Collide-a-scape

Now this initiative bears watching, because it gets beyond the fuzzy climate change cause-and-effect rhetoric. If adaptation is going to be done right in Africa–or anywhere–then this approach strikes me as a really smart way to go about it:

“It is not enough to say that Ethiopia is vulnerable,” says Joshua Busby, an assistant professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Also necessary is “which parts of Ethiopia are vulnerable and why.”

Kudos to The New Security Beat for the interview with Busby. Instead of focusing so much attention on climate politics (which I plead guilty to), we journalists should be paying greater heed to these kinds of efforts that are just getting underway.

This article by Roger Webster, a South African historian, is intriguing on several levels. I was drawn in by this opening:

One of the many aspects of history and archaeology that fascinates me is that, in many respects, archaeology becomes the verifier, or the destroyer, of history.

Be sure to read it all the way through to the haunting poem about drought that closes the piece.

Yesterday, in response to a story in the NY Times, entitled “Sudan Court Fines Woman for Wearing Trousers,” Andy Revkin posted this meta thought at Dot Earth about the future of women in the developing world and how that ties into humanity’s prospects for sustainability:

In a broader sense, then, there appears to be simmering tension over “who wears the pants.” How that gets worked out probably will help determine whether there is a relatively smooth journey toward more or less 9 billion people on a finite planet in the next few decades.

An astute Dot Earth reader offers an excellent anecdote about women in Saudi Arabia. It speaks to the importance of culture in all this. (Savage Minds: where are you? You’re missing a golden opportunity.) Here’s the kicker from the comment (which should be read in full):

So changing a cultural or religious taboo is not something outsiders can impose upon a society without fierce resistance. The change, if it comes at all, must come from within, and the pioneers will pay a painful price.

Half of Zimbabwe’s 12 million people already rely on emergency food aid. Now, according to this UN dispatch,

food shortages are being compounded by elephants eating and trampling the villagers’ crops.

The scenes sound like something out of a Hitchcock movie, with villagers also guarding their agricultural fields from marauding baboons, wild pigs, and flocks of quelea birds.

Oddly, many of the animals are coming from Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe’s biggest animal sanctuary. There, the elephant population exceeds 100,000. One villager tells the U.N. that

“We light fires to drive away the elephants. In most fields we light unattended fires 50 metres apart to scare the elephants away, but you find that the fields are quite large and policing every inch becomes a problem – at times the elephants are aggressive and they attack the villagers, who are forced to flee.”

What’s weird about this story is that we’re accustomed to hearing about humans preying mercilessly on Africa’s vulnerable wildlife. And elephants were once among the biggest victims. But it seems that anti-poaching efforts have enabled elephants to rebound nicely in some African countries, perhaps beyond sustainable numbers, as Ted Kerasote ruminated here a few years back.

However, the bigger picture is more complex, with some researchers recently asserting that the illegal ivory trade is still so robust that large groups of elephants in Africa will be extinct by 2020.

If the severity of this particular situation in Zimbabwe true, then I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the elephants there experience the full wrath of villagers.

Wildlife conservation in Africa has long been a complicated affair. It’s even dicier in countries such as Sudan and Rwanda, which have been torn apart by war, sectarian violence, and environmental degradation.

So as unfortunate as the elephant rampage in Zimbabwe sounds, it hardly seems representative of the vexing wildlife conservation issues felt elsewhere in Africa.