Botswana Politics

# 1 - August 10, 2009

  • Who knew that deep in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where there are no paved roads, phones or TVs,
  • you could find the morning paper waiting for you every day outside your tent, with the latest news, weather and sports? Who knew?
  • True, this is no ordinary journal.
  • The newspaper here on the Jao Flats of the northwest Okavango flood plain is published on the roads — literally.
  • The wetlands are bisected by hippo trails and narrow roads made from pure white Kalahari Desert sand.
  • And every morning, when you set out to investigate the wilderness,
  • it is not uncommon for a guide to lean out of his jeep, study the animal and insect tracks, and pronounce that he’s “reading the morning news.”
  • We were lucky to be accompanied by Map Ives —
  • the 54-year-old director of sustainability for Wilderness Safaris,
  • which supports ecotourism in Botswana —
  • and it was fascinating to watch him read Mother Nature’s hieroglyphics.
  • This day’s “news,” Ives explained, studying a stretch of road,
  • was that some lions had run very quickly through here,
  • which he could tell by the abnormal depth of, and distance between, their paw prints.
  • They were in stride.
  • The “weather” was windy coming out of the east, he added, pointing to which side of the paw prints had been lightly dusted away.
  • Flood waters remained high this morning, because the nearby hyena tracks were followed by little indentations — splashes of water that had come off their paws.
  • Today’s “sports”? Well, over here — the hyenas were dragging a “kill,” probably a small antelope or steinbok,
  • which is very obvious from the smooth foot-wide path in the sand that ran some 50 yards into the bushes.
  • Every mile you can read a different paper.
  • It is mentally exhausting hanging with Ives, who was raised on the edge of the Okavango Delta.
  • He points out the connections, and all the free services nature provides, every two seconds:
  • Plants clean the air; the papyrus and reeds filter the water.
  • Palm trees are growing on a mound originally built by termites.
  • Yes, thank God for termites.
  • All of the raised islands of green in the delta were started by them.
  • The termites keep their mounds warm.
  • This attracts animals whose dung brings seeds and fertilizer that sprout trees, making bigger islands.
  • Ives will be talking to you about zebras and suddenly a bird will zip by — “greater blue-eyed starling,”
  • he’ll blurt out in midsentence, and then go back to zebras.
  • “If you spend enough time in nature and allow yourself to slow down sufficiently to let your senses work,
  • then through exposure and practice, you will start to sense the meanings in the sand,
  • the grasses, the bushes, the trees, the movement of the breezes, the thickness of the air,
  • the sounds of the creatures and the habits of the animals with which you are sharing that space,” said Ives.
  • Humans were actually wired to do this a long time ago.
  • Unfortunately, he added,
  • “the speed at which humans have improved technology since the Industrial Revolution has attracted
  • so many people to towns and cities and provided them with ‘processed’ natural resources”
  • that our innate ability to make all these connections “may be disappearing as fast as biodiversity.”
  • Which leads to the point of this column. We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems —
  • climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet — separately.
  • The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks;
  • climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity;
  • the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors.
  • They all need to go on safari together.
  • “We need to stop thinking about these issues in isolation — each with its own champion,
  • constituency and agenda — and deal with them in an integrated way, the way they actually occur on the ground,” argued Glenn Prickett,
  • senior vice president with Conservation International.
  • “We tend to think about climate change as just an energy issue,
  • but it’s also about land use: one-third of greenhouse gas emissions come from tropical deforestation and agriculture.
  • So we need to preserve forests and other ecosystems to solve climate change, not only to save species.”
  • But we also need to double food production to feed a growing population.
  • “So we’ll need to do that without clearing more forests and draining more wetlands,
  • which means farmers will need new technologies and practices to grow more food on the same land they use today — with less water,” he added.
  • “Healthy forests, wetlands and grasslands not only preserve biodiversity and store carbon,
  • they also help buffer the impacts of climate change.
  • So our success in tackling climate change, poverty, food security and biodiversity loss will depend on finding integrated solutions from the land.”
  • In short — and as any reader of the Okavango daily papers will tell you —
  • we need to make sure that our policy solutions are as integrated as nature itself.
  • Today, they are not.
Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License