A Desert in the Caribbean

Formerly the tropical "Pearl of the Caribbean,"
the Haitian landscape is mostly barren with little
 capacity for soil retention.

As the sun's last halo slid away behind arid Haitian mountains last week, I was reminded of the reason I jump on every opportunity I get to come back to these forgotten places.  Bright orange streaks of fire followed ridges straight up several of the steep slopes, studded with ancient coral cobbles and shrubby chaparrell where mahogany and acacia had once grown.  The truck we were in stuttered around on the old washboard fall-line road while I imagined the goat herders high up in the mountains lighting weeds to clear land for grazing grass, rusty lighter in one hand, nylon rope, tethered to a life's supply of 4 goats, in the other.

The irony is that my life of work in a cubicle, sitting in coffee shops, chatting with friends over dinner, gardening mushrooms, bees, and my garden, mowing my yard; it's a reality for a tiny fraction of the world.  The developed world, with it's abundance of resources, cheap energy, and subsidized life, is totally different than the vast majority of the rest of the world.  This is not a fun idea.  It's not a sexy concept.  It doesn't feel manageable or hopeful.  This objective reality doesn't make people feel happy, and many folks choose to just ignore the waste that our post-colonial society has left in its wake.

It takes amazing organizations to continue the hard work of trying to decipher the most meaningful, sustainable ways of lifting people up, striving toward restoring some of the lost balance in the world, while empowering people to do it for themselves.  Global Food Initiative is one organization that is working in communities throughout the world where people are scraping to hold on to their small share of the world's resources.  I was fortunate to see several of the sites in Haiti last week where they are working with vulnerable communities to maintain stable water supplies, clean food, and where they're finding novel ways to expand food supplies using aquaculture.

Tilapia at a Port-au-Prince hatchery

Smart waste use and reuse is getting bigger and bigger.  Methane digestion with composting toilets that nourish gardens are simple but important solutions that are expanding, along with many other novel ideas for conserving at a small community level.  Our lives of throwing waste on piles and covering them with dirt, of flushing our feces down into drain fields and septic tanks, are wasteful and a frivolous middle finger to the reality much of the rest of the world faces daily.

I believe that keeping in mind the fact that privileged American life is unusual to the rest of the world is important.  It's important not so that we feel guilt or even solidarity with people who see life from the underside, but rather so that we can remember just how unusually fortunate we are to be able to experience life without want for any of the mortal needs that so many scrape for every day.  We need to think smart, be smart, and build smart, with a new infrastructure that repurposes waste and energy.  It's also important so that we don't assume that we are exceptional in any way other than to have been on the winning side of society and the millennia of conflict that enabled it.

A young Haitian girl waits to gather water at a mountain spring,
as a mighty Mapu tree towers behind her.