Poor places experience forest-cover loss because they are exploited by wealthy places. When the French lost their prize colony in , they levied an indemnity on the new Haitian government as punishment. To pay this debt, Haitians began exporting mahogany to France; by they were sending 4 million cubic feet of it overseas every year.
Murray spent a summer talking to farmers and peasants about trees. The tree-planting programs, he noticed, focused on ecology and, problematically, gave ownership of newly planted trees to the Haitian government, which the peasants distrusted. Murray thought the development agencies, under the influence of environmentalists, had gotten it all wrong.
They saw trees as emblems of Mother Nature in need of saving. He predicted that under those conditions, Haitians would fill the landscape with trees. Over the next two decades, a project funded by USAID and implemented by the Pan American Development Foundation resulted in more than , Haitian peasant households planting 65 million trees.
If this turns out to be the case, the implications are amazing. Wampler is designing another study to compare present tree-cover levels with archival satellite images from the s to determine whether his earlier results represent a decrease or increase in trees in the last four decades.
Whatever the extent of tree cover, soil erosion, groundwater contamination, and deadly flooding remain significant problems in Haiti. Cultivating treeless, steep mountainsides for agriculture, a common practice, is environmentally damaging and allows topsoil to wash out.
My research I have endeavored to demonstrate that Haitians have developed creative adaptations to the management of trees—responding not only to changes to their environment but also to outside forces and historical market fluctuations Tarter a, b. Andrew Tarter is a social scientist that studies human—nature interactions in Haiti.
Tarter is currently employed in Haiti, through the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, at the University of Florida, where he received his PhD in sociocultural anthropology in Redo, T. Mitchell Aide, Matthew L. Clark, and Ricardo Grau. Baver, Sherrie. Callaloo 37, no.
Bhatt, Keane. Brenner, Mark, and Michael W. Churches, Christopher E. Wampler, Wanxiao Sun, and Andrew J. Cobb, Charles E. Cohen, Waren B. You may also like. About Marie Cusick Read more. Enter your Email here. Ways to Donate. Hiding the facts from the Haitian people would be the wrong thing to do, for whatever reason.
I would hope that this information is translated into better policy, so that the last remaining primary forest can be saved before it disappears, especially since the loss of forest is directly related to the loss of drinking water and increase in catastrophic floods. It is misleading, because the forest they defined is mostly highly degraded and bad for biodiversity and people. Tarter claims that degraded forest will have biodiversity. Yes, but as we demonstrated, a lot less than in primary forest.
The A. By Yessenia Funes.
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