I knew very little about Haiti before the tragic recent earthquake brought the county to the front pages of the local paper. I still know very little, although I’m learning, slowly.
To those in my boat, the elephant-in-the-room question in the wake of the disaster is: why is Haiti the poorest county in the western hemisphere? It seems that reparations paid to slave-owning nations played a role, along with a string of despotic regimes. But most tangible, most visceral, is the environmental degradation of the landscape itself.
By every account I’ve read, Haiti was once a lush tropical island: coffee and sugar plantations nestled between vast expanses of forest. In 1923 sixty percent of the country was covered in stands of pine and broad leaf trees; by 1988, only about 2 percent of the country had tree cover. And it’s still disappearing: according to some credible looking information I found on the internet, reforestation programs in the 1980s planted more than 25 million trees, but in that time as many as seven trees were cut for each new tree that went in the ground.
There are certainly some interesting parallels here to the Industrial Age forests of the Northeast – and maybe some hope in this line of thinking. In the mid-1800s much of our Northern forest was gone (in Vermont, about 75% of the land had been cleared.) Erosion was rampant, water was dirty. Many of the trees cut in Haiti were turned into charcoal – something readers of Hugh Canham’s wood chemical industry story in our winter issue know a lot about. We’ve been there and done that. And by many measures, our forests, our landscapes, have bounced back.
I don’t mean to come off as idealistic in drawing these parallels, and I’m not trying to armchair quarterback a horrible situation from the comforts of my desk. Nineteenth-century New England is not twentyfirst-century Haiti – our growing conditions are different, our historical yokes are different, and certainly, today’s modern world plays by a much different set of rules. But at the same time, it seems that we do have much relevant knowledge we can share about sustainable forestry and agricultural practices.
It goes without saying that some of the $2,400,000,000 in aid that the world has pledged to Haiti will have to subsidize fuel sources that aren’t charcoal, will have to go towards landscape reclamation projects that can bring nature back into alignment. The Northeastern U.S. has had many success and some notable failures (non-native plant introductions spring to mind) on the reclamation front. In many ways, this information can be more valuable than money.
Whatever the solutions are, let’s hope the administrators of the earthquake aid recognize the need to heal the Haitian landscape as a way of healing its people. Let’s hope relevant information can be shared in an efficient, practical way.
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