Collapse

Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola; both are poor. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, 99% deforested and eroded, its dense population mostly subsistence farmers living under the corrupt rule of a largely useless government, the people often going without electricity, schooling, medical care, and other public services.

Across the border to the east, the Dominican Republic contains large forests—including parkland reserves covering a third of the country—a vibrant economy, a per-capita income five times greater than Haiti’s, half of Haiti’s population density, a semi-democratic government, strong exports and tourism, and a lively baseball culture.

The contrasts between the two countries illustrate how “environmental determinism” fails to explain different outcomes in similar situations. True, “environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies’ responses also make a difference” (333).

Spain took over Hispaniola early in the 1500s; its native Taino people died from disease and maltreatment; African slaves were imported to work on sugar plantations and cattle ranches. In the 1600s, with Spanish colonial attention turned elsewhere, France established a colony of plantation slaves on the western end of Hispaniola and soon took over the entire island, which for a time provided one fourth of France’s wealth.

In the early 1800s the western slaves revolted, killed many of the slave owners, became free, named their part of the island Haiti, and for several decades tried to conquer the Spanish settlements to the east. Thereafter, both nations, now independent, suffered from decades of unstable governments characterized by coups and assassinations. Europe and the United States regarded Haiti as an African country hostile to outsiders, investing instead in the more European Dominican Republic. From 1915 to 1934, and again in 1965, US troops occupied parts of the island to control unrest.

From 1930 to 1961, Rafael Trujillo became dictator of the Dominican Republic, ruling harshly—his armed forces were the largest in the Caribbean—and developing the country’s economy as his personal business empire. Meanwhile, Haiti continued to deteriorate under a series of ruthless dictators who merely lived off the poor.

The Dominican Republic has environmental advantages over Haiti: It receives more rain, has more arable land, richer soil, and more rivers. These are by no means the only factors that separate the outcomes of the Hispaniola nations: “a society’s fate lies in its own hands and depends substantially on its own choices” (341). Haiti became wealthy early on due to heavy use of limited resources, but later it grew hostile to outside investors and their trade, so that today, with a dense population and few cash exports, it suffers from poor agricultural output and great environmental damage.

In the Dominican Republic, after a spate of deforestation in the late 1800s, citizens began a bottom-up campaign to set aside forest areas. Trujillo later instituted a top-down campaign to add forest preserves, develop dams and hydroelectric power, create tree plantations, and restrict logging, except for his own account.

After Trujillo’s assassination in 1961, logging spiraled out of control; when Joaquín Balaguer attained power in 1966, he instituted a harsh ban on logging, enforced by the military, to protect the watershed and reduce silt build-up in dams. During the decades of his influence, Balaguer also subsidized imported natural gas to replace local charcoal for heating, enlarged the system of national reserves, and instituted many other environmental protections. Many private organizations sprang up in the 1980s in a bottom-up effort to create “a homegrown Dominican environmental movement” (345).

After Balaguer, many environmental protections were rolled back. Logging and erosion returned, and sediments increased in rivers and hydroelectric reservoirs. Today, toxic pesticides are applied bare-handed to farm crops, while smog and trash plague the big cities. Recent economic problems have worsened the situation. Some Dominicans fear their country will soon overtake Haiti in its slide toward economic and environmental collapse. Others believe the republic is resilient and able to survive and even shake off the effects of periodic bad governance.

Haiti’s difficulties, especially its lack of institutions and trained experts who might help alleviate the problems, are so great that many people familiar with the situation who were interviewed “answered simply that they saw no hope” (354). As many as a million Haitians have crossed into the Dominican Republic looking for work, land to farm, and wood fuel. Already, Haitians make up 12% of the population. Dominicans respond to Haitian newcomers much like Americans react to Latin American immigrants.

Affected as it is by its neighbor, the Dominican Republic may find its interests best served by helping Haiti with its economic and environmental situations.

At well over 1.3 billion people, China is the most populous nation on Earth. China’s economy is growing rapidly, and it is one of the top producers and consumers of products. It also suffers from some of the worst environmental problems, especially pollution that spills beyond China’s borders to affect the rest of the planet. China’s effort to become a first-world consumerist society has worsened ecological issues there, and full development would double the drain on the world’s resources.

Though large, China’s industrial and agricultural sectors use inefficient, wasteful methods. Motor vehicles and coal-fired power plants create some of the world’s worst air pollution, forcing urbanites to wear face masks. Mountains of trash, including contaminated materials imported for recycling, pile up around Chinese cities. Most of China’s widely diverse ecosystems, from glaciers to deserts to tropical rainforests, are stressed. Lakes, rivers, and aquifers are polluted and/or depleted. Deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, flooding, droughts, dust storms, and desertification have become widespread.

China’s exports include invasive species that have caused widespread environmental damage, for example in the United States, where chestnut, elm, maple, and ash tree populations have been decimated, while the imported grass carp has heavily altered rivers and lakes. China’s air pollution contributes significantly to ozone-depletion and rising CO2 levels; contaminated dust wafts across the world as well. China imports large amounts of lumber, including tropical woods, which causes deforestation in New Guinea, Malaysia, and Australia.

Environmental protection has become a major concern in China, but “economic development still takes priority” (373). Because it is unified politically and geographically, China has historically been able to implement rapid, nationwide changes, both for good and ill, more recently with the one-child family law to control population, the banning of logging in 1998 to protect dwindling forests, and the rapid phase-out of leaded gasoline, but also with economic megaprojects that stress ecosystems.

The positive top-down policies also include the creation of nature preserves, reforestation, low-impact rice farming, and the enforcement of European-style automobile emission standards. The future of these and other environmental efforts “will affect not just China, but the whole world as well” (377).

Australian mines provide the lion’s share of its export revenue. These resources are nonrenewable and therefore limited. Meanwhile, Australia is “mining” its renewable resources—forests, fisheries, and soils—faster than they can regrow, and they will be gone even sooner than the nation’s nonrenewables.

Though the population, at 20 million, is smaller than most first world countries, Australia contains ecosystems that are especially vulnerable to human activity. Most critical are its soils, its freshwater, and its size and distance from nearby countries.

Australia’s soils are the least productive among the continents due to their extreme age—some rocks are nearly 4 billion years old—with much of the nutrients long since leached away. There is almost no vulcanism, glaciation, or uplift to refresh, grind up, or otherwise renew the soil. To generate yields common elsewhere, farms require lots of fertilizer, extra land, and more equipment. Food imported from other countries often is cheaper than that grown locally. Coastal and inland fisheries, served by low-nutrient rivers, are poorly productive and commonly overexploited. Salty soils from sea breezes and ocean floods exacerbate the problem.

Most of Australia is desert or semi-arid, and agricultural areas undergo periodic droughts. The long distance from overseas markets adds costs and limits exports to items of high value or low bulk, such as wool, specialty wheats and meats, wine, and macadamia nuts. Lengthy distances between Australian cities, where most of the people live, also boost expenses.

The first European settlers in Australia were convicts sent from overcrowded British prisons between 1788 and 1868. Resident Aborigines, pushed out of the new coastal settlements, found employment on English sheep farms farther inland.

British cultural values interacted awkwardly with the landscape. Sheep produced wool, an important export, but the herds caused severe rangeland degradation. Rabbits and foxes, introduced to make the continent feel more familiar, quickly became pests: Rabbits ate half the pasture vegetation, while foxes decimated most native small-mammal populations. Many other plants, animals, and insects introduced intentionally or accidentally have wreaked havoc on local ecosystems.

Until recently, government policy was to regard native trees and bushes as nuisances that farmers must clear away; this encouraged short-term, destructive farming that caused soil erosion and degradation. Land prices are based on English values—Australians love their connection to Britain—and are so high that farmers overstock and over-plant to pay down mortgages. The myth of the virtuous farmer in Australian culture, coupled with the exaggerated rural influence in the politics of the world’s most urbanized nation, keeps many environmental problems in place.

Australia has begun to think of itself as an Asian nation; its foreign trade lately puts five nearby countries ahead of Britain. The traditional big trade item, wool, now trails tourism and minerals. Fearing invasion from overpopulated neighbors, and hoping to become a world power, Australia in the 1970s opened its doors wider to include Asian immigrants.

Australia doesn’t, however, possess the agricultural or water resources to sustain the 50 million residents desired by both political parties. Many small countries have made big contributions to the world despite their size, and the desire for more citizens has faded among voters, so that immigration lately adds only a half percent per year to the population.

Australia has the fifth-highest land clearance rate in the world. Bare soils permit rainwater to percolate down to saline layers and pull salt up to the surface, where it stunts plant growth. Australia now sets maximum stocking rates for sheep farms, and drip irrigation avoids the salt problem in orchards, but wheat farms and pastures still suffer from salty soil, and salt corrodes infrastructure and threatens drinking water.

Until felled, Australia’s Victorian Mountain Ash trees, up to 400 feet in height, were possibly the tallest in the world. Today 75% of those forests are gone or partially logged, much of them sold as wood chips for Japan’s paper industry. Thus, the continent with the least forested land, 20%, exports wood to the country with the greatest forestation, 74%, then imports the finished materials at a high price in the manner of a third-world country being exploited by a first-world nation.

Most of Australia’s scarce freshwater is in use; desalination plants are being installed to slake the thirsty nation. Agricultural emissions of greenhouse gasses—methane from cattle and more CO2 than from cars—contribute to the climate change that worsens drought conditions.

Inappropriate cultural and political attitudes are slowly giving way to wiser stewardship. Public resistance has strengthened against “land clearance, river development, and old-growth logging” (410). Tens of thousands of bottom-up-style private initiatives have begun to tackle farmland degradation and made good progress in reducing some of the bad effects of imported pests while revitalizing rangeland and lakes.

Bill McIntosh, a farmer who has bulldozed rabbit warrens and struggled with poor forage, now runs his one-man operation with smaller herds that make more efficient use of their range. He represents the changing attitudes of today’s farmers, who are trading their traditional short-term methods for a more thoughtful stewardship of debilitated pasturelands in the hope that they can pass viable farms to their descendants.

Given that less than 1% of Australia’s farmland produces 80% of agricultural profits, some of it by contaminating agricultural operations downriver, the government has begun to alter its policies. Costly subsidies to poorly productive areas, especially the two-thirds that operate at net losses on land weakened from overuse, are being reconsidered. Such rethinking faces longstanding cultural and political resistance, and change will take time.

Australia may well continue to deteriorate environmentally and economically; worse, its problems could accelerate exponentially. Either way, it’s a bellwether of things to come for other nations.