wildlife in Vietnam.
References:
A Guide to the Mammals of Southeast Asia, 2008. Charles M. Francis.
Birds of Southeast Asia, 2005. Craig Robson.
Mittermeier, Russell A., Jonah Ratsimbazafy, et al. (2007). "Primates in peril: the world’s 25 most endangered primates, 2006 – 2008." Primate Conservation 22: 1–40.
Nadler, Tilo, Vu Ngoc Thanh, et al. (2007). "Conservation status of Vietnamese primates." Vietnamese Journal of Primatology 1(1): 7-26.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Birdwatching in Cambodia
The Mekong River rises as a glacier-fed rivulet in Tibet and roars through deep gorges in Yunnan, China and along the border between Burma and Laos for 1600 km (1000 miles) before settling down to become navigable in Laos. From there it nourishes rice paddies and fishing communities for another 3600 km (2240 miles) before emptying its massive silt load into Vietnam’s Mekong Delta in the South China Sea. The deposited silt blocks the flow, however, forcing the Mekong to back up into Tonle Sap, “the Great Lake” in Cambodia. In the wet season, the Tonle Sap is one of the largest freshwater lakes in Asia, swelling to an expansive 12,000 km2 and flooding the mangrove forests all around its perimeter. During the dry half of the year the Lake shrinks to as small as 2500 km2, draining into the Tonle Sap River, which meanders southeast, eventually merging with the Mekong River. But there is an odd asynchrony in the lake’s rise and fall. Because it takes so long for the monsoon’s rains in the north to transit six countries and reach the Mekong Delta, the Tonle Sap is still rising when the smaller lakes and rivers throughout Cambodia are shrinking in the dry season. The drying forces great masses of waterbirds to leave the smaller ponds for the expanding habitats in Tonle Sap. This was the season when I arrived for a week of birdwatching.
The serenity of Cambodia today belies its recent nightmare of war: the bombing by US forces in the 1970s, followed by the take-over, ideological purgings, and economic restructuring by the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge were defeated in March 1992 and U.N. peacekeepers supervised the revival of Cambodia's constitutional monarchy. Today it is a modern, forward-looking, peaceful country whose people are increasing in prosperity. Except for a hotel in Siem Reap near Angkor Wat, I stayed with local families in their villages. Most of this was arranged through the Sam Veasna Center for Wildlife Conservation, www.samveasna.org (bookings@samveasna.org). The Tonle Sap part was arranged by OSMOSE Conservation, Education, Ecotourism, www.osmosetonlesap.net/.
North of Siem Reap to the Thai border is a nearly featureless plain of rice paddies and coconut palms. Because it was the end of the dry season, the rivers and ponds were drying up, exposing fish for easy capture. Boys, girls, men and women were fishing everywhere with an astonishing variety of nets, traps and techniques. Others were threshing rice by hand, collecting the grains on plastic tarps in front of their houses, built on stilts because the whole region can flood during the monsoon. Every house had a collection of food trees—bananas, coconut palms, and trees with fruits I had never seen. Most also had a large pond stocked with fish and filled with lotus plants, nearly every part of which is edible. Every meal I was served had a different kind of fish in sweet and savoury sauces flavoured with exotic fruits and accompanied with fresh rice and gracious smiles. The feeling of pride in their culture and the self-sufficiency of their circumstances was palpable.
In Ang Trapeang Thmor, women were spinning and dying silk and making gorgeous fabrics for sale in the tourist markets of Siem Reap (the city near Angkor Wat) and the boutiques of Phnom Penh. Everyone I talked to expressed hope and confidence in the future. They spoke of new schools and increasing levels of literacy. This is what peace buys.
A fisherman poled me across a wide, flat lake in a tiny boat to the Ang Trapeng Thmor Sarus Crane Reserve see colonies of storks and other birds. The trip, in early December, was too late to see the cranes, but there were enough other waterbirds and raptors to keep me busy.
Next I stayed at two floating villages in Tonle Sap Biosphere Reserve, one of the most important wetlands for biodiversity conservation in Southeast Asia. Villagers live in floating houses that they drag forward and back as the lake rises and falls with the seasons. Their economy was formerly based totally on fishing; now, in cooperation with international and local conservation organizations, they have added ecotourism. In recognition of the economic benefit, the villagers agreed to conserve birds and other wildlife and some of them open their homes for tourists to stay—a good thing, since there aren’t any hotels. My hosts were gracious and friendly and provided savoury meals of fish straight from the lake. The prize bird was the Greater Adjutant, a rare species of stork that is difficult to see; in all I added 55 species to my life list.
Notwithstanding my positive impression of Cambodians and their land, there is a need for further progress in conservation of its natural resources. In Angkor Wat, I noticed a long mist net strung high between two trees just beside the Bayon (temple complex) at Angkor Thom. My guide said that it was for catching bats, and indeed later I saw roasted bats in the market at Siem Reap. Later, reading about rare bears of Cambodia and neighbouring countries and doing research on endangered primates, I realized the extent of illegal hunting, trapping and capture of wildlife. Much of this feeds local tastes, but there is also a huge amount of trade north into China where the market seems insatiable. Understandably, a conservation ethic comes slowly to people who for generations, and many even now, have had to struggle just to survive. But if these rare wild animals are to survive, the international conservation community will have to continue working with local organizations to make greater efforts at conservation.
Further Reading
Montgomery, Sy, 2002. Search for the golden moon bear: science and adventure in Southeast Asia. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore, Simon & Shuster.
Mittermeier, Russell A., Jonah Ratsimbazafy, et al. (2007). "Primates in peril: the world’s 25 most endangered primates, 2006 – 2008." Primate Conservation 22: 1–40.
Photos of the trip are at http://picasaweb.google.com/Lee.Coquitlam.
The serenity of Cambodia today belies its recent nightmare of war: the bombing by US forces in the 1970s, followed by the take-over, ideological purgings, and economic restructuring by the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge were defeated in March 1992 and U.N. peacekeepers supervised the revival of Cambodia's constitutional monarchy. Today it is a modern, forward-looking, peaceful country whose people are increasing in prosperity. Except for a hotel in Siem Reap near Angkor Wat, I stayed with local families in their villages. Most of this was arranged through the Sam Veasna Center for Wildlife Conservation, www.samveasna.org (bookings@samveasna.org). The Tonle Sap part was arranged by OSMOSE Conservation, Education, Ecotourism, www.osmosetonlesap.net/.
North of Siem Reap to the Thai border is a nearly featureless plain of rice paddies and coconut palms. Because it was the end of the dry season, the rivers and ponds were drying up, exposing fish for easy capture. Boys, girls, men and women were fishing everywhere with an astonishing variety of nets, traps and techniques. Others were threshing rice by hand, collecting the grains on plastic tarps in front of their houses, built on stilts because the whole region can flood during the monsoon. Every house had a collection of food trees—bananas, coconut palms, and trees with fruits I had never seen. Most also had a large pond stocked with fish and filled with lotus plants, nearly every part of which is edible. Every meal I was served had a different kind of fish in sweet and savoury sauces flavoured with exotic fruits and accompanied with fresh rice and gracious smiles. The feeling of pride in their culture and the self-sufficiency of their circumstances was palpable.
In Ang Trapeang Thmor, women were spinning and dying silk and making gorgeous fabrics for sale in the tourist markets of Siem Reap (the city near Angkor Wat) and the boutiques of Phnom Penh. Everyone I talked to expressed hope and confidence in the future. They spoke of new schools and increasing levels of literacy. This is what peace buys.
A fisherman poled me across a wide, flat lake in a tiny boat to the Ang Trapeng Thmor Sarus Crane Reserve see colonies of storks and other birds. The trip, in early December, was too late to see the cranes, but there were enough other waterbirds and raptors to keep me busy.
Next I stayed at two floating villages in Tonle Sap Biosphere Reserve, one of the most important wetlands for biodiversity conservation in Southeast Asia. Villagers live in floating houses that they drag forward and back as the lake rises and falls with the seasons. Their economy was formerly based totally on fishing; now, in cooperation with international and local conservation organizations, they have added ecotourism. In recognition of the economic benefit, the villagers agreed to conserve birds and other wildlife and some of them open their homes for tourists to stay—a good thing, since there aren’t any hotels. My hosts were gracious and friendly and provided savoury meals of fish straight from the lake. The prize bird was the Greater Adjutant, a rare species of stork that is difficult to see; in all I added 55 species to my life list.
Notwithstanding my positive impression of Cambodians and their land, there is a need for further progress in conservation of its natural resources. In Angkor Wat, I noticed a long mist net strung high between two trees just beside the Bayon (temple complex) at Angkor Thom. My guide said that it was for catching bats, and indeed later I saw roasted bats in the market at Siem Reap. Later, reading about rare bears of Cambodia and neighbouring countries and doing research on endangered primates, I realized the extent of illegal hunting, trapping and capture of wildlife. Much of this feeds local tastes, but there is also a huge amount of trade north into China where the market seems insatiable. Understandably, a conservation ethic comes slowly to people who for generations, and many even now, have had to struggle just to survive. But if these rare wild animals are to survive, the international conservation community will have to continue working with local organizations to make greater efforts at conservation.
Further Reading
Montgomery, Sy, 2002. Search for the golden moon bear: science and adventure in Southeast Asia. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore, Simon & Shuster.
Mittermeier, Russell A., Jonah Ratsimbazafy, et al. (2007). "Primates in peril: the world’s 25 most endangered primates, 2006 – 2008." Primate Conservation 22: 1–40.
Photos of the trip are at http://picasaweb.google.com/Lee.Coquitlam.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Strategic Implications of Climate change
In my prevous post, I mentioned the crisis in Sahelian countries as what we can expect from climate change. This post enlarges on the first paragraph. The climate change crisis is not about when it will affect us, but which country it will destroy next. Darfur is a prime example.
The carnage in the Sudan continues, even though climate change has pushed it to the back pages. Meanwhile, the neo-climate change news coverage is framed as, “if we don’t act now, then sometime in the future we will be in trouble.” It turns out that climate change and the humanitarian crisis in the Sudan are related.
The trouble in Darfur results from camel-riding nomads, or young men from nomadic cultures, who are mainly Muslim, attacking settled farming peoples of the south and west, who are mainly Christian. Clearly, the nomads have government support and encouragement, making the current phase of this crisis a political and religious crusade.
No one, except, apparently the jinjaweed themselves, can countenance their murderous attacks on the settled (mostly black) farmers, but the nomads from the north are not to blame for this crisis.
We are. The roots of this crisis are in the colonial enslavement in the first half of the last century, and in misguided international aid efforts that began in the 1960s. Prior to these western interventions, the nomads moved their flocks with the seasons in a relationship with their dry environment that had been stable for at least five millennia. Forced settlement by the colonial masters, followed by well-drilling to ease poverty and encourage farming, disrupted the pastoral patterns and caused large-scale desertification and loss of wildlife habitat. This resulted in continuous famine in various parts of the Sahel since 1968. The famines of 1973–1975 and 1984 were especially severe and burned into our minds the plight of starving people in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Biafra (now returned to Nigeria) and other Sahelian countries. Climate change that began to be felt in the 1980s made it worse. The connection with climate change has been known for more than two decades and was discovered by Canadian wildlife biologists.
Firs, let’s correct an error that has crept into the new reports. The camel-riding nomads from the Sahel, the vast dry savanna and semi-arid desert that lies between the Sahara desert and the green jungles of tropical Africa, are not ethnic Arabs. Although Arabic has been widely spoken in the region since Muslim conquests around 1200 years ago, many people of Chad, northern Sudan and Ethiopia speak endemic minority languages such as Nubian, in the Nilo-Saharan language group; Beja, in the Cushitic language groups; and Kordofanian languages. Nilo-Saharan languages predominate in the south. To the west, in Niger, Mali and southern Algeria, the nomad peoples, such as the Tuareg, speak Berber languages. To lump these people in with “Arabs” as is so often seen in newspaper articles, distorts our perspective.
After forced settlement in the colonial era, desertification intensified with well-intentioned but short-sighted and misinformed development aid projects. Canadian wildlife biologists A. R. E. Sinclair and J. M. Fryxell of the University of British Columbia noted in 1985 (C J. Zool. 63:987-994) that until the mid 1950s, the normal land use in the north of Sudan and indeed throughout the southern fringe of the Sahel—the semi-arid rangeland that is drier than the grasslands to the south but moister than the arid Sahara to the north—was pastoralism with migration following the rain. Human movements mimicked wildlife movements.
In the southern part of the region, the migration was annual and regular. This was the pattern, or example, of some 800,000 white-eared kob, an antelope of southeastern Sudan. Human migration mirrored that of wildlife: pastoralists in the southern fringe of the Sahel took their livestock, mostly cattle, south to the grasslands and fringes of flood plains of Lake Chad and the Senegal, Niger and Chari river basins where vegetation was dominated by perennial grasses.
In the north, however, closer to the Sahara where rainfall was less, the vegetation was dominated by annual grasses, forbs, desert shrubs, and acacia trees. The large wild ungulates of this region, such as the red-fronted and dorcas gazelles, fringe-eared and scimitar-horned oryx, and addax, did not follow annual north-south migrations, and neither did the people. Cattle cannot survive in this dry country, and cannot be driven far enough to reach grasslands and water in summer. Instead, people raised sheep and goats, which can subsist on dry brush and need less water. They and their flocks, like the wildlife, moved nomadically within the region in search of forage. They camped where they found water and forage, and when it was gone they covered large distances in search of rainfall and grass.
After the Second World War, western countries increased their food and development aid to Africa. That encouraged the pastoralists and others to settle around dug and drilled wells. With the wells, farmers and settled pastoralists could increase their flock and herd sizes, but this caused severe overgrazing around the new wells. The famine of 1973–1975 followed periods of below-average rainfall, but the pastoral grazing system had withstood such droughts before. Those droughts were well within the naturally high variability of rainfall in the Sahel. The human tragedies were caused by massive starvation of livestock because of overgrazing, not lack of rainfall. What Sinclair and Fryxell, the wildlife biologists, discovered was that the climate had changed, rainfall was declining over time, and this had exacerbated desertification. Later famines, such as the one of 1984, were climate-related.
They did not know then that the climate change that they detected resulted in part from greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Instead, they hypothesized that the human-caused overgrazing itself caused a decline in rainfall by making less moisture from plant transpiration available uptake by air currents and redistribution to the drier environments to the north. This is no doubt part of the story.
In 1988, a biologist writing about wildlife conservation (John E. Newby: Aridland Wildlife in Decline), also connected the deterioration of range conditions in the Sahel with conflict between nomad herders and farmers and began early in the colonial period:
“In the past, permanent use of sub-Saharan grasslands was not only difficult, since water resources were largely ephemeral, but also constrained by tribal warfare that dissuaded the establishment or activities of isolated groups of people. With the subjugation of the powerful nomadic tribes during the early colonial period, large areas of no-mans’ land, previously inhabited by wildlife, became available to man. Farmers were tree to extend their fields...farmers were perhaps for the first time able to extend their activities into the northern Sahel.”
The colonial masters brought large numbers of black slaves and serfs into the nomads’ territory, and with emancipation, they settled there. Newby further wrote that,
“With independence in the early 1960s, the new Sahelian states began to benefit from international aid programmes, foremost of which was the development of the waterless pastoral lands. Boreholes were sunk, deep wells cemented, and pumping stations installed, and for a short time the nomads had access to rich, new pastoral resources. What the developers failed to foresee, however, was the gross overgrazing that was to take place, the subsequent erosion and the desertification. Neither did they take into account the droughts of the late 1960s and 1970s. With changed herding patterns and increased livestock numbers, millions of head of cattle died for want of food, not water.”
The nomads were being hit from both ends: the wildlife that they had hunted for meat and leather was disappearing along with forage for their livestock in the arid north, and farmers were moving into their traditional dry-season territories areas to the south. The loss of wildlife such as oryx, addax, barbary sheep, two species of gazelles, and ostriches, was acute because these animals were important not only for meat, but for their importance in the cultures of these desert nomads. Oryx hide, for example, has particular uses not easily replaced by sheepskin or cowhide. Giraffes, which occur in the southern fringe of the Sahel where the nomads summer, provide another unique product: their tails are valued as wedding gifts (Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma by J. Michael Fay and Michael Nichols, National Geographic, March 2007). The cultural disruption caused by desertification has de-stabilized nomadic societies as much as the loss of livestock.
Since the rangeland and wildlife research in the 1980s, climate research has shown that global warming is playing a large part in desertification of the Sahel, and has done so for a quarter of a century.
In Darfur, the on-going human tragedy, although abetted by the current government for political reasons (albeit with a religious veneer), is fundamentally an ecological crisis caused first by poor land use, and second by climate change. The nomads are not to blame, except for those actually riding the camels and wielding the weapons. They are victims as much as the farmers they are attacking. The fight is not about religion, politics, or even land. It is about forage for livestock and the loss of rangeland productivity that has sustained the nomadic cultures of the Sahel for at least 5000 years. Disputes like these will spread as a consequence of global warming. We cannot sit in our comfortable homes and worry about what will happen to us in 50 or 100 years if we do not deal effectively with climate change. Canadian soldiers, diplomats, and, yes, even wildlife biologists, have already experienced the results of climate change in the Sahel and a good proportion of our international aid goes there. If we consider “us” to be all of us on this planet, the tragedy of climate change has already begun and it will get worse unless we stop it.
References consulted in this essay
Berger, Joel. 2004. The last mile: how to sustain long-distance migration in mammals. Conservation Biology 18:320–331.
Fryxell, J. M. 1987. Food limitation and demography of a migratory antelope, the white-eared kob. Oecologia 72:83-91.
Hulme, Mike, Ruth Doherty, Todd Ngara, Mark New, and David Lister. 2001. African Climate Change: 1900-2100. Climate Research 17:145-168.
Kabii, T. 1996. An Overview of African Wetlands. Ramsar Bureau, Switzerland. 6 pp.
Newby, John E. 1988. Aridland wildlife in decline, Pp 146-166 in A. Dixon, and D. Jones, (eds) Conservation and Biology of Desert Antelopes. London, Christopher Helm Ltd.
Sinclair, A. R. E., and J. M. Fryxell. 1985. The Sahel of Africa: ecology of a disaster. Canadian Journal of Zoology 63:987-994.
The carnage in the Sudan continues, even though climate change has pushed it to the back pages. Meanwhile, the neo-climate change news coverage is framed as, “if we don’t act now, then sometime in the future we will be in trouble.” It turns out that climate change and the humanitarian crisis in the Sudan are related.
The trouble in Darfur results from camel-riding nomads, or young men from nomadic cultures, who are mainly Muslim, attacking settled farming peoples of the south and west, who are mainly Christian. Clearly, the nomads have government support and encouragement, making the current phase of this crisis a political and religious crusade.
No one, except, apparently the jinjaweed themselves, can countenance their murderous attacks on the settled (mostly black) farmers, but the nomads from the north are not to blame for this crisis.
We are. The roots of this crisis are in the colonial enslavement in the first half of the last century, and in misguided international aid efforts that began in the 1960s. Prior to these western interventions, the nomads moved their flocks with the seasons in a relationship with their dry environment that had been stable for at least five millennia. Forced settlement by the colonial masters, followed by well-drilling to ease poverty and encourage farming, disrupted the pastoral patterns and caused large-scale desertification and loss of wildlife habitat. This resulted in continuous famine in various parts of the Sahel since 1968. The famines of 1973–1975 and 1984 were especially severe and burned into our minds the plight of starving people in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Biafra (now returned to Nigeria) and other Sahelian countries. Climate change that began to be felt in the 1980s made it worse. The connection with climate change has been known for more than two decades and was discovered by Canadian wildlife biologists.
Firs, let’s correct an error that has crept into the new reports. The camel-riding nomads from the Sahel, the vast dry savanna and semi-arid desert that lies between the Sahara desert and the green jungles of tropical Africa, are not ethnic Arabs. Although Arabic has been widely spoken in the region since Muslim conquests around 1200 years ago, many people of Chad, northern Sudan and Ethiopia speak endemic minority languages such as Nubian, in the Nilo-Saharan language group; Beja, in the Cushitic language groups; and Kordofanian languages. Nilo-Saharan languages predominate in the south. To the west, in Niger, Mali and southern Algeria, the nomad peoples, such as the Tuareg, speak Berber languages. To lump these people in with “Arabs” as is so often seen in newspaper articles, distorts our perspective.
After forced settlement in the colonial era, desertification intensified with well-intentioned but short-sighted and misinformed development aid projects. Canadian wildlife biologists A. R. E. Sinclair and J. M. Fryxell of the University of British Columbia noted in 1985 (C J. Zool. 63:987-994) that until the mid 1950s, the normal land use in the north of Sudan and indeed throughout the southern fringe of the Sahel—the semi-arid rangeland that is drier than the grasslands to the south but moister than the arid Sahara to the north—was pastoralism with migration following the rain. Human movements mimicked wildlife movements.
In the southern part of the region, the migration was annual and regular. This was the pattern, or example, of some 800,000 white-eared kob, an antelope of southeastern Sudan. Human migration mirrored that of wildlife: pastoralists in the southern fringe of the Sahel took their livestock, mostly cattle, south to the grasslands and fringes of flood plains of Lake Chad and the Senegal, Niger and Chari river basins where vegetation was dominated by perennial grasses.
In the north, however, closer to the Sahara where rainfall was less, the vegetation was dominated by annual grasses, forbs, desert shrubs, and acacia trees. The large wild ungulates of this region, such as the red-fronted and dorcas gazelles, fringe-eared and scimitar-horned oryx, and addax, did not follow annual north-south migrations, and neither did the people. Cattle cannot survive in this dry country, and cannot be driven far enough to reach grasslands and water in summer. Instead, people raised sheep and goats, which can subsist on dry brush and need less water. They and their flocks, like the wildlife, moved nomadically within the region in search of forage. They camped where they found water and forage, and when it was gone they covered large distances in search of rainfall and grass.
After the Second World War, western countries increased their food and development aid to Africa. That encouraged the pastoralists and others to settle around dug and drilled wells. With the wells, farmers and settled pastoralists could increase their flock and herd sizes, but this caused severe overgrazing around the new wells. The famine of 1973–1975 followed periods of below-average rainfall, but the pastoral grazing system had withstood such droughts before. Those droughts were well within the naturally high variability of rainfall in the Sahel. The human tragedies were caused by massive starvation of livestock because of overgrazing, not lack of rainfall. What Sinclair and Fryxell, the wildlife biologists, discovered was that the climate had changed, rainfall was declining over time, and this had exacerbated desertification. Later famines, such as the one of 1984, were climate-related.
They did not know then that the climate change that they detected resulted in part from greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. Instead, they hypothesized that the human-caused overgrazing itself caused a decline in rainfall by making less moisture from plant transpiration available uptake by air currents and redistribution to the drier environments to the north. This is no doubt part of the story.
In 1988, a biologist writing about wildlife conservation (John E. Newby: Aridland Wildlife in Decline), also connected the deterioration of range conditions in the Sahel with conflict between nomad herders and farmers and began early in the colonial period:
“In the past, permanent use of sub-Saharan grasslands was not only difficult, since water resources were largely ephemeral, but also constrained by tribal warfare that dissuaded the establishment or activities of isolated groups of people. With the subjugation of the powerful nomadic tribes during the early colonial period, large areas of no-mans’ land, previously inhabited by wildlife, became available to man. Farmers were tree to extend their fields...farmers were perhaps for the first time able to extend their activities into the northern Sahel.”
The colonial masters brought large numbers of black slaves and serfs into the nomads’ territory, and with emancipation, they settled there. Newby further wrote that,
“With independence in the early 1960s, the new Sahelian states began to benefit from international aid programmes, foremost of which was the development of the waterless pastoral lands. Boreholes were sunk, deep wells cemented, and pumping stations installed, and for a short time the nomads had access to rich, new pastoral resources. What the developers failed to foresee, however, was the gross overgrazing that was to take place, the subsequent erosion and the desertification. Neither did they take into account the droughts of the late 1960s and 1970s. With changed herding patterns and increased livestock numbers, millions of head of cattle died for want of food, not water.”
The nomads were being hit from both ends: the wildlife that they had hunted for meat and leather was disappearing along with forage for their livestock in the arid north, and farmers were moving into their traditional dry-season territories areas to the south. The loss of wildlife such as oryx, addax, barbary sheep, two species of gazelles, and ostriches, was acute because these animals were important not only for meat, but for their importance in the cultures of these desert nomads. Oryx hide, for example, has particular uses not easily replaced by sheepskin or cowhide. Giraffes, which occur in the southern fringe of the Sahel where the nomads summer, provide another unique product: their tails are valued as wedding gifts (Ivory Wars: Last Stand in Zakouma by J. Michael Fay and Michael Nichols, National Geographic, March 2007). The cultural disruption caused by desertification has de-stabilized nomadic societies as much as the loss of livestock.
Since the rangeland and wildlife research in the 1980s, climate research has shown that global warming is playing a large part in desertification of the Sahel, and has done so for a quarter of a century.
In Darfur, the on-going human tragedy, although abetted by the current government for political reasons (albeit with a religious veneer), is fundamentally an ecological crisis caused first by poor land use, and second by climate change. The nomads are not to blame, except for those actually riding the camels and wielding the weapons. They are victims as much as the farmers they are attacking. The fight is not about religion, politics, or even land. It is about forage for livestock and the loss of rangeland productivity that has sustained the nomadic cultures of the Sahel for at least 5000 years. Disputes like these will spread as a consequence of global warming. We cannot sit in our comfortable homes and worry about what will happen to us in 50 or 100 years if we do not deal effectively with climate change. Canadian soldiers, diplomats, and, yes, even wildlife biologists, have already experienced the results of climate change in the Sahel and a good proportion of our international aid goes there. If we consider “us” to be all of us on this planet, the tragedy of climate change has already begun and it will get worse unless we stop it.
References consulted in this essay
Berger, Joel. 2004. The last mile: how to sustain long-distance migration in mammals. Conservation Biology 18:320–331.
Fryxell, J. M. 1987. Food limitation and demography of a migratory antelope, the white-eared kob. Oecologia 72:83-91.
Hulme, Mike, Ruth Doherty, Todd Ngara, Mark New, and David Lister. 2001. African Climate Change: 1900-2100. Climate Research 17:145-168.
Kabii, T. 1996. An Overview of African Wetlands. Ramsar Bureau, Switzerland. 6 pp.
Newby, John E. 1988. Aridland wildlife in decline, Pp 146-166 in A. Dixon, and D. Jones, (eds) Conservation and Biology of Desert Antelopes. London, Christopher Helm Ltd.
Sinclair, A. R. E., and J. M. Fryxell. 1985. The Sahel of Africa: ecology of a disaster. Canadian Journal of Zoology 63:987-994.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Why the Copenhagen meeting on Climate Change is important
Like Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his delegation going to Copenhagen this week, I, too, have been thinking about global warming—since 1985 when I read an article in the Canadian Journal of Zoology by two Canadian wildlife biologists (Sinclair, A. R. E. and J. M. Fryxell. 1985. The Sahel of Africa: ecology of a disaster. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 63:987-994). The article gave evidence that the weather was changing in the Sahel, the arid grassland region on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, and that this was partly the reason for the mass starvations of livestock and people in the 1970s and 1980s. Remember the television images of people starving and dying in their thousands in Eritrea, and Biafra? Sinclair and Fryxel proposed that the cause of the climate change in the Sahel was desertification caused by land mis-management and they got it partly right. But they could not have known then, as we now do, that part of the drying was caused by our greenhouse gas emissions. Yes, you and I share responsibility for countless deaths from starvation in Africa. Our culpability grows when we realize that conflicts like those in Sudan and Somalia derive from the same source: too many goats, sheep, cows and camels competing for too little forage and forcing families, clans and countries to confront each other over water and territory.
(please let me know if you would like a more detailed discussion of the agove paragraph, with references).
In 1987, as a middle manager with Environment Canada, I attended my first briefing on climate change. That was the year Canada hosted an international meeting in Montreal that resulted in an agreement to ban chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), a gas used in refrigeration systems that causes atmospheric ozone depletion, another aspect of climate change.
Five years later I had risen enough in the ranks, as well as in the science, to be the briefer instead of the briefee. In 1993, in a briefing to the Regional Director General and the regional executives of Environment Canada, Pacific & Yukon Region in Vancouver, I quoted this from John H. Gibbons and his colleagues in the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in a 1989 article from Scientific American on "Managing Planet Earth.":
“Even if industrial countries managed to halve their carbon dioxide emissions...population growth and economic development in the less developed countries would most likely drive up their carbon dioxin emissions from 450 to 900 kilograms per person per year by 2030. Annual worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide would then be 2.5 times what they are today....The path of industrial development in China, for instance, could have a greater effect on the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide that of any other nation. China's critical role stems from its large and growing population, its tendency toward energy intensive processes, its poor energy efficiency and its massive reliance on coal.”
I prepared that briefing after my first visit to China and before the publication of my Environment Canada report, Biodiversity in British Columbia: our changing environment, which was in peer review at the time and was published in early 1994. It contained a chapter, which I wrote with co-author Eric Taylor of the Atmospheric Environment Service, “Atmospheric change in British Columbia.” The title itself says quite a lot, because, back then, Environment Canada had not officially accepted that climate change would, in fact, occur with continuing increases of greenhouse gases. I was not allowed to use the term, nor to imply that the changes that I documented as already occurring in British Columbia—increasing precipitation on the coast, drying and winter warming in the interior, increased frequency of forest fires and increased spread of destructive forest insects—were the result of human-caused climate change.
The purpose of my 1993 briefing to the regional executives was to explain why Canada should support the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the precursor to the Kyoto Protocol. I pointed out the example of China as one of several vigorously developing countries whose air emissions would be crucial to success in controlling global warming:
• China led the world in per capita economic growth during 1965-1989, and would continue to do so at least through 2025,
• World economic growth assumptions, and hence the projected rate of increase in greenhouse gasses, had to be revised upwards for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 1992 supplementary report, partly because of China's unexpectedly strong performance,
• In 1990 China's carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GNP were four times higher than the global average, and five time higher that OECD countries, owing to inefficient production, transportation/ transmission systems, and patterns of consumption,
• The greenhouse gas emission projections are highly sensitive to population and economic growth assumptions, and most of the uncertainty over future growth in greenhouse gas emissions was likely to depend on how developing countries such as China chose to meet their economic and social needs.
As an example of this last point, I noted that if China did not build the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River—the world’s largest, which was extremely controversial at the time—it would forgo electricity equivalent to the consumption of 40-50 million tons of raw coal, or to 10 nuclear generating stations, or to seven 2.4 million KW thermal generating stations and associated coal mines and railroad transportation. The dam would, according to Chinese official estimates, cut carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen-oxide emissions by 100 millions tons, 2 million tons, 10,000 tons and 370,000 tons, respectively. Against these energy and climate change benefits, the dam would displace 1.2 million people and endanger many rare Yangtze River species, such as the unique Chinese river dolphin.
(The conservationists were right: the Chinese river dolphin was officially declared extinct on December 13, 2007.)
My take-home message to the Environment Canada executives was that the stability of our own ecosystems here at home, and the industries and commerce that they support, depend on the success of international agreements such as the UNFCCC.
Another chapter in Biodiversity in BC, “Threats to diversity of forest ecosystems in British Columbia” showed that insect infestations had increased exponentially during the 1980s and 1990s, coinciding with record warm winters. One species, the mountain pine beetle, had recently overwintered further north than ever before, and reproduced earlier. The damage had gone from an annual average of about 250,000 hectares to a peak of 1.1 million hectares and I warned that, with global warming, forest pests could increase further. Sure enough, by 2004, the scale had scale of insect damage had grown to 9.0 million in 2004, and the BC Government acknowledged that it was at least in part due to global warming.
In 2005, the federal government chipped in $100 million, on top of British Columbia’s $101 million, to combat the mountain pine beetle, just one of the two dozen species that regularly damage our forest. This a cost of not controlling climate change. Others include damage to forest and residences from forest fires, damage from increasing floods stronger storms, rising costs of insurance payouts and premiums, and so on. These costs grow annually are not hypothetical: British Columbians and other Canadians are paying cash for them.
There are even more ominous threats that centre on global trade. Canada sells a lot of food (mainly wheat) to other countries and buys a lot of food (mainly fresh produce and specialty foods) from them. Our selling depends on being able to produce surpluses and finding buyers who can afford them. Our buying depends on being able to afford it and finding sellers with surpluses. Given the climate change impacts in the most recent IPCC report, completed February 3, 2007, these are matters of increasing uncertainty. Climate change disruptions in food production and wealth generation systems in other countries will affect us. Our survival may depend on joining with other countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Meanwhile, in 1997, as Canada prepared for the negotiations on greenhouse gas controls under the UNFCCC, to be held in Kyoto later that year, Canada asked its top scientists to prepare an eight-volume “Country Study.” Its purpose was to brief negotiators and the bureaucracy that supported them on the implications of Climate change for Canada. Volume I, British Columbia and Yukon, contained my chapter on ecosystem response to climate change and 25 other chapters detailing the potential impacts on Canada’s environment and a range of response options that focused on greenhouse gas emission reductions. As a result, Canada signed the Kyoto Protocol in April 1998 and, with even stronger science evidence, ratified it in December 2002.
When I was first in Shanghai in 1993, the city’s 14 million people owned seven million bicycles and almost no private cars. Busses, trucks and a few taxis inched their way through streets filled with bicycles, pedestrians and handcarts. By 2003, the human population had increased by another 2 million (6 million, if outlying cities are included), the number of bicycles had increased at a lower rate than the people, and 200,000 private cars were in use
China’s CO2 emissions rose rapidly from 1978 to 1996, mostly as a result of increasing automobile use and new coal-fired power plants. Coal-fired power plants now provide 70% of its electricity supply, compared to 24% hydroelectric power. China gets just 2.3% of its electricity from nine nuclear power plants, but plans to build another 30 by 2020. Its CO2 emissions fell 7% by 2000, however, as a result of new hydroelectric power (principally from the Three Gorges Dam) and the closing of coal-fired plants. US emissions grew by 5% in the same period. Canada’s also grew. In 2005, China stopped construction of 22 more coal-fired power plants, possibly to try to embarrass the United States into signing on to the Kyoto Protocol.
The amount of pollution in China’s air is becoming legendary. In 1995, my wife and I visited Qingdao, a coastal city blessed with sea breezes that blow its pollution inland from its popular sandy beaches. We did not notice any particularly thick air. In December 2007, however, I returned to Qingdao, taking with me our 1995 tourist map of the city. A new edition of the map showed that the city had expanded to about 3 times its former size and the air pollution was more than noticeable: inland from the beach, it was so dirty that it hurt my eyes and lungs. One day the highway west (downwind) of the city was closed because drivers couldn’t see the road. My pictures taken in a nature sanctuary some 400 km northwest of Qingdao, halfway between there and Beijing, show migratory birds in a thick soup of air pollution on an otherwise clear, sunny winter day.
The data on China’s, the United States,’ India’s and other countries’ air emissions make a mockery of Canada’s politicians’ sudden efforts to convince us to give up our SUVs. (I drive one because as a wildlife biologist and I need it for fieldwork, but my wife and I gave up our second car years ago and willingly arrange our schedules accordingly.) Of course we as citizens need to do that because it is the right thing to do. We should recognize, however, that to make a meaningful impact on global warming, we will have to set rigorous emission limits for commercial vehicles and our most polluting industries. Even this will not actually dent global CO2 emissions much, but it will buy us a place at the table—the Copenhagen table—where we can hopefully influence the countries whose emissions do matter, such as the United States, China, and India. Our future depends on it.
(please let me know if you would like a more detailed discussion of the agove paragraph, with references).
In 1987, as a middle manager with Environment Canada, I attended my first briefing on climate change. That was the year Canada hosted an international meeting in Montreal that resulted in an agreement to ban chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), a gas used in refrigeration systems that causes atmospheric ozone depletion, another aspect of climate change.
Five years later I had risen enough in the ranks, as well as in the science, to be the briefer instead of the briefee. In 1993, in a briefing to the Regional Director General and the regional executives of Environment Canada, Pacific & Yukon Region in Vancouver, I quoted this from John H. Gibbons and his colleagues in the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in a 1989 article from Scientific American on "Managing Planet Earth.":
“Even if industrial countries managed to halve their carbon dioxide emissions...population growth and economic development in the less developed countries would most likely drive up their carbon dioxin emissions from 450 to 900 kilograms per person per year by 2030. Annual worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide would then be 2.5 times what they are today....The path of industrial development in China, for instance, could have a greater effect on the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide that of any other nation. China's critical role stems from its large and growing population, its tendency toward energy intensive processes, its poor energy efficiency and its massive reliance on coal.”
I prepared that briefing after my first visit to China and before the publication of my Environment Canada report, Biodiversity in British Columbia: our changing environment, which was in peer review at the time and was published in early 1994. It contained a chapter, which I wrote with co-author Eric Taylor of the Atmospheric Environment Service, “Atmospheric change in British Columbia.” The title itself says quite a lot, because, back then, Environment Canada had not officially accepted that climate change would, in fact, occur with continuing increases of greenhouse gases. I was not allowed to use the term, nor to imply that the changes that I documented as already occurring in British Columbia—increasing precipitation on the coast, drying and winter warming in the interior, increased frequency of forest fires and increased spread of destructive forest insects—were the result of human-caused climate change.
The purpose of my 1993 briefing to the regional executives was to explain why Canada should support the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the precursor to the Kyoto Protocol. I pointed out the example of China as one of several vigorously developing countries whose air emissions would be crucial to success in controlling global warming:
• China led the world in per capita economic growth during 1965-1989, and would continue to do so at least through 2025,
• World economic growth assumptions, and hence the projected rate of increase in greenhouse gasses, had to be revised upwards for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 1992 supplementary report, partly because of China's unexpectedly strong performance,
• In 1990 China's carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GNP were four times higher than the global average, and five time higher that OECD countries, owing to inefficient production, transportation/ transmission systems, and patterns of consumption,
• The greenhouse gas emission projections are highly sensitive to population and economic growth assumptions, and most of the uncertainty over future growth in greenhouse gas emissions was likely to depend on how developing countries such as China chose to meet their economic and social needs.
As an example of this last point, I noted that if China did not build the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River—the world’s largest, which was extremely controversial at the time—it would forgo electricity equivalent to the consumption of 40-50 million tons of raw coal, or to 10 nuclear generating stations, or to seven 2.4 million KW thermal generating stations and associated coal mines and railroad transportation. The dam would, according to Chinese official estimates, cut carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen-oxide emissions by 100 millions tons, 2 million tons, 10,000 tons and 370,000 tons, respectively. Against these energy and climate change benefits, the dam would displace 1.2 million people and endanger many rare Yangtze River species, such as the unique Chinese river dolphin.
(The conservationists were right: the Chinese river dolphin was officially declared extinct on December 13, 2007.)
My take-home message to the Environment Canada executives was that the stability of our own ecosystems here at home, and the industries and commerce that they support, depend on the success of international agreements such as the UNFCCC.
Another chapter in Biodiversity in BC, “Threats to diversity of forest ecosystems in British Columbia” showed that insect infestations had increased exponentially during the 1980s and 1990s, coinciding with record warm winters. One species, the mountain pine beetle, had recently overwintered further north than ever before, and reproduced earlier. The damage had gone from an annual average of about 250,000 hectares to a peak of 1.1 million hectares and I warned that, with global warming, forest pests could increase further. Sure enough, by 2004, the scale had scale of insect damage had grown to 9.0 million in 2004, and the BC Government acknowledged that it was at least in part due to global warming.
In 2005, the federal government chipped in $100 million, on top of British Columbia’s $101 million, to combat the mountain pine beetle, just one of the two dozen species that regularly damage our forest. This a cost of not controlling climate change. Others include damage to forest and residences from forest fires, damage from increasing floods stronger storms, rising costs of insurance payouts and premiums, and so on. These costs grow annually are not hypothetical: British Columbians and other Canadians are paying cash for them.
There are even more ominous threats that centre on global trade. Canada sells a lot of food (mainly wheat) to other countries and buys a lot of food (mainly fresh produce and specialty foods) from them. Our selling depends on being able to produce surpluses and finding buyers who can afford them. Our buying depends on being able to afford it and finding sellers with surpluses. Given the climate change impacts in the most recent IPCC report, completed February 3, 2007, these are matters of increasing uncertainty. Climate change disruptions in food production and wealth generation systems in other countries will affect us. Our survival may depend on joining with other countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Meanwhile, in 1997, as Canada prepared for the negotiations on greenhouse gas controls under the UNFCCC, to be held in Kyoto later that year, Canada asked its top scientists to prepare an eight-volume “Country Study.” Its purpose was to brief negotiators and the bureaucracy that supported them on the implications of Climate change for Canada. Volume I, British Columbia and Yukon, contained my chapter on ecosystem response to climate change and 25 other chapters detailing the potential impacts on Canada’s environment and a range of response options that focused on greenhouse gas emission reductions. As a result, Canada signed the Kyoto Protocol in April 1998 and, with even stronger science evidence, ratified it in December 2002.
When I was first in Shanghai in 1993, the city’s 14 million people owned seven million bicycles and almost no private cars. Busses, trucks and a few taxis inched their way through streets filled with bicycles, pedestrians and handcarts. By 2003, the human population had increased by another 2 million (6 million, if outlying cities are included), the number of bicycles had increased at a lower rate than the people, and 200,000 private cars were in use
China’s CO2 emissions rose rapidly from 1978 to 1996, mostly as a result of increasing automobile use and new coal-fired power plants. Coal-fired power plants now provide 70% of its electricity supply, compared to 24% hydroelectric power. China gets just 2.3% of its electricity from nine nuclear power plants, but plans to build another 30 by 2020. Its CO2 emissions fell 7% by 2000, however, as a result of new hydroelectric power (principally from the Three Gorges Dam) and the closing of coal-fired plants. US emissions grew by 5% in the same period. Canada’s also grew. In 2005, China stopped construction of 22 more coal-fired power plants, possibly to try to embarrass the United States into signing on to the Kyoto Protocol.
The amount of pollution in China’s air is becoming legendary. In 1995, my wife and I visited Qingdao, a coastal city blessed with sea breezes that blow its pollution inland from its popular sandy beaches. We did not notice any particularly thick air. In December 2007, however, I returned to Qingdao, taking with me our 1995 tourist map of the city. A new edition of the map showed that the city had expanded to about 3 times its former size and the air pollution was more than noticeable: inland from the beach, it was so dirty that it hurt my eyes and lungs. One day the highway west (downwind) of the city was closed because drivers couldn’t see the road. My pictures taken in a nature sanctuary some 400 km northwest of Qingdao, halfway between there and Beijing, show migratory birds in a thick soup of air pollution on an otherwise clear, sunny winter day.
The data on China’s, the United States,’ India’s and other countries’ air emissions make a mockery of Canada’s politicians’ sudden efforts to convince us to give up our SUVs. (I drive one because as a wildlife biologist and I need it for fieldwork, but my wife and I gave up our second car years ago and willingly arrange our schedules accordingly.) Of course we as citizens need to do that because it is the right thing to do. We should recognize, however, that to make a meaningful impact on global warming, we will have to set rigorous emission limits for commercial vehicles and our most polluting industries. Even this will not actually dent global CO2 emissions much, but it will buy us a place at the table—the Copenhagen table—where we can hopefully influence the countries whose emissions do matter, such as the United States, China, and India. Our future depends on it.
Pella, Jordan: the oldest continuously occupied city in the world
I first arrived serendipitously in Pella at the end of a very long day in 2002. Signage was poor and as I turned south from the Jordan Valley and drove up through the modern little village of Tabaqat Fahil, I didn’t know exactly where the ruins were. The road wound through parched hills that the setting sun had turned the colour of amber wine. I pulled into the beautiful, spacious Pella Resthouse, designed by prominent architect Ammar Khammash, to ask directions. The proprietor took me out onto a patio draped with flowered vines and adorned with ancient, carved stone pediments and column corinths. The restaurant was on a promontory overlooking a deep basin filled with marble columns and floors of Byzantine basilicas. The sun glinted on a pool where a permanent spring issued from the ground and fed a small stream, flowing now even in the heat of August. Beyond it were holes of archaeological digs, prompting the proprietor to proudly inform me that Pella was the oldest city in the world. To the left was another collection of columns, the remains of a 5th Century Byzantine church.
Although not much to look at compared, say, to the well-preserved and restored Roman city of Jerash a little to the southeast, Pella is a must for history buffs, and there is no more scenic place in Jordan. It is one of the oldest, continuously-occupied sites in the world, with Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age layers under the ancient city structures. The earliest written record of it so far discovered is in Egyptian texts from 4,000 years ago; Pella’s former oak forests supplied timber for their chariots. Roman palaces and temples built on former Hellenistic ruins had been destroyed by the Hebrew king Alexander Jannaeus in 82 BCE, rebuilt by the Romans, and rebuilt again by the Byzantine Christians. There is a Caananite temple, referred to as the Pella Migdol Temple, an Iron Age palace, and three Byzantine basilicas. A Mamluk mosque commemorates where a Companion of Mohammad fell in the Battle of Fahl in 635 AD. Archaeological work continues; the site has been rich in antiquities that fill a new, small museum overlooking the site. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage Site tentative list.
The proprietor brought tea, and I was about to order supper when I saw a shepherd riding a donkey, leading his sheep through the ruins. I said, “Wait a minute—no, wait an hour.” I clambered down from the patio, ducked through a fence and caught up with the shepherd as he reached the top of a high, steep hill, Tell Husn, that overlooks Pella to the north, and also gave expansive views west out over the Jordan Valley, east up a dry wadi, and south over rolling hills. The shepherd greeted me standing atop the ruins of a Byzantine fortress under which archaeologists have found Bronze Age tombs. We shared a pleasant conversation in the sunset, after which I returned to the resthouse for one of the best meals I ever ate as the crescent moon rose over the Jordan Valley.
Search Picasa for “Pella 5th Century Byzantine Church” to see a photo, and others from Jordan.
Although not much to look at compared, say, to the well-preserved and restored Roman city of Jerash a little to the southeast, Pella is a must for history buffs, and there is no more scenic place in Jordan. It is one of the oldest, continuously-occupied sites in the world, with Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age layers under the ancient city structures. The earliest written record of it so far discovered is in Egyptian texts from 4,000 years ago; Pella’s former oak forests supplied timber for their chariots. Roman palaces and temples built on former Hellenistic ruins had been destroyed by the Hebrew king Alexander Jannaeus in 82 BCE, rebuilt by the Romans, and rebuilt again by the Byzantine Christians. There is a Caananite temple, referred to as the Pella Migdol Temple, an Iron Age palace, and three Byzantine basilicas. A Mamluk mosque commemorates where a Companion of Mohammad fell in the Battle of Fahl in 635 AD. Archaeological work continues; the site has been rich in antiquities that fill a new, small museum overlooking the site. It is on the UNESCO World Heritage Site tentative list.
The proprietor brought tea, and I was about to order supper when I saw a shepherd riding a donkey, leading his sheep through the ruins. I said, “Wait a minute—no, wait an hour.” I clambered down from the patio, ducked through a fence and caught up with the shepherd as he reached the top of a high, steep hill, Tell Husn, that overlooks Pella to the north, and also gave expansive views west out over the Jordan Valley, east up a dry wadi, and south over rolling hills. The shepherd greeted me standing atop the ruins of a Byzantine fortress under which archaeologists have found Bronze Age tombs. We shared a pleasant conversation in the sunset, after which I returned to the resthouse for one of the best meals I ever ate as the crescent moon rose over the Jordan Valley.
Search Picasa for “Pella 5th Century Byzantine Church” to see a photo, and others from Jordan.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Bedouin Coffee and other Rituals
Visitors always enjoy meeting local people and in the Jordanian desert, the feeling is mutual. The Bedouin tribes who make up almost the whole population outside of the cities have a cultural compulsion of generosity to strangers. The Koran requires it and they are proud of their custom of hospitality. Often isolated in their tents and remote villages, they also enjoy meeting and hearing the views of foreigners. Canadians are well liked because of our perceived neutrality in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The children may enjoy practicing their English. During the four years that my wife and I worked in Jordan, upon seeing our red and white maple leaf bag tags, people often called to us, “Hey, Canadi!” It is well, however, to be aware of local customs, one of which is the coffee ritual.
The ritual is performed at every formal meeting, for example, with government officials, and reflects the tradition of the Bedu, as they call themselves (“Bedouin” is a French corruption): “people of the desert.”
Almost every Bedu family has a least a few sheep and some have hundreds. They still measure wealth in camels. About 60% are semi-nomadic in that, although they have a home in one of the many villages that dot the desert, they spend part of the year living in tents and roaming in search of pasture. Between 5% and 10% are completely nomadic, having no permanent home.
Although most tourists only meet Bedu in places like Wadi Rum and Petra, and pay for the privilege, you can walk up to a tent anywhere and usually be well received, as long as someone in your group speaks enough Arabic to say “As-salaam halaycum,” (Peace be upon you) and explain that you just want to say hello. Then you will most likely be invited inside.
Every Bedu tent has two sections: a public area where the men greet visitors and a private area for the women. Visitors of both genders go into the public part. Do not ever go or even look into the women’s section unless invited, and a male stranger will never be invited. Outside the tent, if you chance to meet a woman, she will usually avoid eye contact and you should too.
Inside are usually four long, narrow kilims arranged in a square. The women weave the kilims of goat or sheep wool in traditional patterns, and they are treasured. Remove your shoes before stepping onto the kilim. There will be, or your host will quickly bring, pillows for you to recline against as you sit or half recline on the carpet. Then begins the coffee ritual.
A son of the tent’s owner—usually the youngest who is old enough to complete the task competently—brings an urn of coffee and a single, small cup without a handle. He goes to the eldest male guest, offers the cup, fills it with coffee, and then stands there expectantly. Take it with your right hand and never touch it with your left. Arab coffee is thinner than the Turkish coffee that you get in the cities, and usually flavoured with spices such as cardamom and sumac, or desert herbs. As it is a real treat, and valuable, you should act appropriately grateful. Do not set the cup down or dally with it. Drink it quickly and give the empty cup back to the lad with a side-to-side tipping motion, as if demonstrating that the cup is empty. This indicates that you have had enough. If you have failed to make the tipping motion, he offers to refill it. Decline. You may say “shukran,” thank you. He will then take the same cup to the next visitor, and so all around the tent until everyone has sipped.
After the coffee ritual, the lad brings sweetened tea, often flavoured with mint or herbs of the desert, and glasses for everyone. There is no ritual with the tea; it is simply refreshment, but there are customs to observe. The lad pours everyone a glass and sets the tea kettle on the sand in the middle of the square formed by the four kilims. On the sand is also where you place your glass when you want to set it down. This protects the kilim in case of a spill. Water for washing is in short supply in the desert. Do not drink your tea too quickly, as it will keep the lad jumping up to refill your glass. Taking a second or even third glass, though, is no affront.
Your host may ask you to stay for a meal. Decline. If he offers a second time and appears to insist, decline. If he offers a third time, and if your meeting has been especially friendly and fulfilling, you may accept. But remember this: if you accept his hospitality once, it means nothing because his religion and culture require him to offer it. If you accept his hospitality twice, it means you have become friends and there may be obligations. He may, for example, expect you to help his son or daughter get into university in Canada. If you accept a third time, it means you are willing to die defending his family and property from attackers. Later I'll post some photos at Picasa.
The ritual is performed at every formal meeting, for example, with government officials, and reflects the tradition of the Bedu, as they call themselves (“Bedouin” is a French corruption): “people of the desert.”
Almost every Bedu family has a least a few sheep and some have hundreds. They still measure wealth in camels. About 60% are semi-nomadic in that, although they have a home in one of the many villages that dot the desert, they spend part of the year living in tents and roaming in search of pasture. Between 5% and 10% are completely nomadic, having no permanent home.
Although most tourists only meet Bedu in places like Wadi Rum and Petra, and pay for the privilege, you can walk up to a tent anywhere and usually be well received, as long as someone in your group speaks enough Arabic to say “As-salaam halaycum,” (Peace be upon you) and explain that you just want to say hello. Then you will most likely be invited inside.
Every Bedu tent has two sections: a public area where the men greet visitors and a private area for the women. Visitors of both genders go into the public part. Do not ever go or even look into the women’s section unless invited, and a male stranger will never be invited. Outside the tent, if you chance to meet a woman, she will usually avoid eye contact and you should too.
Inside are usually four long, narrow kilims arranged in a square. The women weave the kilims of goat or sheep wool in traditional patterns, and they are treasured. Remove your shoes before stepping onto the kilim. There will be, or your host will quickly bring, pillows for you to recline against as you sit or half recline on the carpet. Then begins the coffee ritual.
A son of the tent’s owner—usually the youngest who is old enough to complete the task competently—brings an urn of coffee and a single, small cup without a handle. He goes to the eldest male guest, offers the cup, fills it with coffee, and then stands there expectantly. Take it with your right hand and never touch it with your left. Arab coffee is thinner than the Turkish coffee that you get in the cities, and usually flavoured with spices such as cardamom and sumac, or desert herbs. As it is a real treat, and valuable, you should act appropriately grateful. Do not set the cup down or dally with it. Drink it quickly and give the empty cup back to the lad with a side-to-side tipping motion, as if demonstrating that the cup is empty. This indicates that you have had enough. If you have failed to make the tipping motion, he offers to refill it. Decline. You may say “shukran,” thank you. He will then take the same cup to the next visitor, and so all around the tent until everyone has sipped.
After the coffee ritual, the lad brings sweetened tea, often flavoured with mint or herbs of the desert, and glasses for everyone. There is no ritual with the tea; it is simply refreshment, but there are customs to observe. The lad pours everyone a glass and sets the tea kettle on the sand in the middle of the square formed by the four kilims. On the sand is also where you place your glass when you want to set it down. This protects the kilim in case of a spill. Water for washing is in short supply in the desert. Do not drink your tea too quickly, as it will keep the lad jumping up to refill your glass. Taking a second or even third glass, though, is no affront.
Your host may ask you to stay for a meal. Decline. If he offers a second time and appears to insist, decline. If he offers a third time, and if your meeting has been especially friendly and fulfilling, you may accept. But remember this: if you accept his hospitality once, it means nothing because his religion and culture require him to offer it. If you accept his hospitality twice, it means you have become friends and there may be obligations. He may, for example, expect you to help his son or daughter get into university in Canada. If you accept a third time, it means you are willing to die defending his family and property from attackers. Later I'll post some photos at Picasa.
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