The Environmental History of Africa

Topic 9 - Images of Degradation: Creeping Desert?

  1. Science in the colonial period and up to the 1970s began from assumptions about the nature of past landscapes and the role of African's in shaping it: Degradation narratives are ideas about environmental decline (such as desertification, erosion, loss of biodiversity) that appeal to popular images and also direct decisions that affect policy and development aid.

  2. Degradation narratives are inherently historical in their arguments. Anthropologist Allan Hoben has defined as degradation narrative as: ...historically grounded, culturally constructed paradigms that at once describe a problem and prescribe its solution. Many of the environmental narratives about Africa are rooted in a narrative that tells us how things were in an earlier time when people lived in harmony with nature, how human agency has altered that harmony, and of the calamities that will plague people and nature if dramatic action is not taken soon.


  3. Science has played a role in setting assumptions about environmental degradation in Africa.
    1. In 1972-74 successive years of drought triggered a famine that swept across the African Sahel from Senegal to northern Ethiopia. Beyond its tragic human effects, the drought/famine also produced Africa's first media tragedy: images of cruel nature and human suffering appeared on television and in major print media.
    2. The most enduring image may be Time magazine's poignant full-page photograph of a desiccated and stiff carcass of a cow lying forlornly in a dry waterhole. Several years later a BBC reporter informed me that an ambitious news photographer had taken it upon himself to construct that riveting scene by dragging a dead bovine into the waterless depression because the surrounding landscape had already turned green from renewed rains.
    3. In 1987 the highly regarded PBS science program NOVA broadcast a documentary film entitled "The Desert Doesn't Bloom Here Anymore." The film played on the public memory of the 1972-74 famine by presenting striking images of despoiled arid landscapes from West Africa and from the western United States. In both cases, the film argued, the cumulative weight of human action had transformed a delicately balanced natural order into environmental disaster.
    4. Footage of the Burkinabe village showed bleak brown landscapes and conditions of stark poverty, images particularly effective with a viewing audience from green temperate latitudes. Computer-generated animation of a Sahelian landscape showed the disappearance of trees and the southern creep of the desert. The thesis was that historical weight of human abuse under rapid population growth and the search for profit had created degraded land and made permanent changes in both landscapes and climate.

  4. "The Desert Doesn't Bloom Here Anymore" had an ideological message --bad land management by humans creates deserts-- hidden in its reportage.
    1. The argument was not just dogma, it had a basis in science of the mid-1970s.
    2. In 1974 Joseph Otterman, an Israeli climate scientist who had worked in Israel's Negev desert, published his research hypothesis that posited a relationship between drought and the loss of vegetative cover. Specifically, he argued that bare, highly reflective soils in semi-arid zones would increase surface "Albedo" (reflectivity), and reduce convective processes, thus resulting in decreased rainfall. Otterman attributed vegetative change to overgrazing, though one could easily extend his thesis include to other economic activity that exposed the soil, such as tree-cutting and annual cropping. Thus, in this view day-to-day human activity, especially tasks performed by women, was responsible for creating drought.
    3. This scientific hypothesis seemingly confirmed a popular suspicion in the West than African farmers and herders had brought on their own crisis.
    4. A year later, Jule Charney, an M.I.T. climatologist proposed a similar cause for desertification that pointed a finger directly at local land use as the agent of climatic change. Charney argued that changes in vegetative cover could indeed increase aridity. He held that desertification was not the result of a single causal factor but an ever tightening chain of events that began with the removal of plant cover followed by a loss of the soils' moisture retention and resulting in a reduction of rainfall that, in turn, further reduced vegetation. With this science as a backdrop, the Nova film's pessimistic images of West African farmers closed the Neo-Malthusian circle: under severe population growth African farmers had occupied fragile lands and their poor land management had pushed the Sahel into a slide toward desert.

  5. Desertification as a concept of human-induced environmental change:
    1. The science of the 1970s added to an existing set of conclusions about the presence and origins of desertification in Africa from an earlier historical epoch. Anthropologist Jeremy Swift's study of colonial land studies of the late 1930s argued that the Sahara desert was advancing at an alarming and measurable rate.
    2. The most widely distributed and influential of these reports, by the colonial forester E.P. Stebbing, held that the root cause was human misuse of resources.
    3. French forester A. Aubrèville coined the term desertification to describe the human-induced process of land degradation in the West African Sahel.
    4. Placing blame on African farmers and pastoralists external agents justified colonial rule, central planning, and the urban control of rural resources. In the post-independence era desertification, however vaguely defined and applied, as a justification of coercion and paternalism by urban elites, was already rather firmly in place by the time the African Sahel experienced the severe droughts of the mid- 1970s

  6. Institutional Applications of Concept of Desertification:
    1. Based on early colonial assertions, embryonic scientific hypotheses, and popular assumptions of the 1970s, the idea of human agency in African climate change diffused into international policy and media representations of the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
    2. In 1977 the influential environmentalist group Worldwatch Institute and its director Lester Brown officially linked the Sahara's advance with African land use practices, such as overgrazing, increased cultivation, and firewood gathering. In that same year the United Nations Conference on Desertification asserted specific figures for desertification: 10 percent of the earth's surface was "man-made" desert and another 19 percent was under threat by human mismanagement.
    3. By the mid-1980s linking African farmers and pastoralists with advancing desert was commonplace in the popular press, including in such reputable organs as National Geographic that projected the definitive aura of science and richly illustrated the degradation narrative.
    4. The Ethiopian famine of 1984-85 presented more immediate and more graphic images of Africans suffering amidst degraded landscapes. In 1991 the United Nations further added its bureaucratic imprimatur by officially defining desertification in anthropogenic terms as "land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting mainly from adverse human impact."
    5. International policy thereby placed Africa's environmental crises of the 1970s at the doorstep of Africans themselves, the result of both alarming rates of population growth and land degradation. This view was both historically based (even if wrongheaded) and judgmental: Africans were reaping the whirlwind of their past actions.

  7. New Evidence on Desertification
    1. In the late 1970s a new countervailing historical perspective on the Sahel's crisis of desertification came from climate historian Sharon Nicholson who combined the evidence from historical landscape descriptions, modern climate models, and research on lake levels from Lake Chad to reconstruct a history of desiccation of the Sahel.
    2. From this evidence and rainfall data for the past 25 years, it is clear that the Sahel's climate patterns since 1970 represents the most dramatic sustained decline in rainfall ever recorded anywhere in the world. The Lake Chad levels in particular indicate that the late twentieth-century desiccation is at least as severe as any in the last millennium.
    3. Climatologist Peter Lamb as early as 1978 had differed with the anthropogenic (human cause) thesis by pointing out the connection between oceanic conditions in the Atlantic and African climates.
    4. In 1991 data from polar-orbiting satellites examined the movements of Sahelian vegetation over the 1980 to 1990 period in relation to annual changes in rainfall. This study showed that the Sahara's southern edge indeed had moved, but that it has fluctuated both north and south depending on the levels of each year's rainfall. It argued that previous evidence had been both overly localized and anecdotal.
    5. This new body of research also supports Lamb's evidence pointing to a causal effect between lower ocean surface temperatures in the Atlantic north of the equator and higher ones to the south. There may therefore be some reason to believe that the Sahel's recent desiccation has been a product of an overall global warming that has occurred in the second half of the twentieth century.
    6. Desertification therefore seems attributable to global climatic processes more than local human action. From this new perspective, farm-level actions along the edge of the desert may well be responses to long-term climate change rather than causes of desert encroachment. In this context a number of new studies of African land use have offered fresh insights into the relationship between African peoples, population, and landscapes.
    7. In other words, the African farmers in "The Desert Doesn't Bloom Here Anymore" were more likely to be victims of a changing environment rather than its perpetrators.