Re:

[Leif <leif.hanlen@studentmail.newcastle.edu.au>]

Matt Cremer wrote:
> 
> Rod wrote in message <7n7bd2$9rh$1@news1.mpx.com.au>...
> ...
> >Me thinks that Greedy Westerners who consume 80% of the worlds resources
> and
> >yet account for about 20% of the population.
> >Who produce Green house gases abundantly as they persue their infantile
> >pleasures.
> >Who watch the starving billions die slowly, as they throw more in their
> >garbage disposals than others can find to eat.
> ...
> 
> Now, this sort of thing really annoys me.
> There is no "noble savage" thing. Just because someone is starving doesn't
> mean
> they are blameless.

I've actually taking this reply out of aus.cars/aus.transport because
it's gone beyond the highly of-topic.

Hmmm... there was a view, held back in the "lovely" times of Queen
Victoria, England, that your lot in life, was entirely your own
doing/fault. It works well if you just so happen to be the King and or a
rich merchant... because you happily claim credit for being born into a
nice position.. and likewise, if you are a beggar, it is not the way the
world works or societies lack of humanity, it is your fault...

It would seem that this view is alive and well in the modern day.

It's great living in a highly educated (although Australia's present
government seems to want to fix that) well structured stable sort of
country, where your every whim can be catered to by the drop of a few
bits of plastic (we don't even bother with the *paper* money now).. and
it's always so easy to simply point over the fence and say "What ho?
*You're* starving? Geeeze well, *you* mustn't have looked out for
yourself must you? Bloody foreigners, always bloody wanting
handouts...."

> Sure, there are a lot of issues here that probably don't need to be brought
> up in a
> discussion in a "cars" newsgroup ... but aren't there are quite a few
> deserts that were
> made by "non-western" people?

Well, let's take a wander 'round this happy little globe shall we?

Starting at home:
Australia's inland desert was certainly here before the Europeans
arrived. It is possible that some of this desertification was due to the
repeated burning off by native inhabitants... but to make a desert you
really need agriculture, becuase simple bushfires while they destroy
some forest, don't waste the nutrients, and the plants will quickly grow
back... you need to really stick at it if you want deserts, and
Australia's aborigines weren't (to any large extent) farmers.

Going on west.. well, the Americas have some lovely deserts, c/o the
European settlers... onward to Africa.. 

I am guessing that this may have been your point where a desert has been
created by non-westerners.. ie the Sahara.
Well, it is sort of true... there are nomadic tribes -kalahari and
Bedouin to name two - who are among many wh wander around the edges of
the sahara... and their wanderings have been gradually extending
outward, particularly in the last hundred or so years.

Any suggestions why?
No, Matt, it's not because they are greedy, ignorant fools who have
suddenly decided to run an extra thirty goats per farmer, per acre, to
make a profit (actually, the Kalahari have not concept of profit -
profit is only for the morally deficit...) but, no, it's not because of
something nice and easy to attribute blame like that...

mostly it is due to some other problem:
For thousands of years the tribespeople wandered around the desert...
the desert naturally grew and shrank over those millenia.

A little while ago, some more aggressive, and non-nomadic individuals
turned up, and decided to keep sections of the landscape. hey divided
the country into neat little sections, and said, basically "this is my
backyard, would you lot kindly bugger off" it is (afterall) difficult to
be a nomad across international borders.

So the nomads moved to more arid lands.. they didn't reduce livestock,
because there is only so little food you can eat before you starve.. and
they were already at that level.  As you increase the number of
aggressive individuals, all wanting the good land, and all keeping it,
you reduce the amount of space over which the nomads can roam.... and
suddenly the nomadic practise, which is to strip an area - in muh the
same way as the Aborigines burnt the landscape here - and then MOVE ON
to let it re-grow doesn't work.... because no one will let you move far
enough... so the desert grew.

Now who's at fault there?

It's sort of like saying "to hell with the wiildlife, if they can't
organise themselves into properly organised wilderness areas, they
deserve to die out"

Shall we continue our wanderings? Well, there aren't many more deserts
that were created by humans (that I can remember) except those c/o those
happy larrikins the Romans, around northern Yugoslavia... the Gobi's a
pretty sizeable desert too.... but that's been around for a while...



But the real problem is, what is the one correlation between the sudden
increase in barren land? It was once owned and operated by western, or
westernizing cultures. Show me any desert that has increased in size
over the last hundred years, and I will show an area in which western
agriculture has been placed, or into which "non-westerners" have been
pushed by western populaces.

And even now, when we can see what is going wrong, we tromp in with all
our western bells and whistles and give these poor little savages a bit
of westernism... but only the bit that makes our lives better - like
feeding a million starving africans, but neglecting to teach them how to
feed themselves.. or providing schooling and hospitalisation to
thousands of little poeples.. but giving them such high conctrantations
of artificial baby milk, that they can't support themselves without
it... 
 
We in the west have a very neat attitude - we built ourselves up, while
we couldn't see the damage occuring, we made out lives better at any
cost, because we couldn't see what was going to happen. Then we sell off
our ideas to those who would like to copy our nifty way of life, and
scream at them when suddenly we see the same destruction being caused as
we have perpetuated all along. We present ourselves as wonderfully
advanced, and yet our current life style means that we have to plunder
most of the non-western cultures.. but that's ok, because we're the ones
who are living high off the results.. remember, the westerners are about
20% of the world's population - yet we make almost 90% of the polution
(probably 80% directly). Now you want to say "hold on non western chums,
YOU can't join the westerners club, because some poor bastard's got to
cop the shit, and if YOU start following our lead, the whole world's
going to look like the arse-end of my car.. and I don't want that..."

?

You just happen to be one of the lucky ones born into (or maybe moved
into?) a good place in life.

Leif.