Since we are all thinking about Haiti... did you read COLLAPSE?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

My take-way from Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" was that trees are everything.

Granted, I was primed to have that takeaway. I have been arguing for years that America is a world power primarily because of the availability of timber, versus the Old World which had been actively logging and clearing land for agriculture for millenia. (Native Americans cleared land and used a lot of wood, but not to the same degree or for as long.)

Anyway... the discussion of Haiti versus the Dominican Republic is the best part of the book. You can actually see the border from the air, with the Haitian side being deforested.

The deforestation of Haiti was an unintended consequence of a great success. Haiti was the first colony to rebel, and did so in a big way. It became the first black-led nation outside Africa.

After the revolution slavery was abolished and everyone got land to own and farm. This created inverse economies of scale... when everyone has a little parcel of land nobody can afford to say, "It would be nicer for everyone if I left my land undeveloped."

So almost everything got cleared.

But longer term it's a disaster to not have enough trees.

In the Dominican Republic brutal dictators in the 20th century decided there weren't enough tress and that the nation owned all the trees and anyone trying to cut down a tree in the huge national forests was shot.

(Haiti is, I believe, more mountainous an not as good land as the Dominican Republic to begin with, but they are not wholly dissimilar and it is still an interesting comparison.)

This is the sort of lesson that has always bedeviled us. We want to be free but central planning must have a dictatorial component.

I'm not proposing anything... just noting the interesting difference between the two nations that are simply the left and right side of the same island.

[Libertas1776]

1. Haiti on the left, the DR on the right...

[gateley]

6. Wow -- put a space between and it would almost look like two entirely different

continents! It's sobering.

[Warpy]

8. Right, Haiti has been deforested not by people building homes

but by people who need a few sticks of firewood to cook their food because they can't afford the kerosene.

[glitch]

11. You can see the same effect in WA state where private land borders National Park land.

And the deforestation isn't due to wood gathering for cooking.

[csziggy]

2. Here is a photo of the difference at the border

The thin line down the middle is a river that is the border. Neither side is good land, but the denuded area on the left leaves nothing to hold the ground in place when hurricanes or earthquakes hit.

[Zoeisright]

4. WOW!!

That's just amazing. Incredible what bone-grinding poverty does to people and the earth.

[Blue Meany]

9. This probably has a lot to do with difference in

population density:
594 per square mile for the Dominican Republic vs. 936 per square mile for Haiti. There are methods of sustainable agriculture that use trees to curtail runoff, which were probably unknown when all of this began. But no matter what kind of agriculture is used, there is a limit to how many bodies the land can support. It looks to me as though this is a classic case of environmental overreach.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

13. Wow... 936 per square mile sounds like a lot

[shopgreen]

3. I read about the deforestization of Haiti years ago where women have

to travel miles every day for a load of wood to cook with.

[csziggy]

7. I know that efforts in some countries in Asia where wood was scarce, aid worked

By giving women trees to plant and teaching them to harvest smaller branches and fallen wood instead of cutting down the entire trees. I can't remember which country was the pilot program but it was over twenty years ago. For one thing, it empowered the women and helped them make better decisions about resource use without trying to change their lives too much at once.

[Blue Meany]

10. In a number of place in the world, solar cookers are being used

to curtail, or mitigate the impact of deforestation. However, this is a global problem. Deforestation devestated the environment in Europe until the plague reduced the population, allowing forest to recover. Then the process began again and was only controlled by the use of coal and then oil in place of wood as a fuel. Once we run out of fossil fuels we will all be Haitians.

[csziggy]

12. Good point - aren't solar cookers being distributed in Ethiopia?

[Cassandra]

5. Yes, I was thinking of that...

when someone here asked about DR.