So I have been reading through The Lie of the Land. It’s an
edited book with the subtitle “Challenging Received Wisdom on the African
Environment.” The point many of the
chapters make is that Western expertise and science have not always given
Westerners as privileged an understanding of African environments as we would
like to believe. On the Conservation side of things, the
central premise that every environment has an optimal and stable state to which
it is succeeding has been abandon by all serious scientists for at least 25
years. Without such a state, the
question of what exactly ought to be conserved becomes a lot more ambiguous. And yet in the minds of many Westerners the
desire to conserve remains instinctual and strong. On the Development front, many colonial-era
agricultural development projects in particular are now universally recognized
to have sprung from some really shoddy scientific understandings. And yet still many of the same development
ideas that were dominant in 1940 are still being tried over and over again in
the new millennium.
In the course of our own scientific research on Lake Malawi
the single most common question we are asked by Westerners is if the lake is
being over-fished. When I tell them “We
don’t know” their responses are always either surprise or disbelief. The narrative of African environmental
degradation in the Western mind is so strong that even any statements that
simply refrain from supporting it are met with deep skepticism. And yet it remains a simple, sad, truth that
the accumulated scientific research done on the lake since the turn of the 20th
up to the present day trying to ascertain the state of Lake Malawi’s fish
populations, in any other scientific field, would not allow any scientist to
make firm conclusions without being laughed out of the room by his colleagues. Why are we so willing to believe, why do we
in fact seem to want to believe that
African environments are in such poor shape?
On the other hand the authors in the book sometimes repeat the
mistakes of those they criticize by claiming to know more than their data can
possibly support. Without asserting that
pre-colonial Africa was always and everywhere ecologically sustainable (another
troublesome term) they do often seem to believe that at least human management
of African environments under African stewardship was superior to that under
colonial rule. When there is clear
evidence for this, I have no trouble believing it. But often the data upon
which this claim is made is very thin indeed.
That is not to say that the opposite is true, but simply that it may be
unwise to even make the comparison given the asymmetry of the data about the
two periods.
More generally I think we need to get beyond the
never-ending gotcha game of pitting everything African against everything
Western as if one side must always be better than the other in some way, and
more importantly as if these two categories are truly distinct and worth
preserving as objects of analysis.
Certainly it is human nature to want to categorize, compare, and rank,
but we must do so with sophistication, caution, and much introspection.
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