Travels on a Dirty Planet

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Some of the most illuminating conversations I had during my travels were with people on the lower economic rungs of the human family: not just the Dinka, but working men and women in Istanbul and London; peasants scratching out a living on Brazil's central highlands and Russia's vast steppes; young students in Prague, Beijing, and ThessalonÌki yearning for a better future. Even in remote areas, people have a clear sense of environmental threats and how crucial it is to counter them. But in every case they added a caveat: First, bread must be put on the table; one cannot starve today to preserve the environment for tomorrow.

Poverty is central to the global environmental crisis, and poverty raises the question of fairness. For example, if the planet's atmosphere can withstand only a certain level of greenhouse gases, then humans must work out a way to share that capacity. The same point applies to most environmental threats; experts refer to it as the problem of sharing "environmental space." Right now, the bulk of the earth's environmental space is claimed by the United States and other wealthy nations of the North. But this cannot last. As the nations of the South develop economically, they will require more space for the pollution they will surely generate.

Our dilemma is that, on one hand, more and more scientific evidence suggests that the consumption levels now prevailing in wealthy nations are ecologically unsustainable; extending this standard of living to all 6 billion humans on the planet would doom the species. On the other hand, who doesn't deserve electricity, telephones, and running water? Once people experience these things, they want them, no matter the ecological cost. As well they might. It is easy for outsiders to warn against the long-term costs of damming Africa's rivers or destroying its woodlands, but it is akin to a glutton admonishing a beggar on the evils of carbohydrates--the glutton lacks a certain moral authority.

This point was brought home to me after I left the Dinka and traveled through eastern Africa, retracing a trip that Winston Churchill had made in 1907. At age 33, the future British prime minister had just begun his first significant government job, as parliamentary undersecretary of state for the colonies. Churchill's expedition took him by ship through the Suez Canal to the port of Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean coast of what is now Kenya. The newly constructed Ugandan railway then carried him west to Nairobi and on to Lake Victoria, the presumed source of the Nile, which he followed north through Uganda, Sudan, and Egypt.

Churchill paid for the expedition in part with sales from a book he wrote about it, My African Journey. Part travelogue, part policy paper, this short, impassioned work now has a significance beyond its keen observation and dazzling prose. For in it, Churchill articulated virtually all facets of the ideology that would shape the 20th century industrial impact on Africa--the values, fears, goals, and rationales that drove European efforts to recast both the land and the people of this most foreboding and seductive of continents.

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