Fear in a Handful of Dust

The environment is changing today at an unprecedented pace.  Natural resources are being consumed and depleted at an alarming rate, ecosystems are being altered across the planet, and every increasing pressures are being brought to bear on flora and fauna.  Even global climate regimes are being transformed in new, unfamiliar and potentially adverse ways.  Human interventions are responsible for many of these changes, and they continue to sustain their momentum in the name of progress, development and better living standards for people.  Increasingly, however, it is becoming clear that such motivations are at best short-sighted; that development processes that degrade the environment ultimately hurt those whose very interests they champion. 

Nowhere is this recognition more apparent than with regard to the use and management of land.  So basic is this resource to economic and social activity, and so subtle the changes effected upon it, that the temptation to take it for granted has often proved irresistible in the past.  Such complacency is no longer possible today. 

In recent years, we have been witness to the progressive degradation, and even desertification, of once fertile land, as its natural endowments have been exploited into exhaustion.  The cruel implications of such change are starkly manifest in deforestation, in the destruction of rural economies, in the abandonment of villages and in migrations of entire agricultural populations to already congested cities.   Gradually, it is becoming clear to us that these transformations are extraordinarily difficult to reverse, and that their several impacts will haunt our communities long after we are gone. 

Hence, even as we presently enjoy the benefits of bore wells, bumper harvests and food security, we are troubled by portents that presage a future distinguished by its environmental devastation.  In the midst of relative plenty, we are learning to fear the handful of dust that haunts T. S. Eliot’s greatest poem, “The Waste Land”. 

As the Chinese pictogram for the word “crisis” indicates, however, every contingency entails both danger and opportunity.  Certainly, there is reason to continue in our fears, because the perils of land degradation are still very much with us.  But we must not also lose sight of the fact that our fears have been profoundly instructive; that society today knows more about the causes of such damage today than at any anterior time.  NGOs, governments and local communities are therefore well-situated to make use of these new understandings, to transform the crisis of land degradation into an opportunity for its regeneration, conservation and sustainable use. 

This special issue of the Development Alternatives Newsletter illuminates some of the problems and emerging solutions to land management.  In the articles that follow, our colleagues at DA examine processes of land degradation and regeneration in a wide variety of contexts, and from a number of different angles.  For instance, they consider income-generation projects that enable local communities to use the resources of reclaimed land to protect it.  With regard to agriculture, unarguably the most significant land-based activity, they take a look at various kinds of organic fertilizer, and the competing claims that have been made about their relative merits.  They underscore the pressing relevance of conservation efforts by presenting an example of an ecologically sensitive area, and the case for its heightened protection.  Finally, at the international level, they look at the pilot phase of the Joint Implementation program that was recently approved during the Berlin “Climate Summit”, and its implications for the reclamation of degraded forest lands in India. 

Limitations of time and available space, however, have not permitted us to be comprehensive in our coverage of either the problems of land management, or their solutions.  For instance, the many impacts of large-scale industrialization on land, and methods of effluent control, have not been discussed.  But we hope that our treatment of a select number of these issues will heighten general awareness and appreciation of land-related concerns, and thereby accelerate the shift to a genuinely sustainable trajectory of development.  q

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