Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Ecological disasters

Turned on the television news the other night and got a heart 
rending account of the plight of wildlife in Zimbabwe. It seems 
the country's ravaged economy no longer has the resources to 
protect its wildlife.

The item maintained that previously the wealthy white farmers had 
protected and conserved the country's wildlife, but now that they 
had been driven off their farms by what the reporter referred to 
as "so-called war veterans", it was open go for poachers.

The people of Zimbabwe, we were told, are so badly affected by 
poverty and hunger, that they are slaughtering the wildlife for 
food and for money. All this, of course, was the fault of the 
Mugabe Government.

They even interviewed a white farmer, probably in Mozambique, 
bemoaning the fate of the wildlife his ilk had allegedly nurtured 
so carefully in days gone by. And that was the whole of the 
"news" item.

Not one word about the West's economic onslaught against Zimbabwe 
that has brought its economy to its knees.

Not one word about the devastating drought that is affecting not 
only Zimbabwe but a swathe of Central African states, bringing 
food shortages and hunger with it.

The item's crocodile tears about the poor wildlife, like the 
crocodile tears of the white colonialist farmer, were merely a 
cover story for the item: the real aim was to find yet another 
opportunity to attack Robert Mugabe's government which still 
refuses to give in to imperialism.

The constraints imposed on Zimbabwe's economy by Britain, the EU 
and the US would be lifted tomorrow if Zimbabwe's government only 
acceded to World Bank dictates, abandoned the land reform and all 
efforts to control its own economy.

All would be well if foreign companies were only given unimpeded 
access to, and control over, all aspects of the country's trade 
and resources.

If the land was returned to the former white colonialist planters 
or Zimbabwe's people were saddled with a huge and everlasting 
debt to pay "compensation" to these planters for the land that 
was originally stolen from black Zimbabweans, then Western 
"investment" would once again be available.

There would once again be funding to pay for adequate wildlife 
conservation and anti-poaching measures.

Zimbabwe's game parks are among Africa's richest. What is 
unfolding there now is an ecological disaster. But the blame has 
to be put where it belongs, at the feet of imperialism, those 
Western countries (including Australia) that are waging an 
economic war against Zimbabwe for daring to stand up to 
imperialist demands.

The wildlife of Zimbabwe's game reserves will not be saved by 
peddling, even implicitly, the same old racist colonialist line 
that you can't leave the "natives" of Africa to manage their own 
affairs because unless they accept our guidance, our decisions 
and our wishes they will make a botch of it, with calamitous 
results.

It's a lie, and what the "civilised" nations of the West are 
doing to Zimbabwe is a crime.

* * *

Looming nightmare

John Howard is as happy as a pig in clover at his "deal" with 
the US. He has hooked Australia up to what he and other Free 
Trade Agreement supporters are wont to call "the world's largest 
economy" and in some mystical way we are all going to 
benefit.

It doesn't faze him in the least that a large proportion of the 
people who live in the USA live in poverty. If being "linked" to 
the "world's largest economy" was such a groovy thing, you'd 
think that people who actually lived there would be positively 
brimful of tangible benefits. Wouldn't you?

Australian capitalists may be itching to get their hands on some 
US investment money so they can buy out their competition, 
"rationalise", and boost their profits while shedding employees, 
but for ordinary people in this country increased US involvement 
in Australia — culturally, socially or economically — is a 
looming potential nightmare.

The USA has played a leading role in the desolation of Zimbabwe, 
mentioned above. But consider just one aspect of the ecological 
disaster within the USA itself. Let's take the country's forests.

Roughly 191 million acres — the bulk of US forest land — is 
held by the US Forest Service. As Bill Bryson says in A Walk 
In The Woods, "Its remit was to manage and protect these 
resources for the nation."

Although private companies would be granted leases to extract 
minerals and harvest timber, "they would be required to do so in 
a restrained, intelligent way". What this means in practice is 
that the main activity of the US Forest Service is to build 
roads.

Writing in the 1990s, Bryson points out that "There are 378,000 
miles of roads in America's national forests — eight times the 
total mileage of America's interstate highway system. It is the 
largest road system in the world in the control of a single body.

"It is the avowed aim of the US Forest Service to construct 
580,000 miles of additional forest road by the middle of next [ie 
the 21st] century.

"The reason the Forest Service builds these roads — is to allow 
private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands 
of trees."

About two thirds of the Forest Service's land is held in store 
for the future. But on the remaining 50 million acres it "allows 
huge swathes of land to be clear cut, including (to take one 
recent example) 209 acres of thousand-year-old redwoods in 
Oregon's Umpqua National Forest."

If the Free Trade Agreement with the US goes ahead as Howard 
hopes, how long before US timber companies are demanding the 
right to exploit our forests as they have their own?