African nomads to be first people wiped out by climate change

[G_j]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1945770,00.html

African nomads to be first people wiped out by climate change

Kenya's herdsmen are facing extinction as global warming destroys their lands

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday November 12, 2006
The Observer


They are dubbed the 'climate canaries' - the people destined to become the first victims of world climate change. And as government ministers sit down in Nairobi at this weekend's UN Climate Conference, the people most likely to be wiped out by devastating global warming will be only a few hundred miles away from their deliberations.

Those people, according to research commissioned by the charity Christian Aid, will be the three million pastoralists of northern Kenya, whose way of life has sustained them for thousands of years but who now face eradication. Hundreds of thousands of these seasonal herders have already been forced to forsake their traditional culture and settle in Kenya's north eastern province following consecutive droughts that have decimated their livestock in recent years.

Earlier this year the charity commissioned livestock specialist Dr David Kimenye to examine how the herders are coping with the recent drought, uncovering a disastrous story. Over two months, Dr Kimenye talked to pastoralists in five areas across the Mandera district, home to 1.5 million people.

..more..

[mom cat]

1. First they came for the Kenyans .........

[Demeter]

2. And here I thought It Would Be the American Desert Dwellers

without any water to sustain their golf courses.....

[phusion]

14. It's really a tragedy...

so many golf courses dot the landscape around here. Albuquerque now has plans to draw drinking water from the Rio Grande surface supply (vs. the aquifer we use now). I really dread our future in regards to water. It's frightening.

[Ian David]

3. Any country that hasn't ratified Kyoto should be required to take them as refugees

The UN should pass a resolution-- if your country hasn't signed Kyoto, then your country is required to automatically give asylum to all climate refugees.

[lonestarnot]

4. 50 years for chimps too I saw last night.

[Teaser]

8. All chimps do is steal anyway.

When I was a kid a chimp stole a sandwich from me at the zoo.

Extinction is too good for'em, that's what I say.

[Crunchy Frog]

5. The ones least responsible for the mess will be the ones to suffer most.

That's the real injustice of the thing. The Eskimos are in pretty deep shit too. The American SUV drivers are doing fine, other than slightly higher gas prices.:(

[leftchick]

6. Hey, Nancy!!! Could you put this in your first 100 hours?

Like AT THE TOP??? :scared:

[Teaser]

7. And you guys say Climate Change is bad?

C'mon. It's just forcing us all to move to cities, which will eventually be encased in domes.

And DOMES ARE COOL.

Here's a simple flow chart:

Climate Change -> Domes -> Cool.


What's not to like?

[ArbustoBuster]

9. You forgot the rest of that chain of logic.

Climate Change -> Domes -> Cool -> Robot Overlords -> Extinction of Humanity

While the Era of Coolness would indeed be cool, it would end in death and blood and Arnold Schwarzenegger stalking the ruins of our cities as a horrifying Terminator.

Of course, one might say that Arnie is already stalking the ruined cities of California, but that's just a myth told at bedtime to scare children, right?

Joking aside, if we don't do something about climate change now, we're going to regret it sooner than the Republicans think.

[wickerwoman]

10. Am I the only one uncomfortable with the way this story

portrays human beings as if they were a species of endangered animal?

Is it hyper-sensitive to think phrases like "the people most likely to be wiped out by devastating global warming" or "but who now face eradication" make it sound like they're giant pandas or Siberian tigers? And that maybe with the West's history of portraying Africans as subhuman or bestial that this is somewhat insulting?

Wouldn't it be better to frame this story as "their way of life faces extinction" rather than "they face extiction"? I mean, really, if we wanted to save them we could just move them to Montana and give them cheeseburgers. But setting them up as a kind of "endangered species" makes it that much easier to just shrug our shoulders and pretend that there's nothing we can do to save them and that their deaths are an inevitable consequence of habitat destruction.

Anyway, I expected better from the Guardian.

[semillama]

13. Yeah, it is kinda hyper-sensitive

I have a background in anthropology and I didn't get that at all. Their culture is indeed endangered. Their communities are breaking up, they are dispersing, and if trends continue - they will in fact stop existing as a distinct culture and community. It's genocide by climate change.

[wickerwoman]

17. But I think there's a distinction between

"Their culture is endangered" and "They are endangered." The latter makes it sound like it's virtually impossible to save their lives when in fact it's as simple as sending over some aid. I think using the latter discourages people from looking for ways to save them. So I would have rather seen something like "their way of life is endangered".

[semillama]

19. Do you think that it's not genocide then?

I mean, if their culture goes, and they are completely absorbed into another population, isn't that the same effect as if they were all killed? It is within a generation or two. I mean, I'm sure that you could probably find a few people somewhere in California with Yahi genes floating around in their DNA, but you would never say that means the Yahi aren't extinct as a people. (if you don't know the story of the Yahi, google "Ishi" and learn).

I'm sure that the people in question would strongly disagree with you.

[wickerwoman]

23. I don't see it.

For me the distinction between "cultural genocide" and "genocide" is pretty stark. One group of people is dead and the other group isn't. I think if you gave most people the choice, they'd pick the former pretty much every time. Give these people a choice between scraping by in a desert, watching their children starve to death and living in a fixed shelter with 9 to 5 jobs, regular meals and an education for their kids and I think for most of them it would be a no-brainer.

The problem with wringing our hands and assuming these people are doomed to die is that it gives us an excuse not to really help them.

[BeFree]

20. Hehehe

Thing is, these people are the canaries.... canaries are used to alarm of environmental changes. In this case, these canaries are telling us that ALL humans are endangered. Not just our cultures, or our way of life, but our whole life as we know it.

[FernBell]

11. k&r

[sofa king]

12. I'm surprised Darfur is not cited in that article.

As I understand it, no doubt imperfectly, the conflict in the Darfur region of Chad/Sudan is primarily between herding and sedentary peoples. While the story is reported as being ethnically based, issues such as water and grazing rights almost certainly play an important role--perhaps more important than the particular ethnic groups involved.

Would anyone care to expand upon that thought?

[Xithras]

15. Not exactly.

The origins of the war actually go back to the mid-60's and are the results of efforts to build a pan-African Arab nation with Libya and Chad. Basically, the government of Sudan declared that anyone who wasn't Arab was a second class citizen. The predominantly non-Arab Darfurians, who had always been resistant to the idea of being ruled by anyone else anyway, launched a campaign of low level resistance that slowly escalated over the following decades. By 2001, government troops were being periodically fired on by the Darfurians, and the government regularly responded by firing blindly on villages. At that point, it was mostly a racial conflict.

The change came about in 2001 when the Darfurians stepped their resistance up to a full scale rebellion. They began attacking military convoys, killing Sudanese police and soldiers, and basically launched a full scale guerrilla resistance campaign. In 2003 they escalated it even further, attacking and destroying a Sudanese military base and killing most of its soldiers. The Sudanese government had to respond, but its military forces were all tied up elsewhere.

The Sudanese governments solution was to draft a militia, which was predominantly composed of loyal Arab camel and cattle herders from elsewhere in the country. This was the Janjaweed. The Janjaweed, however, weren't so much interested in helping to hold the country together or promote Arab unity as they were interested in acquiring new grazing lands. The governments orders were to end the war by any means necessary, and they intended to complete those orders by driving the rebels out and claiming their territory as their own. The sedentary farming Darfurians were quickly overrun by the better armed and numerically superior Janjaweed, and the Janjaweed quickly made use of their control to begin evicting people from their land...executing anyone who resisted. By this point, however, race was no longer an issue. Darfur has had a sizable Arab population for many centuries, and that population was primarily composed of farmers just like the non-Arab Darfurians. To the Arab herders, a farmer was a farmer, and a Darfurian was a Darfurian...they all had to be driven out or executed to take over their land.

Darfur today is a conflict over greed and limited resources. The tribal heads of the Janjaweed feeding herder peoples want more grazing land so they can increase the size of their herds and grow their wealth. The government was happy to grant them the right to Darfurian land in exchange for putting down the rebellion. The Darfurians, both black and Arab, are fighting to keep their farmland and to prevent their land from reverting to grazing scrub.

So no, climate change isn't an issue. If anything, climate change might resolve the conflict in favor of the Janjaweed. Grazing requires only minimal rainfall, and many grazing societies exist in dry deserts around the world. Farming, on the other hand, requires regular rainfall to support their crops or supply their irrigation systems. If Darfur desertifies, the Darfurians will have to flee anyway, de facto granting that land to the Janjaweed militias.

[XemaSab]

24. Aren't grazing pressures part of the problem?

The OP seems like in some ways blaming whitey for something that's partly whitey's fault, but partly the fault of the people themselves.

African arid lands are already under the greatest threat of desertification, and that's mostly due to land use pressures from the people living there, no?

[Odin2005]

21. Because blaiming the conflict on climate change means blaming it on the West.

It is much better for the corporatists to blame the conflict on the Africans themselves.

[MisterP]

16. the neoliberal Nigeriois regime said that the Tuareg were "in the way of progress"

ditto Botswana and the Bushmen

[Infinite Hope]

18. I often wondered...

I know this is a stretch in some ways, but the ocean levels are rising. How about digging a canal through the driest areas of African that are affected by drought and famine. Have a major desalinization plant in a couple locations on the coast also providing some jobs and then send that water through a narrow channel around which vegetation could grow and from which people could extract drinking water.

[Odin2005]

22. Interwsting idea, and crazy enough that it just might work!

The main problem is getting the resources (both physical and monetary) and energy to do it. We'll probably need nanotech, better robots, and fusion power to make it feasable.