cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Africa On a lighter note: http://www.granta.com/extracts/2615 Personally, I don't blame the West for the state of Africa. I blame first the Africans for being a bunch of savages who won't stop killing and stealing from each other long enough to build stable governments. Second, I blame the weather. It's almost always either too much rain or not enough for a good crop. Third, I blame elephants and other very large herbivores that can and will eat an entire village's crop in matter of hours or days while the people can only stand by helplessly and watch. It's pretty hard to build a real economy when these enormous fucking elephants and buffalo are constantly eating your entire year's work. Then you have no food, so you have to go throw spears or whatever at the village across the river so you can take their food. Nothing personal, just survival. Not that I'm opposed to conservation and protecting elephants and other endangered animals in Africa. I'm all in favor. Just that I don't believe in bullshitting ourselves about the very real choice we have to make between the welfare of the animals versus the welfare of the people in Africa. Ha. Look at that - I said 'we.' As if I or anyone else reading this has a vote. It's their fucking continent and their fucking governments. The Africans will do as they please. In the end, there will be a few large parks and game reserves where huge animals like elephants live and then everywhere else all of this megafauna will die out, except for those few species that adapt and learn to live at the edges of civilization in the same way that bears and deer have done in the US. Yeah, it sucks. But not quite enough to make starving people willing to continue to starve. There are very practical reasons why you won't find an auroch or a barbary lion in Europe any more. The Africans will make the same decisions that the Europeans did. 4:11 p.m. - 2007-10-09 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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