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Saturday 11 October 2008

Another Voice

Kill a goat if you want to save the planet

But the degradation of our planet owes as much to the poor as to the rich. Notions of folk-environmentalism peddled by urban romantics — the idea that peasants close to the land are inhabited by a natural wisdom and ecological foresight denied the rest of us — are fanciful. A million small-scale farming operations satisfying individually modest needs can wreck a landscape and extinguish every competing variety of bird, animal, insect and plant life. Hunger is no steward of river, land and forest, and the poor may ravage their environment more cruelly than those of us who enjoy the luxury of treating outdoors as a kind of garden. Thus have the poor and their goats teemed beneath the radar of our environmental surveillance systems, and daily destroy more land than rising sea-levels will ever do.

You or I can keep a goat (tethered) and my Derbyshire neighbours Simon and Carol can tend their attractive little herd of rare-breed goats securely fenced, and do no harm to man or beast. But set that plant-killer loose in the desperately fragile environment of the Danakil desert in Ethiopia, whence I have just returned, and within a year ten square miles of land will be devastated; acacia, palm, aloe and salt-grass nibbled down to brown and dying stumps; and every new blade to venture above the dust ripped away.

Once goats have mown down the ground-cover of an area, natural reseeding, let alone reforestation, can never get started. The more they multiply and eat, the barer becomes the ground, and the hungrier they get. As their voracity increases, so does the thoroughness with which they find and take every new seedling. Insect, bird and animal life dependent on plants begins to collapse too. Then, when it rains, the soil erodes into gullies and begins to wash away. (I wonder what calculations the global warming industry has made of the relative contributions to sea-level-rise of ice-melt versus soil-dump. I find it hard to believe they know.)

More articles from: Matthew Parris | this section

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