Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology

Introduction

Introduction In 1991, Larry Summers produced a now infamous memo urging the World Bank to encourage “more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs” (less-developed countries). Part of his “economic logic” included an assertion that “countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted” (qtd. in Harvey, Justice 366–67). The continent’s positioning in this memo is not surprising. Most obviously, by the standards of neoclassical economics, Africa includes thirty-nine of the fifty least developed nations in the world. According to a certain “logic” (which both Summers and the Economist deemed “impeccable”), these countries are the most likely to accept pollution in return for economic growth (Harvey, Justice 367). At the same time, although there is a long history of environmental degradation in Africa by imperial capital operating with impunity, this degradation has mostly been rendered invisible to the rest of the world as a result of the continent’s extreme marginality both in imperial representation and in the world economic system. In fact, its marginalization makes it a great place to do business; minimal media exposure, images of irredeemable chaos and violence, and national governments made weak by globalization often result in the maximizing of externalized environmental costs and the positioning of Africa as a perfect destination for waste. From an environmentalist perspective, Robert Kaplan seemed to offer a more enlightened perspective than Summers in his Atlantic Monthly article “The Coming Anarchy” (1994); yet his representation too has been subjected to withering analysis. Kaplan claimed that resource scarcity caused by anthropogenic environmental degradation and overpopulation is leading to a dystopian future for the developing world and that this future is already with us in Africa, where we find “the political earth the way it will be a few decades hence” (46). In one sense, Kaplan offered a picture of the continent diametrically opposed to the one assumed by Summers; rather than representing Africa as “­ under-​ polluted,” he claimed that “desertification and deforestation ” (tied “to overpopulation”) were driving more and more people into cities that were already under intense demographic and social 2 different shades of green stress (46). These conditions were leading to the rapid proliferation of disease, crime, anarchy, and barbaric violence. Kaplan’s summation of his thesis was often cited by policy experts in the Clinton White House and in the Pentagon and seemed to signal a new, more environmentally aware political climate: “It is time to understand ‘the environment’ for what it is: the national security issue of the early twenty-first century” (58). However, in at least one very important way, his representation is similar to Summers’s: they both suppress the ways that African environments have been and (especially) are being shaped by global political and economic forces and by the long shadow of colonial development. In Kaplan’s article, environmental degradation in Africa results from demographics and lack of proper environmental stewardship: “in Africa and the Third World, man is challenging nature far beyond its limits , and nature is now beginning to take its revenge” (54). Ultimately, the article offers us a form of geographic determinism. In a contemporary rendition of the heart of darkness trope, the horrors Kaplan describes are driven by a lack of adequate cultural and social constraints, Western education, and ingenuity. The West looks on, like Marlow, “cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings . . . ​ as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse” (Conrad 37): “Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel’s and Fukuyama’s Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger, part is inhabited by Hobbes’s First Man, condemned to a life that is ‘poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ Although both parts will be threatened by environmental stress, the Last Man will be able to master it; the First Man will not” (Kaplan 60). This naturalizing construction has a similar implication for global capital as does Summers’s claim that Africa is “vastly under-polluted”: it reinforces business practices on the continent by suppressing how they have shaped environmental and social crises, and it cuts off consumers from their historical relationship with these crises. Like Kaplan and Summers, mainstream Western environmentalism has often occluded environmental damage in Africa and/or its complex historical causes. Because of the association of the continent with wilderness replete with exotic biodiversity and charismatic megafauna, parks or potential parks where one finds the real Africa are often highlighted in the Western environmental imagination while the rest of the continent...