B. Mezgebu
7 September 2005
opinion
The Amharic weekly newspaper, Reporter of last Sunday, interviewed a soil conservation expert, Ato Ayele Angollo, who told the paper about some things that some tribes are losing when the forests they live within, or close-by, are destroyed, but about which the rest of us may not know.
Deep in the southern parts of Ethiopia, namely in Cheroka, Sheka, Gemedo to name just a few, home to some of the forests that make the 2-3 % remaining in the country, officially sanctioned and widespread cutting has been going on for sometime now. In Ato Ayele's view, it is hugely unfair and in the end self-defeating, to clear-cut so much virgin forest in the name of new investments.
The development projects in these areas seem to be based on the premise that development and conservation never can mix; that they are so incompatible that it is either the one or the other. In other words, there is no middle ground. This kind of thinking is, of course, in stark contrast to the widely accepted notion of sustainable development in these times.
So do we, most of us, most of the time, know what we are losing when we destroy a forest? In this particular case above, the tribes mentioned definitely know what they have been losing. As the immediate inhabitants of the forest environs, anything that affects the forest adversely affects them too. They lose their livelihoods and their direct source of food. So they know.
But how about the local bureaucrats and administrators who have been enthusiastically issuing the permits for many of the investment projects; when the project's sustainability was suspect even from the beginning?
Do they know what those particular tribes are losing and what we collectively as a nation are losing, as we keep on frittering away the edges of the remaining natural forests in the country?
As one writer put it in the journal, NewScientist of August 6 2005, " when we discuss what we miss about forest after they have been cut, we usually mention the sight or the shade or the species; but now I was breathings of a forest gift I had forgotten: the air."
The philosopher-writer obviously savors the special smell of the "wood-air" and the special sense of well-being when she walks inside the forest. To her, what she misses when forests disappear, are the intangibles but no less real things.
On the other hand, the local people of Cheroke, Gendero and Sheka in the south of Ethiopia, may or not miss the "special air", but for sure, they miss the bottom line: their livelihood.
On another level, what society collectively loses when its forests vanish has much more lasting impact and is greater than the sum of the parts. The trouble is, when we lose the forests we do not exactly know, as society, what we are losing.
The writer quoted above goes on to say "We know, instinctively, that our health, both physical and spiritual, is a reflection of the health of the Earth-for better or for worse. But we barely have words to discuss this connection, perhaps because we do not yet have all the tools needed to measure it. The strands connecting us are largely invisible."
"We decry the destruction of tropical rainforests, citing the wander drugs that may eventually be found in them, but we may have miracle medicines lurking right beneath our own noses. Perhaps someday, when our physician asks us to" taking a deep breath", it will be old-growth forest that he or she is recommending"
The inevitable question we should ask ourselves here may be, "can we be sensitive to the invisible connection of the forest and its allure, when we are hardly conscious of even the most tangible and obvious aspects of it.
The most serious, indeed the most catastrophic consequence of forest destruction in Ethiopia has been, of course, the on-going loss of its fertile soils from its farmlands mainly, but no less from its grazing areas and other landuses.
Accelerated soil erosion creates and unleashes its own vicious circle of more degradation of the farmlands leading to more destruction of the forests in search of new lands for cultivation.
No less serious in the aftermath of destruction of forests is the loss of plant species and biodiversity. With the loss of biodiversity, the web of life is disrupted so casually and so fast.
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