WORLD RECLAMATION

by Richard St Barbe Baker

In the early years of this Century, desert encroachment was forcing tribes in Northern Equatorial Districts of Africa to converge on a fine section of forest in the old French West Africa to the north of the Gold Coast. Little did these nomads realise that the change of climatic conditions in their train had been caused by their own folly - that of felling the forests to make temporary cultivations, which were abandoned after a year or two. To them it seemed that the forests went on for ever; they were so vast that the thought that constant nibbling would in course of time destroy the whole never entered their imaginations.

The increased density of population meant that the abandoned cultivations did not have time for successful natural regener­ation before their turn came again, and in this way the encroach­ment of the desert from all sides was accelerated; the people were trapped in a rapidly shrinking fertile area surrounded by 1000 miles of pitiless desert. Their eyes were opened too late for any effective action. All that the Chiefs in Council could do was to issue edicts forbidding marriage - and the women of the tribes refused to bear children who would be faced by certain starvation.

This tragic story, enacted in one of the least accessible parts of Africa, was passed over by the world, but it filtered through to me not long after my arrival in East Africa in 1920 to take up my first forestry post. I found that conditions in Northern Kenya were steadily drifting in the same direction, and I was deeply moved to try to prevent a repetition in my own area of this example of racial suicide on a bigger scale than the world had known before.

The A-Kikuyu and other cultivators though crowded into a small area owing to the pressure of European settlement were continuing the practice of felling and burning the high forests to make farms which after two or three seasons had to be abandoned for fresh clearings. Elsewhere it was my duty to issue permits to fell many thousands of pounds worth of valuable timber annually -but my planting allowance for the whole vast area was negligible.

Long lecturing tours brought mo the general support of the chiefs and elders, who prepared the way for my adaptation of the Boy Scouts "A Good Deed a Day" idea to tree-planting. The interest of the Morans - the young "warriors" - was enlisted by the inauguration of a new dance, the Dance of the Trees in which only those who had fulfilled their tree-planting obligations could take part. Those forest "scouts" wore always to be seen planting trees, and earned for themselves the nickname "Men of Trees" - a name which has since been borne not without honour by many thousands throughout the world.

The high ideals, looking for the distant good of the community instead of immediate personal gain appealed, as always, to the young. Three thousand warriors were present at the first official "Dance of the Trees" gathering, following which a safe­guarding initiation ceremony was evolved, and the chiefs and Elders, versed in ancient wisdom, gathered together to choose the motto, TWAHMWE, meaning "All as one" or Pull together."

On leaving Africa I soon found that variations of the same problem were confronting the populations of many countries of the world. In some countries - France, Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere in Europe - the important place of trees and forests in keeping the land productive had long been recognised, but the British, blessed by an insular climate, had never been forced to learn the lesson, and great areas of the world occupied by people of British and sometimes Dutch origin were suffering in consequence. New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the USA all had similar problems, and over the next two or throe decades variations of the same solution were applied to combat them, boy scouts being in many cases alerted to plant trees. Indeed many of the Scouts of those days in the USA became leaders in the Civilian Conservation Corps camps where, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 6,000,000 young men found work in forestry during the dark days of the thirties.

These matters attracted little attention from the general public and it was not until 1953 after my return from the Sahara that the importance of conservation began to sink in.

During the preceding years I had visited various countries and studied many reports of soil erosion, terrifying reports from all over the world. It was obvious to me that unless immediate action was taken we should be overwhelmed with cataclysmic disaster. During a recent visit to the US'. there had been a "big blow" lasting three days after a four months' drought; and a culmination of circumstances which permitted the top soil of 32,000 square miles of farmlands over parts of seven States in the south-west to be picked up and blown across the Atlantic. 20,000,000 tons of top soil had sunk in the sea.

In Australia there were prolonged droughts following years of forest destruction.

In Russia, large areas of black earth lands wore constantly threatened by sheet erosion, by wind and flood, similar to the dust bowl formation in the USA. Countries in and around the Sahara who have fought and are still fighting for their freedom from colonialism and who have fought each other in the past, are now coming together in this gigantic task of making the world's most famous desert fruit­ful again.

Those most closely concerned have however been driven to realise that true success in an undertaking of such magnitude can only be achieved with the help of a revolution in the World's thinking and outlook. Too long has Man been devoting his energies and enterprise to wrong things, piling up armaments, exploring space and the moon. He has been emulating Nero - fiddling with his new toys while the world is burning up.

I am confident that if the work of rehabilitation of the Sahara could be treated as seriously as putting a man on the moon, 100,000 square miles of this desert could be reclaimed in as short a time as eight years. Hones and gardens and cities could be built to rehabilitate a 100,000,000 people, and under a vegetable economy, but two million square miles could produce food for more than the present population of the world. It is high time for the world of nan to abandon the extravagant and harmful practice of eating animal flesh. There are plenty of trees that bear food, such as mango trees (of which there are 200 varieties growing in India), cashew nuts tamarinds, date and coconut palm.

With correct cultivation, fields of reasonable size amid sylvan surroundings could produce the remaining food needs of mankind on a continuous yield basis.

Unsuspected treasures have emerged from the Sahara's great variety of soils - minerals for which the world hungers. It is now recognised that the Sahara is a vast reservoir of minerals and energy. Rich are the iron deposits, tin and manganese, for which there is an ever increasing demand, and rich also are the stores of petroleum and natural gas. Everything needed by modern civilisation is there.

The sun freely offers the Sahara an infinite amount of power. The solar oven with the great advantage of intense heat in un-contaminated conditions is ideal for many purposes in laboratory work. Solar heat can be used for extracting salt from water. Solar refrigeration is already an accepted economic proposition in the Sahara for industrial and domestic use.

Of all this vast potential, the matter of prime importance and real urgency is still the reclamation of the land's surface for food production - this objective must not be put aside in favour of the quick profits obtainable from mineral exploitation,In India a new struggle was taking place to combat the effects of wholesale clearing of mountainsides for shifting cultivation.

New Zealand was threatening to become an emaciated skeleton, for the virgin forests were being cleared away to make grazing lands for sheep and cattle.

The Argentine was suffering from the wholesale exploitation

of Quebrecho for making charcoal, and overgrazing by beef cattle.

Even Brazil was suffering from the removal of tree cover to make coffee plantations which were soon threatened by gully erosion.

The plateau of Spain was rapidly becoming arid, as also else­where in Europe, South Africa, the Middle East ... the story could be continued almost indefinitely. Even today in Eastern England small dust bowls are in process of being formed - and large ones in Canada.

The Sahara, which over recent centuries had been pushing its way south and merging into the Libyan desert on the east, was growing at a phenomenal pace. From my previous experience of equatorial Africa I was convinced that here was a task that must be tackled, and tackled promptly, so with the encouragement of the Universities of Vienna, Innsbruck, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge I set out on the first Sahara University Expedition. Our findings that the Sahara was advancing along a 2,000 mile front often to a depth of 30 miles a year redoubled world interest in Man's environment.

Little did I realise when I first heard the story of the vanishing French West Africa forests that this was a fore­warning of the state into which the world as a whole was rapidly advancing. When I was inaugurating the Men of the Trees in Kenya to combat local encroachment, I was in fact starting to tackle a problem which has grown into the greatest task the world has ever had to face.

A section of mankind is now at last slowly waking up to the fact that at a time when the population is increasing as never before the food-bearing lands and productivity generally are rapidly diminishing. World-wide starvation can only be avoided if the matter is urgently tackled on a vast and indeed world­wide scale.

This position had forcibly struck many of the less materially advanced nations of the world long before the more prosperous western countries took any notice, and already by the time of my second Sahara Expedition in 1964 a fine beginning had been made by many countries of the area. The discovery of vast underground water supplies has shown the practicability of Sahara reclamation. The area of the first underground source of water extends for a quarter of a million square miles - the size of France. A similar area has more recently "been discovered in Libya, where it is already planned far 200,000 acres of cereals to be grown under irrigation.

Millions of trees are being planted to create micro-climates and to produce humus in which food can be grown; this work of reclamation is being tackled from the northern and southern perimeters. The first exercise must be containment of the Sahara and when that has been achieved slowly and surely the desert will be pushed back.

This is a reprint of an article which appeared in 'The Mondcivitan' Spring 1972.