And when the Rains Failed in Sudan there was War

George Orwell wrote in the Partisan Review in 1945 that reasonable political assessments of the future often require moral courage. Our perceptions of the future are subjective and as long as they coincide with our expectations, we remain sanguine.

Orwell’s observation may apply to more than just politics. Do we really care about what we leave behind for those who inherit the earth after our passing ? To do so, entails that all of us take a stand that requires, to put it mildly, moral courage.

Consider global warming. There are those who say that it has been made out to be more than it actually is; that there is no real basis for predicting that climate change and global warming are the kind of threats they have been cracked up to be. And there are those who say that it is already too late.

It does not matter what position we take and how much moral courage we have. A story in the Atlantic Monthly (April 2007) traces the roots of ethnic violence in Darfur to environmental degradation.

(The story comes to mind because the World Bank President Robert Zoellick recently appointed Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, ex-finance minister of Nigeria in the Obasanjo government, as a Managing Director. Her responsibilities include oversight of the Asia, Central Asia, Europe and Africa regions. Okonjo-Iweala takes over in December 2007, and a source in the World bank I recently talked to said that one of the weighty reasons why Okonjo-Iweala had been appointed to the post was her familiarity with Africa – the problem continent today).

As the article says, there was a time during the 70s and the 80s when African farmers in Darfur hosted fellow Arabs who are traditional nomads, on their lands, gave them shelter, and gave fodder to their cattle. And then, the rains became rare, resentment appeared, escalated and in 2003, the Arabs avenging themselves on Africans “laid the land waste.”

As opposed to popular belief that poor farming practices, were to be blamed, the article cited strong scientific evidence to the effect that global warming was the reason for why the land had become less fertile.

Forget the finesse. For various reasons the environment was degraded, friends became foes, ethnic violence erupted, continues and the rest of the world has not been able to do much.