Reality Check

Picture is a fire burning above Ranomafana village

Though September and October are the high water marks for tourism in Ranomafana, it is also the season when all the Malagasy farmers take to the hills with their curved axes and burn the forest down. A few weeks of dry weather dries the underbrush and turns the entire male population of this formerly green island into frantic pyromaniacs. For the past six weeks, the valley of Ranomafana has languished in the smoggy haze resulting from all the burning, obscuring the forested mountaintops that remain in the East. While fetching water last week I was caught in a small flurry of ash descending from the sky. Ostensibly the purpose of all this environmental rape is to prepare the land for planting cassava, a crop with all the succulent flavor and nutritional value of a newspaper. Also, most of the land being subjected to slash and burn ‘agriculture’ isn’t forest; it’s already de-forested land that has been struggling to recover. However, there are still some parcels of the remaining forest included in the inferno every year as human progress marches forward.
Not to mention the extraordinary amount of erosion these fires are going to cause when the rains roll through in the coming months, or the astronomical cost of repairing infrastructure damaged by this erosion, the main loss to the people of Madagascar, and the world, is the permanent loss of biodiversity. Additionally, each fire set has the potential to grow out of control and burn through the Park, the economic lifeblood of Ranomafana. Just a few weeks ago, a fire set near Isalo National Park grew too large, got out of control, and proceeded to destroy most of the sites I hiked through and raved about last month. The leafy canyons, grassy landscapes, and even the picnic site with the friendly lemur families were all tragically reduced to ash. The Malagasy are trying to shoot themselves in the foot, but catching the bullet in the face on the ricochet.
For the past week I have sat on my back stoop watching the fires rage and light up the evening sky just across the river from my house and wondering how a supposed ‘environment volunteer’ can take all this so supinely. I want to form a bucket brigade and have the people responsible for the appalling destruction arrested. But blaming the local Malagasy farmers for this is like blaming the boiler-room workers on the Titanic for driving the ship into the iceberg. Compounding the poverty that inspires this madness are a truly Byzantine system of land distribution and ownership, a wild-west style of law enforcement, and a corrupt political system that ensures that the people on the bottom receive no benefit from the wealth of tourist dollars that Ranomafana is blessed with. As much as I want to end this post with an up-beat assessment of conservation or a clever quip about hope for the future, I feel that would be misleading. The forest is burning and there is nothing I, or anyone, can do to stop it.