“This sounds like something we’d be talking about in an underdeveloped country,” the Mayor of New York said today.
If I attributed that remark, as any good journalist would, even some of the fairest liberals would hesitate and wonder if it were “political” or “biased.” And we’d never get to the point of whether it was true.
Dear Trumpers, Wildmen, Militias and you famous Deplorables. This blog’s for you.
A couple days ago Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi died. I watched a lot of people like Moi in my 50 years in Africa. As an outsider I can tell you something about them. Just like as a nonTrumper I can tell you something about Trump. You might want to read this.
About 30 years ago “ecotourism” began to be used by scholars around the same time as “climate change” and “globalization.” That may seem like a long time but in the lexicon of social movements it’s the flick of an eye.
“Climate change” and “globalization” are still substantive if explosive issues. “Ecotourism” has been all but discredited. What’s the difference?
The three issues – and certainly others – that consumed the mini-intellectual renaissance of the 1990s all shared a common theme, hardly new. All for one and one for all. Imagine harassing public attention in the decades just before that for any issue, except war, that encompassed more than just your neck of the woods.
But the 1990s were a prosperous time, world-wide. The youth especially knew that Kiev or Cusco were just as close to them as the person in the next booth. Prosperity relaxed suspicions. All for one and one for all.
“Ecotourism” best I can determine first emerged as an important selling point for travel in Holland, where recently it also saw its death (literally). The Dutch’s penchant for social compassion spread throughout Europe, and soon a real advantage to selling anything in the developing world was for it to be considered a part of the new “ecotourism” movement.
The idea was simple. Some kind of tourism activity would help sustain biodiversity and help preserve ethnic heritages and culture.
The most common example was the developing agriculture of the originally nomadic Maasai of East Africa, who in times past roamed large tracks of fecund land grazing their herds. But Maasai got educated. They built barns and fences and got deeds.
As the price of cattle increased, the expansive fragile prairies of the Serengeti were threatened, much less any hope for sustainable ranching. Overgrazing had been a problem for several decades before, but that was now aggravated by pesticides and hormones and the overuse of antibiotics.
So compassionate conservationists realized that if those modern ranchers were offered a less demanding alternative for the same income, the ecosystem could be preserved.
Build a tented camp and give the ranchers a percentage.
I was very closely involved with several of those and in 2004 got the company for which I was consulting in Tanzania named “Ecotourism Company of the Year” by Conde Nast.
Initially I believed whole-heartedly in the idea. All for one and one for all. I was always suspicious that even the best of seasons could provide sufficient revenue to our Maasai partners while covering our costs and making a bit of money, but the euphoria of the time stripped any brake on the idea:
So what if we lost a few dollars on one or two of our projects. There was absolutely no question that the exposure we got from the Conde Nast and other awards boosted our overall revenue.
That’s when a scholar at the African Studies Centre (ASC) at Leiden University first contacted me to help them mount a lengthy study on ecotourism. I couldn’t have been more honored. After all, this is where the idea began.
I began working with Marcel Rutten in 2008, actually before he officially announced the ongoing project. We worked together for years. He was a taskmaster of extraordinary dedication. Every claim I made, every anecdote I recounted had to be documented.
Four to five years later it was clear what was happening, and not just to the project but to all of us who were working with Marcel.
Ecotourism was not the panacea originally presumed. In fact, it was little more than a ruse. All of us felt first deflated, then defensive, and then really, really angry. We had been duped by our own ideas, ideas that we had so forcefully presented that the public was now wholly onboard. And now, we had to work to reverse all that.
Marcel died unexpectedly in 2018. Nobody wanted to replace him. The flipflop in the goals for the project was an embarrassment to the ASC. The whole project was simply dropped and swept under the rug.
Many of us have spent the last ten years trying to explain what happened. Let me try to give it to you in a sentence: No ecotourism project can create sufficient enough revenue to sustain a healthy business venture. Much better chance with cows eating up the ecosystem.
And the arrogance (click here) of assuming that a developing Maasai farmer will choose the former over the latter for haughty conservation reasons is appalling. We’re still talking about survival economies. If half of America won’t support reducing fossil fuels, it’s breathtakingly evil to promote travel because it considers itself “ecotourism.”
RIP Marcel, as difficult as that will be.
You’re probably reading this on Facebook. Well if so, buckle up. Time’s are a changin’.
I can tell from the stirrings on the African continent, grossed up by European sentiment first started in Ireland, that serious social media regulation is on the way.
Walifundisha sisi na macho yet yamefungwa. Tulipowafungua, walikuwa na ardhi na tulikuwa na Biblia.
Moments of human greatness often come in speeches. They lose a little each time they’re replayed or recounted from one person to another or translated through languages, because each language has a unique tonality, syntax and onomatopoeia – an unique style for their own unique talk.
What I fear most is that we’ll give up. “A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.”
MLK said those exact words at a church in Selma the day after Bloody Sunday, but they’re rarely quoted. Instead a much shorter paraphrased version is attributed to him, even though he didn’t say it: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
Thus our age began.
Does this mean that America is three times as bad as Kenya and has now devolved into a third world culture?
The Human Rights Watch’ “World Report 2020″ implies exactly that. “In 2019,” the report states, “the United States continued to move backwards” towards the cabal of wicked dictatorships and failed states. Have we really fallen that far?
In many parts of Africa a new year – and especially a new decade – begins with somber predictions from seers and religious leaders whose adoration depends upon their past reliability.
In Kenya the famous psychic Nicolas Aujula says Trump will lose “but won’t go quietly.” In Nigeria The Presiding Bishop of The Divine Seed of God Chapel Ministry, Sasa, Ojoo, Ibadan, Prophet Wale Olagunju says, “With little prayer, Donald Trump will win the election.”
So there you have it.
The long Christmas holiday in America starts soon and goes right through next week because of the day-of-the-week that Christmas lands. It’s one of the biggest end-of-the-year travel periods in decades because of this as well.
But somehow it doesn’t feel like a holiday this year. People are still spending like crazy in an economy that to me is all smoke and mirrors, but all over the world dissatisfaction with their lives is only growing. You know the list. America’s on top.
Listening to her, you wouldn’t believe that Charlize Theron is South African. Her English is near perfect Americana and her experience in South Africa before coming to the United States in her twenties is also near perfect Americana.
I’ve often used South African comparisons as harbingers of what will happen, here. So has Theron, the star in the movie, Bombshell. None in Hollywood have the life experience that Ms. Theron has to play this role.
Victoria Falls without falls is disturbing enough but there are even more disturbing aspects to the viral dissemination of the falls turned off.
More than several times I’ve seen the falls this way. It reflects a severe drought to the west. But right now really destructive torrential rains are destroying large towns and major agricultural areas to the west as the drought breaks. In several months the falls will be running wild. No one seems to mention that… this time.
Early Wednesday I bemoaned Democrats for impeachment because their Republican opponents argued the facts weren’t egregious enough. By Wednesday afternoon Republicans said they weren’t the facts.
Last May Nairobi housing officials declared a large number of residences “safe” for habitation. Yesterday one of those collapsed. Last August Kenyan police declared they had disarmed holders of illegal assault weapons in the northwest. Sunday Kenyan reporters revealed children as young as ten years old were proudly talking of the number of people they had recently killed. (Watch this unbelievable video.)
Hoisted by their own petard. I love that phrase and I think that’s what the Democrats are unfortunately being forced to do.
In Africa and other newer societies the body of law is less than in our “ancient” country (as one African commentator recently called us). That means two things: there’s less to consider and less to interpret.
It’s very hard to write about Africa when America is in such crisis. But there’s one topic that stitches the two together perfectly: corruption.
Corruption is at the heart of America’s disintegration, today. And corruption was always pervasive in Africa until just recently. But it’s not an exaggeration to say that corruption in America, today, is greater than it was ever anywhere in Africa that I can remember.
What do you see in the picture above? Snapped by a reporter for one of South Africa’s most read publications, Aisha Abdool Karim is not himself a photographer. This was last week in the very center of Cape Town, St. George’s Mall.
The woman being dragged was a refugee. There is growing xenophobia in South Africa against illegal immigrants, which we know is a worldwide phenomenon. But what does the picture tell you?