As Colin Tudge points out in The Time Before History, there was indeed a large marsupial, Diprotodon, which became extinct in Australia only a few thousand years ago, possibly hunted to death by humans. The bunyip tale may originate in memories of this giant relative of the wombat.

Unusually among predators, we can hunt large animals to extinction because we do not depend on any one prey. We can pick off rare specimens for reasons of status while depending on more prosaic foods for mere sustenance. Humans, Tudge tells us, evolved during the last ice age. As it ended, the melting ice caused rapid and catastrophic rises in sea level – rises that may just be behind the flood myths in 500 cultures worldwide. Australian Aboriginal culture stretches back into the last Ice Age; they can name and locate mountains that have been under the sea since the great icecaps melted 8000 years ago.

In the Judaeo-Christian world, the tale of Noah’s flood is the familiar one. According to Tudge, Genesis really describes the time when the soft and luxurious gathering grounds of the Tigris-Euphrates delta disappeared rapidly under the rising seas of the Persian Gulf. Horticulture, a supplement to hunting and gathering, had helped populations to grow, but as the land shrank, people in the Middle East had to farm with a vengeance. “The cultivation skill they had indulged as a bonus had to be deployed as a matter of urgency,” he writes. “Thus, they were embarked on the rising vortex of agriculture and population from which, ever since, there has been no escape.”

In Genesis, God’s curse on Adam was that he must leave his hunting-and-gathering Eden and “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”. Or, to put it another way: by dreadful labour you will farm cereals and bloody miserable it’s going to be. Farmers rise early and work till dark. By contrast, !Kung bushmen work 15 hours a week to hunt and gather what they need, and spend the rest of the time sitting around telling stories. Is it any wonder, asks Tudge, that we remember the garden – which knowledge (of horticulture) and climate change rendered too small for us – with such wistful longing?

Tudge admits he has pieced together some facts and some ideas – and some opinions – and told them like history. And a cracking good tale it is. He tells a story of human evolution that is fast-paced, exciting and, of course, deeply interesting because we enjoy reading about ourselves. One of the recurring themes is the punctuated equilibrium behaviour of complex systems. In evolution, the bulk of change in populations occurs quite rapidly, when the population is under stress. Climate changes in the same way: millennia of stability, then something suddenly gives and whoosh – ice age. Tudge describes the evolution of Homo sapiens as an excellent exemplar of this thesis. H. sapiens’s ancestors were forest-dwelling primates – versatile and successful creatures who had developed flexible arms and binocular vision in response to the evolution of the tall, branching plants we still like.

But with the cooling of the planet during glaciation, evaporation dropped, rainfall dropped, and our forest home became distinctly moth-eaten. The stretches of grassland encroaching into the drying African forest presented a new challenge to the primates.

As more forest ceded to savanna, bipedal primates were at extra, fortuitous advantages. They presented a smaller surface area – a hairy head only, to the unshaded sun, and were thus less prone to overheating while running. Their treeclimbing arms, now free of locomotive duties, could throw missiles or carry children, permitting the luxury of a longer childhood. They could begin to make things. As manipulation took off, so did brain size, in a positive feedback loop of the kind supposed to drive those rapid and astonishing creative leaps that dot evolution.

Other tales are told in the book: ice ages, plate tectonics, the coming and going of greenhouse gases, the way that horses became horses and giraffes giraffes. In the course of the narrative, Tudge honourably sets out not just the scientific principles underpinning the likes of catastrophe mathematics, but also how scientists’ beliefs and cultures shape and colour their discoveries.

I did feel, however, that having offered that caveat at the beginning, Tudge felt he could roar on through the book saying this was so and that was so, without slowing any of his sentences down with maybes and it-seems-to-mes.

But the book is sold as much more than just an update on contemporary theories about evolution and planetary history. For this is a zookeeper’s view of evolution, and it leads to a zookeeper’s – or a gamekeeper’s – view of where we went wrong, and of “what we must do now”.

Before he begins his warnings and prescriptions, Tudge devotes a whole chapter to the theory of “prehistoric overkill”. He plausibly, if a little tediously, catalogues great suites (he’s fond of the term) of large mammals that have fallen into extinction and whose disappearance seems to coincide rather unfortunately with the arrival of Homo sapiens on their continent or island. He makes the point that large animals are particularly vulnerable to becoming extinct because there are fewer of them and they are more vulnerable again if they represent a charismatic prey to a versatile human hunter.

Yet there is an irony in this. Even as these extinctions are recounted, you cannot avoid the note of regret on Tudge’s part, almost bitter, on occasion, that these splendid beasts “formidable creatures whose like we do not see today”, no longer roam the Earth. Tudge’s prescriptions, even on issues such as global warming, are geared above all to save those charismatic megafauna we have not yet wiped out. The irony, of course, is it is the very prestige of the charismatic megafauna as hunting trophies for men – from the aboriginal warrior who caught the (last?) bunyip down to the great white hunter, which informs Tudge’s own outlook.

Slowly, slowly, the conservation movements of the north, bodies such as the World Conservation Union and the World Wide Fund for Nature are evolving away from their origins as game conservancies to ensure good trophy hunting, through game conservancies to ensure good shots with the Pentax, into bodies that embrace not just lions, tigers and elephants but also ecosystems. More challenging, still, they are beginning take on the concerns of the people who coexist – or, indeed, are part of, those ecosystems. But Tudge sees only the hunter and destroyer.

He worries about the greenhouse effect, not, it seems, primarily because of its catastrophic effects on vegetation on which all animals, farmers and elephants alike, utterly depend, but because there are now too many of us to allow the elephants to migrate to a place where they could survive global warming.

Some who will say this is the view of one who cares more about elephants than people – for elephants are in direct conflict with people already, thanks to the way game has been managed and land has been enclosed. Others who will say that this is the view of one who sees species as separate and autonomous and fails to appreciate the intricate web of life. Both are fair points.

It would be a great shame if elephants became extinct. But on its own this is never going to be a sufficient argument to alter the entire economics and politics of the world. It seems a little perverse, then, to present this prospect in that way: on its own. This is not to say that The Time Before History isn’t an enjoyable, stimulating and sometimes exhilarating tour through life’s history. But it is not comprehensive. It has a particular, highly personal point of view, perhaps a rather old-fashioned one. It makes use of old-fashioned principles of A-caused-B positivism, which leads to cumbersome reasoning at times. No open systems or self-organising complexity here.

Maybe the blurb about how this book draws lessons from the origins of humankind that we can apply to our present and future world and so forth was grafted on by the publisher, who suspected that a plain tale of man and the charismatic megafauna might not sell. Personally, I don’t see why not. I’m not sure that people would not rather read a good tale with the odd ecological insight turning up along the way, than yet another book on “what we must do now”.

Take the “bandwagon” success of the oncogene theory about how cancer is caused in the 1980s. It may not have been simply because it was a good idea, argues Joan Fujimara in one of the more readable contributions to Susan Leigh Star’s Ecologies of Knowledge (State University of New York Press, $21.95, ISBN 07914 2566 5). She proposes that the bandwagon was helped on its way because of the development of recombinant gene technology, the dissemination by key labs of probes for “their” oncogenes, and even the political imperatives of those in the US National Cancer Institute who saw an opportunity for justifying past expenditure.

The introductory essay promises a political agenda: discussion of questions raised by feminists and liberation movements in poor countries. But this early promise disappears in a thicket of sociologese. To borrow a sociological term, many of the essays are self-referential – that is, they cite other sociological papers rather than actual ideas or examples. Where the book is comprehensible, it fails to be truly stimulating. The sociology of science can – and should – be both.

Wilfred Beckerman’s Small is Stupid has been bracketed with North’s book. It is a defence of economic growth andeconomists against the green rhetoric. He claims to “blow the whistle on the greens”. In line with the wider movement’s fashion for borrowing the rhetoric and techniques of marginal groups, Beckerman stoops to the old trick of making wild generalised accusations. He attributes some extreme statements or policies to environmentalists and “eco-doomsters”, and to politicians who have fallen under their sway. But he doesn’t attribute specific statements to specific people. On the whole, this is because such immoderate sentiments have never been expressed, or at least not for years.

However, Beckerman also touches on points that do deserve an airing. He criticises the environmental movement for prioritising “middle-class” concerns rather than issues of social justice, and also for falling prey to the temptation to overstate a scare story while failing to correct popular distortions of the message.

Much of the environmental movement in Europe and North America grew out of the conservation movement with its emphasis on pursuits such as bird-watching. It has indeed tended to reflect middle-class concerns, possibly to the exclusion of more democratic worries, such as airborne lead in inner cities or toxic waste dumping in West Africa. But Beckerman has failed to grasp that all this is now changing.

Friends of the Earth UK was massively embarrassed, for example, by public opposition to its support for VAT on domestic fuel. Its critics pointed out that those being taxed were consumers using only small amounts of energy. The tax was socially regressive and unlikely to be very environmentally effective. Friends of the Earth UK learnt from this episode, changed its mind and is trying to incorporate issues of social justice into its policy making.

The interesting question now is whether environmental protection needs to be expensive, and whether it needs to penalise the poorest most heavily. Beckerman does not enter into this debate, however. He assumes that environmental “protection” costs money that could – and would – otherwise be spent on “welfare”.

The preconception that environmental “goods” must be bought with money and at the expense of welfare, flows from a way of thinking from which Beckerman specifically pleads not to be parted. According to this outlook, the environment is just a sector, making demands on the economy and competing with other sectors such as business. The economy describes the world, the environment is just a part of that world, and must justify its contribution to human welfare in value-for-money terms.

But you could equally well view the environment as the world, biological and physical, from which we derive our welfare. The economy would then be only a sector of that world – making demands on the environment and competing with other sectors such as agricultural labour or caring for the sick – which must justify its contribution to human welfare in terms of “value for damage”. Of course, neither view is complete – neither takes much account of society or human ingenuity, for example.

Beckerman defends his use of economic growth as a rough, but pretty much linear index for welfare against the charge of oversimplification, assuring us that “no professional economist would ever have advocated maximum economic growth per se”. He goes on to say that since growth enables us to consume, and consumption is desirable, growth is desirable. Once again, there is no mention of the debate about whether growth, combined with the market liberalisation and globalisation put in place to promote it, is in fact leading to such a widening of incomes as to be deleterious to many, most, or even all of us.

Until the debate on “does money maximise welfare?” has matured, it may not be possible to define sustainable development in a way that economists and politicians properly understand. Beckerman has uncovered the fact that definitions of “sustainable development” in economic terms do tend to come unstuck, because there is no consensus on what these terms mean.

Once you begin, as many economists (such as David Pearce) have done, to convert welfare and environmental goods into cash “equivalents”, it is all too easy for everyone to slip into the notion that money is not a symbol for welfare and environmental goods, but a convertible form of those goods. Once you put a cash value on happiness, even as an exercise, you open the door to the belief that money can buy it.

Beckerman seems to have few problems with this, though. He insists that we don’t need to worry about many kinds of environmental damage because we can more than make up for it with money. “Alarm over the predicted effects of global warming is vastly exaggerated,” he writes. “For the USA at least, global warming could hardly have a significant effect on national income. For the sector most likely to be affected is agriculture, which constitutes only about 3 per cent of GNP.” What Americans are to eat, he doesn’t say.

By this reckoning, stopping climate change will cost us more than climate change itself, so we are better off if we keep the money and damage the environment.

He quite seriously proposes that it is in “everybody’s interests, including the Bangladeshis'”, to make “some kind of deal” (he does not say who is to make it) whereby the Bangladeshis say goodbye to 20 per cent of their country but receive in money perhaps one-fifth of whatever it might cost the global economy to rein in greenhouse emissions. They lose their homes and land to the sea, but get a cheque in return. This, he says, is the cheapest way of “sparing them from the effects” of global warming.

He rounds this off with a demonstration of his fine grasp of the complex way that populations and ecosystems might respond to a changing climate: “We would all have plenty of time to put on a lighter shirt.”

The reduction of the world, both physical and spiritual, to dollars and immediate human comfort occurs repeatedly. There is no sense of living biology on the pages, of a system that we cannot simply replicate by reinvesting the same cash we earned when we chopped it down or dug it up.

Such ecological illiteracy is a common feature of economics books, which tends to make them a maddening read for anyone who knows even a little about ecosystems. It behoves biologists, ecologists and environmental campaigners to get to grips with modern economic thought. But I can’t help feeling the need for economists to study a bit of ecology is even more urgent.

Perhaps one of the most useful contributions in Partha Dasgupta’s book
is the challenge to the widely believed notion of the ‘tragedy of the commons’.

The very poorest in poor countries frequently depend directly on the
environment for much of their living, and many environmental resources
are held and controlled communally. Social norms evolve to ensure that no
one abuses or damages those resources. Dasgupta asserts that these norms
represent an effective way to protect environmental resources, better than
private ownership or state control, and that the state should therefore
support, rather than undermine, communal control of important natural resources.

This is more thought-provoking than the conclusion, reached after several
chapters of equations and functions pertaining to human metabolism, that
if wages for physical work are low enough, the effort of doing the work
will cost people more in extra food bills than they earn, so they won’t
accept the jobs.

Although the book opens with a specific injunction against unjustified
and, especially, unspoken assumptions, it is riddled with both. For instance,
he assumes that if the ‘gentry’ make money, their land will automatically
be improved. Yet mechanisation, tree removal, use of high levels of fertiliser
and pesticide – all carried out by farmers with money – degrade land.

Recognition of this effect would have a fundamental bearing on the mathematical
modelling of the economic performance of the agricultural sector, as it
means that both investment and turnover are eroding, rather than adding
to, the capital base. It defeats the whole object to recognise this degradation
only in the chapter on environment, and ignore it in the rest of the book.

In some passages, it even seems that the hunger of the subjects is there
to serve the analysts, and not the other way round. Further, it is also
made clear whose side the analysts are on: ‘The problem for the analyst
is that in long-run equilibrium, the better fed . . . would be expected
to spread the expenditure of their greater energy intake over a number
of activities. This has been confirmed in a series of studies.’

In these studies, sugar-cane cutters were given a food supplement, but
the problem for the analysts was that they failed to cut more sugar cane.
Instead they finished work earlier, hurried home to their families and spent
longer up and about in the evenings. This made it impossible for the analysts
to measure how much extra work could be done on the strength of the extra
food, and impossible for their employers to get more cane cut.

From this, Dasgupta relates, researchers have inferred that there are
‘strong diminishing returns in the nutrition productivity function at moderate
levels of nutrition intake’. Returns to whom? Productivity of what? That
inference is left to the reader.

Dasgupta’s approach is tiresomely meticulous. Quite often, he stumbles
upon exciting observations which promise valuable insights into the plight
of the destitute. But busy as he is, calculating the exact notional wage
which buys a notional number of calories for his notional worker to power
a notional number of swings of a pickaxe, he does not explore these observations
any further.

For instance, at the outset Dasgupta quite commendably decided to explore
the economic manifestations of sexual inequality within households. He makes
the important point that because of these factors, households do not, as
economists generally assume them to, always behave in the way that optimises
the situation for all members, because some members, commonly the male ones,
have more sway.

In the course of this he uncovers a finding that the improvement in
child survival of awarding extra income is 20 times better if you give
the income to the mother than if you give it to the father. This potentially
explosive point is not explored – indeed, it is underplayed to the extent
that it never escapes from brackets.

Instead, page after page is given up to graphs and equations of negotiation
sets ‘proving’ that when things get truly desperate in the home village,
it makes economic sense to a man to leave his wife, however servile and
obliging she is, to seek his fortune in the city. As Dasgupta puts it: ‘It
is the shrinking of the shaded area on figure 11.1, and not the reduction
in the wife’s exit option, that makes a man abandon his wife in times of
economic crises.’ I find this unlikely: ‘Sorry, honey, I’ve just noticed
that the shaded area on figure 11.1’s shrunk, so I’m off.’

There is something grotesque about 70 pages of different formulations
of the energy metabolism of a malnourished labourer in different states
of body and employment market – in some cases calculated to four significant
figures – to decide whether she has just enough or not quite enough to eat.
It might be a whole lot simpler just to ask her.

Kate de Selincourt is a freelance writer.

A key focus of recent work by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation
and Development is achieving what is known as a ‘win-win’ situation- one
where improved economic efficiency and a healthier environment are compatible.
The OECD commissioned the reports that make up this book so that readers,
the jacket claims, can find out how improved economic policies in forestry
management could help avert environmental destruction. But the ‘win-win’
quest has been a waste of time so far, according to the five case studies.

Forestry in five European countries is examined from an economic point
of view. One can be forgiven for wondering whether the environmental considerations
have been added in because that is what economists are told to do these
days. In some contributions, the environmental analysis amounts to no more
than an attempt to put a price on such considerations as recreational value,
impact on the water supply and so forth, so it can all be added up in the
way economists are comfortable with.

The outcome of these sums in some cases is likely to please the forestry
authorities. Although forestry as an industry loses money, if you add in
the notional value to the nation totted up by asking people how much they
spend visiting the forests, forestry miraculously turns in a profit. Sadly,
they do not speculate on how much more people would spend on visiting pleasant
plantations of broadleafs-or, to put it in economic terms, the opportunity
costs of planting boring old spruces are overlooked.

To discuss the world as it is discussed in this book is to accept that
environmental and social good can be measured in the same coin by which
we measure ‘the economy’-if it ain’t worth dosh, it ain’t worth nuffink.

But even if one could accept the prices economists put on things people
value, economists cannot be expected to understand how the real environment
works. So in the chapter on British forestry, by Ian Bateman of the University
of East Anglia, we read ‘the quality of the water in headwater streams .
. . is greatly affected by afforestation (under certain geological circumstances)’
but ‘currently no cost data is available . . . but it seems likely that
these costs will be relatively small’.

Yet in 1990, the earliest this could have been written, ecologists were
already sounding warnings that acid pollution in combination with conifer
plantations seemed to be having a dire effect on water and wildlife. The
cost to the Welsh salmon fishery alone will run to ‘millions’, according
to the Welsh National Rivers Authority. And the dipper has all but disappeared
from many streams. An economist might be able to cost that too, by asking
people how much they would pay to bring it back. But economists cannot predict,
and so protect us from environmental damage. Only the naturalists, ecologists
and local observers of the mountains do that.

A heartening touch of humility is shown by Massimo Florio of the economics
department of the University of Urbino, Italy. He suggests that better research
and monitoring of Italian forests could have averted pollution damage and
environmental errors. He admits that ‘a generally neglected topic in discussions
of market failure is ignorance’.

‘It is often thought (presumably only by economists, that market failures
. . . are caused by the lack of incentives to exchange information. However,
a more careful examination reveals that, in many cases, information is not
exchanged for the simple reason that it does not exist,’ he adds.

If the British contribution has its flaws, however, parts of the German
chapter by Volker Bergen, Michael Behrndt and Gerhard Pfister of the University
of Guttingen could become classic illustrations on how to dress up a truism
with lots of jargon and a graph, and acquire an OECD grant to do so.

For instance, it will not surprise many people to hear that if a certain
amount of German agricultural land is converted to forestry, then whether
or not this is a benefit to the nation will depend on the relative profitability
of these two land uses, taking into account the way the markets will respond
to the changed supplies of the products, and will also depend on the social
and environmental effects of the change.

However, the German authors took five dense paragraphs of text dotted
with jargon about incremental losses and shadow prices, and a graph simply
to make that point. I cannot help wondering whether such obfuscation represents
good value for money to OECD taxpayers.

Only the Spanish author, Pablo Campos Palacan, a government research
council environmentalist, stops pretending that all can be for the best
in a sustainably developing world, and comes clean about the competition
between economic and social-environmental benefits. He describes the dehesa
areas of western and southwestern Spain; arid areas where cork oak and holm
oak have for centuries stabilised the soils and the microclimate, and provided
pasture and fodder for modest livestock herding.

This way of using the land is under threat from tree clearance, to make
way for the intensive, high-input farming that destroys many wildlife habitats
and could quickly lead to soil loss and desertification in such a dry climate.

Using straightforward economic analysis, he demonstrates that preserving
the trees would make available a small income from forest production, but
overall will cost the country money, relative to the income available from
intensive agriculture in the short term. He then states that his countrymen
and women had better decide it is worth spending the money because they
won’t have an environment left if they don’t.

This, I cannot help feeling, is keeping economists in their proper place.
By all means we can ask them how much something will cost, but we shouldn’t
let them tell us what to do.

The South African Tourist Board has a slogan: ‘Our world in one country’.
And you cannot really argue with it.

From an environmental point of view, South Africa is a little model
of the world. Western-style consumption leads to greenhouse and acid rain
emissions, and is extracting grain and beef from the fragile soils and tearing
minerals from the land. The white lifestyle is propped up by underpaid,
land-hungry, impoverished black people.

South Africa also has the desertification, deforestation, overcrowding,
erosion, squalor, the shoddy pollution standards and dirty habits like importation
of toxic waste, of many poor countries.

Magnifying all this has been apartheid. Apartheid is not so much an
aberration, as an exaggeration of the way the whole world works. Apartheid’s
environmental consequences have lessons for us all. Our world in one country.

Restoring the Land has been written by a distinguished list of South
African activists, academics and journalists, and gives a comprehensive
account of how South Africa’s history has affected the environment, and
finds some realistic solutions.

It should be mandatory reading for every South African. But contributions
are written in such graphic detail that a stranger to the country can read,
visualise and understand what is happening. The authors recount how apartheid’s
idea of ‘separate development’ was used to justify the banishment of anyone
black who was without a job to one of the tiny, already overcrowded ‘homelands’.

Even in the 1950s, before the huge waves of forced removals from ‘white’
areas, the South African government estimated these lands could only support
60 per cent of the people already there. The soil erosion and deforestation
that have resulted from this policy are visible from space.

Readers visit a ‘temporary’ resettlement camp that has been used for
15 years at Thornhill, Transkei. In conditions of ludicrous overcrowding
and poverty not a tree and scarcely a blade of grass has survived people’s
hunger. We meet people with blankets pulled round their heads to keep out
the dust, hear an old man shout ‘I am sick and tired of this’ through the
dusty wind.

We visit tiny shacks in the urban squatter camps, where there are no
services because under apartheid they were not supposed to exist, so coal
smoke from a million stoves combines with the stink of a million toilet
buckets.

Consultant editor Mamphela Ramphele is a black academic with a lifetime’s
involvement in the struggle for democratic rights. She explains in a painfully
personal way how hard it is for the country’s majority to take on environmental
issues.

‘On a visit to Australia in 1990 I was overwhelmed by the beauty of
the landscape . . . In particular the mountains seems to have different
hues of blue, which I thought was a particular feature of Australian mountains.
The Australian she was with insisted that South Africa is just as beautiful.
To her astonishment she found that he was right.

‘Throughout my adult life, I had not paused long enough to admire the
natural beauty of South Africa. I came back to my country with new eyes.
There must be many black South Africans who have not yet opened their eyes
to the beauty of their country of birth.’

In her introduction, Ramphele explains that most black people are completely
occupied with day-to-day survival – those with energy left over are almost
always engaged in the political ‘struggle’. But this has been cruelly compounded
by conservation policies politely described as ‘insensitive’. People have
lost their rights to lands, water, fishing, grazing and collecting forest
products. They have been turned out of their homes to create space for game
reserves. People defending the local people’s rights have been assassinated,
as David Webster was in 1989. As one community worker quoted by Ramphele
puts it: ‘This can only promote vigorous anti-conservation ideology among
rural communities.’

But people have fought back, and shown that their needs may be environmentally
friendly. Restoring the Land shows how, as with the South as a whole, it
is grassroots initiatives – tree-planting, house-building, organising to
protect traditonal and sustainable ways of life – that are working.

When the Richtersveld, a stunning semi-desert on the Namibia border,
was designated as a national park, the local Nama people, descended from
the bushmen, were to be moved off the land, with no consultation. The chapter
on people and parks tells the story of how a legal action by the community
forced the Parks Board to negotiate; the board now accepts that farming
can continue in harmony with the local ecology, and the people can stay.
They have secured rights to income generated by the park, and to a role
in its management.

The Nama people say they feel their victory has liberated them. The
Parks Board has embraced the principle of community participation and now
publicly repudiates the heavy-handed removals that went before – and seems
relieved to do so.

Such rays of hope are still rare, and several of the authors warn that
after ‘liberation’, it is crucial that the environment is not forgotten
in the desperate scramble to better the financial lot of the masses. Central
to environmentally viable change will be land reform, and research and education
on land restoration and sustainable agriculture.

Many books about the politics of the environment start from generalised
theory and some never actually touch the ground. But because this volume
describes one real place, readers who are not particularly politically
well-read can make sense of the political points being made. And, with
luck, relate them not just to South Africa but to the world.

Kate de Selincourt is a science writer.

Groundwork: African Women as Environmental Managers edited by Shanyisa
A Khasiani, African Centre for Technology Studies, Nairobi, pp 131, Kshs
140

Development organisations have failed to encourage successful, ecologically
sustainable development, not just because of the way they do things, but
because of the way they know things, says the collection of essays Gaining
Ground.

Ecosystems are so complex and so full of interrelationships that the
exact, analytical approach will never provide a usable working model – and
that is even before the human element is introduced.

In their contributions to Gaining Ground, Calestous Juma and Betty Nafuna
Wamalwa point out that the Western way of knowing separates humans from
their environment, and separates the spiritual from the material. Wamalwa
contrasts this with societies that give weight to spiritual, as well as
to physical and intellectual tools, when managing nature. She describes
the belief system of the Kenyan Akamba people in which the concept of a
human being includes the dead, the living and the unborn – life, spirit
and immortality.

Courses of action are always conditioned by the spirits and the effect
of an action on the unborn, on posterity, is automatically taken into account,
she says. Wamalwa relates this cosmology to the Akamba’s agricultural tradition,
which cherishes and respects the soil, cultivating a mixture of crops so
there is vegetation cover all year round, and rejecting the plough as too
damaging to the earth.

Although the main meat of Gaining Ground is literally earthy: soil erosion,
crop selection and land tenure, the book opens with two very stimulating
chapters, by Juma and Richard Norgaard, giving an up-to-the-minute tour
of thinking on epistemology and institutional management.

They also mention the system theory of Fritjof Capra, in which relationships
rather than ‘things’ are important, illustrating this in Juma’s chapter
on genetic diversity, in which he describes plant classification in another
traditional Kenyan society. The Bukusu classify plants by their role in
the ‘socio-ecosystem’ – one name can be transferred to another ‘species’
if it takes over the same role. ‘A plant is not an entity existing in isolation
but an embodiment of the interrelationships involving physical, biological
and social aspects of its existence,’ Juma says.

Despite the exciting start, some of the contributions fail to deliver
– surprisingly, including one by Juma on Kenyan economic policy. In it he
appears to accept the Bruntland ‘sustainable growth’ idea, with its perception
of the environment as a reservoir to fuel ‘growth’ and ‘development’, and
environmental protection as important mainly to keep that reservoir full.

He also quotes without comment the Kenyan government’s projection that
the average gross domestic product ‘will have to grow by 5.6 per cent per
year to accommodate the population’. Yet surely measuring GDP is a highly
westernised ‘way of knowing’ whether people have what they need, and many
alternative ways of measuring wealth have been proposed elsewhere.

Norgaard warns that the way things are organised as though it was possible
to be rational and scientific in the real world can lead to an awful lot
of wasted time and effort. In his illuminating chapter on managing arid
lands in Kenya, Gideon Cyrus Mutiso repeats the point, saying that employees
of aid organisations too often try to plan in quantitative terms. This means
they all start off with a huge mission to amass data. They cannot cope with
asking local people to give their judgement of what might be needed, and
then simply taking it from there.

Instead of setting up tightly-researched prescriptions for action,
organisations should be thinking in terms of becoming flexible and responsive,
and of cooperating with one another. Good practice ‘will be an ongoing process
of searching and reorganising’, Norgaard writes. He hints at why this sensible
approach is not much in evidence: ‘If they indeed function better together,
organisations will lose much of their individual identity and claim to resources.’

The sister collection, Groundwork, looks at environment and development
in Kenya from women’s point of view. Land title, for instance, was thoughtlessly
given by the colonial government exclusively to men, who took advantage
of this to grow cash crops and make money: it is the women’s task to feed
the family, so women are forced to cultivate, and thereby imperil, marginal
land for the sake of survival.

The fact that the women themselves are often blamed for this situation
could be described as an error of perception – but Groundwork tells the
tale in simple political terms. Knowledge and perception are highly political
matters – something that the more intellectual approach of Gaining Ground
sometimes side-steps. Between the two, these books help the reader to a
satisfying understanding of the situation in much of rural Africa.

Kate de Selincourt is a science writer.

*ACTS, PO Box 45917, Nairobi, Kenya. Fax: 010-254-2 743 995

The flora of the Cape forms one of the world’s six biomes. It occupies
just 1.5 per cent of Africa but is extremely rich in species.

Rapid urbanisation in South Africa is bringing thousands of country
people to Cape Town each month. The new arrivals bring with them the tradition
of visiting sangomas who prescribe herbal medicines.

Gathering herbs from the wild has become a boom industry, and there
are fears that some plants, especially those dug up for their roots or bulbs,
may become extinct. Attempts by the police to stop people collecting plants
have failed. ‘Many of the collectors are young men and very fit,’ says Cameron
Greene of Stelenbosch University, who has studied the herb gatherers. ‘The
police chase them through the mountains on motorbikes but never catch them.’

On one occasion six sangomas were arrested while collecting bark in
a forest on Table Mountain. Fiona Archer, an ethnobotanist at the University
of Cape Town, interceded on their behalf, pointing out to the magistrate
that if these collectors were locked up, others would simply take their
place.

‘I said we would just drive the whole thing underground, and instead
we should take this opportunity to cooperate with the healers in finding
more sustainable sources for healing plants,’ Archer explained.

The sangomas were released, and the Western Cape Traditional Plant Use
Com mittee was set up. This committee has now discussed with the sangomas
plans for cultivating traditional herbs. The healers are enthusiastic about
the idea because it will save them a lot of travelling, and ensure them
a steady supply of plants.

The committee, chaired by Cape Town City Council’s director of parks
and forests, Peter Rist, has applied to the South African Nature Foundation
for funding for a full-time worker and cash to start a nursery.

The scheme has the support of many of the local botanists and ecologists
– but not all. Ian MacDonald, of the Percy Fitzpatrick Institute of African
Ornithology at the University of Cape Town, argues that the scheme gives
credibility to medicinal practices which, he says, ought to be phased out,
‘the way my culture no longer uses eye of newt and wing of bat’. ‘What will
the position of conservationists be if, five years later, it turns out that
they have been encouraging the cultivation of a harmful plant?’

Wouter van Varmelo, spokesman for the committee, agreed that the authorities
would need to be careful about which species were cultivated, and they were
still discussing how much control there would be over the nurseries. ‘But
if people need the plants for their medicine, we must let them grow them.’

The crops will be valuable not only to sangomas, who can sell them in
the same way they now sell wild plants. They will also form a reservoir
of potential pharmaceuticals. Research is needed to find the basis of most
of the traditional remedies before the sangomas’ knowledge disappears.