DEFORESTATION AND REFORESTATION IN NAMIBIA: THE GLOBAL CONSEQUENCES OF LOCAL CONTRADICTIONS
ABSTRACT
Descriptions of the late 1800s landscape in the Ovambo floodplain in north-central Namibia closely match the area’s late 1900s appearence, suggesting that little change occured between the pre-colonial baseline and the postcolonial outcome. Yet, paradoxically, colonial conquest, population pressure, biological invasions, new technology, and economic globalization caused both dramatic deforestation and reforestation in less than a century. The paradox stems from the fact that the prevailing global environmental models obscure and homogenize the process of environmental change: different and contradictory interpretations are dismissed as alternative readings or misreadings of the same process. Deforestation and reforestation in Namibia, however argues that the paradox highlights the need to reframe environmental change as plural processes occuring along multiple trajectories that may be dissynchronized and asymmetrical.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
The causes and consequences of environmental change have been hotly debated by academics, policy makers and the public at large since at least the 1960s. The prevailing literature focuses on evaluating environmental change against a baseline (such as pristine Nature) to assess whether the outcome is environmentally neutral, or one of environmental degradation or improvement. The most commonly used models analyze environmental change by highlighting one or more causative agents, including the so-called ‘population bomb’; factors ascribed to colonialism and imperialist power struggles such as conservation policies and political ecology; ecological exchanges (such as those involved in the spread of diseases and in biological imperialism); economic globalization, for example the rise of capitalist markets; and new developments in technology (such as the use of firearms and steel). The case of north-central Namibia serves to demonstrate how these global models give rise to different and often contradictory interpretations even within a single approach that cannot be simply explained away as alternative readings or mis-readings of the same process. Twentieth-century north-central Namibia experienced dramatic deforestation and reforestation as a result of population pressure, and the area witnessed the deglobalization of a precolonial global resource (cattle). Diamond’s trinity of ‘guns, germs and steel’1 – the unholy alliance of imperialism, ecological exchanges and technology – is certainly revealing. But global flows of microbes,