Travels on a Dirty Planet

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It was Churchill's unqualified enthusiasm for technology that led me to retrace his African journey, for technology lies at the heart of humanity's relationship with the environment. But, oh, how views have changed since Churchill's day! To many modern environmentalists, technology is almost a dirty word. In their view, the 20th century has revealed technology to be a mixed blessing at best. With prosperity and convenience have come life-threatening pollution and a disorienting acceleration of daily life, not to mention the threat of nuclear war. The root of the problem is the arrogant belief that modern humans can, with technology, live separate from, and be superior to, nature--"to tame the jungle," as Churchill put it.

I sympathized with this critique; of course we have to respect the laws and limits of nature. But visiting the Dinka made me realize that a certain separation from nature's whims--in the form of adequate clothing and shelter, for example--is a good and necessary thing. The Dinka seemed to need more technology, not less.

Churchill made the same argument in My African Journey, and not just because he coveted the rubber and other raw materials that technology would allow Europeans to extract from Africa. People of Churchill's era had good reason to regard technology as a liberating force, for the evidence of how technology had improved human health, productivity, and comfort was all around them. But in retracing Churchill's journey, I found that the forces of progress that Churchill championed seemed to have changed everything and nothing about eastern Africa. The physical environment had certainly been altered, but most Africans have tasted barely a bite of the feast of materialism Churchill had prophesied.

Leaving Mombasa on a train to Nairobi, I passed many signs of a functioning industrial society: smokestacks, power lines, petroleum refinery tanks, and row after row of concrete warehouses near the half a dozen container ships moored in Kilindini harbor. Next to a chemical processing plant, silver pipes thrust skyward like industrial dandelions, while overhead a jetliner descended toward the international airport. But the lives of the people were another matter. As the jet disappeared, the train chugged past a squalid shantytown whose tin-roofed shacks housed the shops and hovels of the urban masses. Beyond the city limits, children scampered from their mud and grass huts to wave and cheer and plead with outstretched palms, "Give me pen! Give me sweet!" or, merely, "Something!"

As we humans seek to create an environmentally sound future, no challenge will be more crucial, or more difficult, than bridging the ancient gap between rich and poor. Can we learn to share? The hardest sharing will not be of money--the rich have plenty of that--but of environmental space, because that will require Americans and other well-off folk to cut back their own consumption to make way for that of the ascendent poor.

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