Comment & analysis
Climate change makes us forget
Janice Golding
2007-05-31, Issue 306
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/41718
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The threat of climate change is real and potentially horrific. But, as is argued here, the whirring engine of the climate change research buzz seems to pretend that everyday threats to biodiversity in Africa have disappeared into oblivion.
George Berkley, the 18th century Irish philosopher and theologian, is most well known for the conundrum, 'If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?'
Today, this insight on the ‘truth and the existence of things’ is ever relevant to our research institutions and what it is they are doing for nature conservation. If no one perceives or documents the loss of biodiversity, then the tree will not make a sound when it falls. Because the tree did not exist in the first place.
Now the caveat of Berkley’s philosophical meandering is this: he did not claim the existence or non-existence of entities. He claimed that man’s suspicion that things exist actually enlivens the existence, and therefore makes it ‘real’. So, conservationists not only suspect existence of many as yet unnamed gems of biodiversity, but they are quite certain of their bountiful existence.
This matters a lot, because almost 300 years after Linnaeaus gave us the tools to classify and name species, scientists in the 21st century continue to make startling discoveries. Think of the Bornean leopard subspecies now dominating the headlines. In southern Africa, recent discoveries include the Upemba lechwe antelope from the Katanga area in Zambia; the scarabid insect order that was discovered on Namibia’s Brandberg, and the monotypic tree genus, Icuria, from coastal Mozambique.
And yet, the brows of our botanical research institutions are deeply furrowed. It seems they are grappling with the practical ramifications of understanding the effects of climate change on unknown species in unknown landscapes. Is it possible to study climate change effects on things you don’t know even exist and for which you have no information? James Berkley would have thought so.
The threat of climate change is real and potentially horrific. Drier and warmer weather patterns forecast increased hunger of starving bellies and thirst in barren landscapes. Nature will suffer too. And, global warming will also throw its shadow on undocumented virgin territories.
The use of surrogates is a kind of information replacement therapy useful to climate change studies. Frogs, spiders or birds can be used as methodological substitutes. Even the properties of ecosystems can be helpful in filling the void. What it actually amounts to is that nature can be helped without actually knowing for sure that it actually exists. This amazing metaphysical feat that brings together rather elegant ideas on truth and science into the real world appeases most people; except, I would imagine, the pragmatic, gung-ho field practitioner. The one-and-only bush James Bond with the khaki micro-shorts and the steely resolve to protect nature at all costs.
Thus, on how ‘science noire’ is perceived: Our James Bond practitioners work at the coal face. They require precise, unfaltering answers on how to deal with prevailing, every-day threats like poaching, the bushmeat crisis, depleting firewood trees, and the trafficking of tropical timber. Try fleecing them with hypothetical academic grey matter, and they may ridicule the desktop climate change nerds to ‘get real and get with the real programme’.
The whirring engine of the climate change research buzz seems to pretend that Africa’s everyday threats have disappeared into oblivion. But, those involved in the scourge of biopiracy and land rights conflicts, and the violations of oil multinationals thieves are all bastards who are omnipresent in the pillaging of Africa’s natural resources.
Climate change hides all this exploitation and injustice under the carpet. The very threat of the climate change agenda is that its appeal is so earnest that it makes us forgetful of the biodiversity skullduggery. It turns away political focus and public interest. It blinds budget frameworks and it softens the policing of biodiversity regulations. And this is the heart of the problem.
Quite frankly, I am bored hearing that climate change is a new vehicle for getting recalcitrant corporates around the environmental table. Almost as if to say, that, what the biodiversity agenda could not achieve, climate change can.
Climate change can leverage funding from businesses that the biodiversity movement could not. Yes, it is true and that's great. But the one magnificent achievement that makes the biodiversity movement stand head-and-shoulders above the climate change buzz is the fact that it instilled a love and respect for nature. It wooed us with the miracles of nature: rivers and mountains, gorillas in mist forests, polar bears in snowscapes, indigenous tribal groups and cultural rights. It inspired appreciation for exotic travel (think ecotourism) and ardent support of charities (e.g. 'save-the-girl-child-in-Africa'). And, it gave us big, flirtatious hearts, generosity and a sense of diversity in a complex world.
Climate change has instilled a fear of nature - a dark uncertainty and a shared global fate. The passion for nature has been replaced with diplomacy: now it is all clinical thinking, economic elbowing and political stratagems. It even raises suspicion and rivalry at work – who is the culprit who left the lights on? May the person who flew to Paris instead of taking the Eurostar rot in hell. The love affair with nature, it seems, is over.
Everything we had planned, for a sustainable future in Africa in the 1990s, post-Rio epoch, such as the protection of ecologically sensitive habitats, animal migration corridors, CBNRM models – now needs to be fundamentally rejigged. Strategies that have taken so long to devise in Africa need to be modified. Why? Because climate change says so: new objectives should examine how existing strategies must be altered in relation to climate change. This is all good and well.
But, African conservation scientists need to keep banging the drum that the conservation problems of yesterday, are still the problems of today. Instead of nodding in agreement and cosseting the new climate change dogma, scientists need to emulate the classic character of the bush James Bond. We need to be bold. Speak out, and find ways to utilise the climate change ethos to keep Africa’s everyday biodiversity issues mainstream. Needless to say, I have great respect for committed practitioners who keep a beady, slightly sceptical eye on the horizon. Or perhaps its just the fantasy of the khaki shorts that is so alluring.
No matter how one looks at it, it will become increasingly difficult to locate a secure research space for many conservation scientists, taxonomists in particular. Intrepid adventurers who obtain samples of species potentially new to science will get little joy under the new research banner. Herbaria have built their tradition on naming species. Every African country has at least two state-run herbaria. If African conservation scientists do not ‘get with the real programme’ in order to boom, then they are certainly going to bust out and turn into white elephants.
George Berkley’s oft-quoted discourse on the nature of things presents a marvellous revelation. All sorts of stuff that affect named and unnamed forms of biodiversity can take place in nature, of which we are not directly aware, like climate change. Even if we don’t hear the sound of a tree falling, it remains the human responsibility of good virtue to take action. Conservation scientists should not forget the real biodiversity issues in Africa. Cherish nature and keep the love alive.
* Janice Golding is a doctoral candidate from South Africa at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
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