Climate Change In Africa

There have been a number of reports about the fact that Africa will be the first to be materially impacted by global warming. There are people fretting about lost livelihoods of nomadic herders and such. Do not count me as one of them. Yes I am very concerned about global warming however I see it as an opportunity for some Africans to change themselves.

Unless you are one of those people that think the world is about 5K years old and man was placed on the planet fully formed, you should know that desertification of North Africa has been going on for quite some time. In fact the Sahara itself used to be green like Kermit the frog. No doubt the change that occurred there forced people to move and adapt and just as then, the climate change and continued desertification is also going to force change. This is a good thing. Part of the problem in Darfur Sudan are the consequences of desertification. Desertification and climate change is going to force Africa to deal with provincialism and tribalism. If groups insist on excluding other groups based on ethicity or other "vague" categories then people are going to die. They will die either by insisting on living a way of life that is simply unsustainable by on the ground realities or they will die in foreigner financed wars for what little arable and grazeable land remains.

Fact is that some countries, the result of colonialism, are not going to be able to feed themselves. That is not a bad thing. The people who live in NYC cannot feed themselves either. They are dependent upon the farms of upstate NY and other parts of the country for food. Similarly countries are going to have to cooperate so that places that can produce food can supply those that cannot and those areas that are no longer capable of supporting large scale agriculture will have to move into other directions. In other cases land is simply going to have to be abandoned.

Now I am fully aware of alternate technologies for growing food in otherwise inhospitable environments but unfortunately negroes are too busy trying to maintain so called "traditional" means of life. Like I mentioned in the "African culture does not spread AIDS" post many people insist that black people in Africa ought to be frozen in time and that if they modernize their practices they are no longer authentically African. It is these people who are extremely dangerous to the African. No species that does not adapt survives. None.

The African facing this dire situation ought not be coddled and "protected" rather this climate change should be used as an opportunity to strike a death blow to provincialism, ethnocentrism and politics by the gun.

Technorati Tags: Africa, critique, Climate Change