Planting the Trees of Life
Gonaïves, the third-largest city in Haiti, lies on a floodplain beside the Caribbean Sea, and looks as if it could slide in. Twice in recent years, part of it has. In September 2004, Tropical Storm Jeanne deposited more than a foot of rain on northeastern Haiti, including the degraded mountains that form a horseshoe around the city. Forests are buffers against hurricanes, but the mountains around Gonaïves (pronounced Go-nye-eve) were stripped of their trees and topsoil long ago, and the ground became so hardened and compacted that it no longer absorbed water. Instead, Jeanne’s storm water hurtled downward to Gonaïves, collecting sediment, sewage, and human and animal carcasses as it swallowed the city in depths of up to 10 feet.
That was mere prelude. In one astonishing month four years later, a hurricane and three tropical storms visited Gonaïves. This time water rose as high as 25 feet, inundating two-story houses and forcing residents to live on their roofs for weeks.
The photographer Lynn Johnson and I went to the Jean Paul neighborhood, which was particularly hard-hit by the 2008 storms. It still hasn’t recovered. The first person we talked to there was Walter Prenevil, 42, an unemployed customs agent with a missing front tooth, who emerged from his front gate to check us out. He took us for a stroll through his haunted neighborhood. In this house, he said, pointing to a shell, seven people died. In that one -- he pointed again -- eleven did. The second house was missing half its front gate, and the front door was covered with math equations written in chalk; a schoolchild had used it as a blackboard. Dried mud covered the front room’s floor in curled, gray triangles, and in the hallway it rose to three feet high, like a table someone forgot to move. All but one of the single-story house’s occupants drowned in Hurricane Hanna’s floodwaters. The survivor, the household’s father, escaped to a two-story rooftop next door, and hung on for three more days. Then Hurricane Ike hit, raising the water level to 25 feet, sweeping the man off the roof and into the maelstrom.
The plight of Gonaïves is Haiti’s in intensified form, for deforestation is at the core of the country’s environmental debacle. Deforestation is nothing new in Haiti: you can read the nation’s history by tracing the fate of its trees. Indeed, one of Haiti’s most celebrated novels, Jacques Roumain’s 1944 chef d’oeuvre, Masters of the Dew, depicts a valiant villager appalled by rampant deforestation and resulting drought and starvation.
Christopher Columbus noted in 1492 that Haiti was "covered with tall trees of different kinds which seem to reach the sky." By the late 1600s, Haiti’s French colonial rulers had cleared jungles and savanna lowlands to make room for sugarcane fields; at higher elevations, they replaced trees with coffee plantations. All over Haiti, they cut down hardwoods such as mahogany and transported the timber to Europe in the same ships that brought slaves from Africa to work the fields. But it was Haitians themselves who perpetrated even more destruction: after the bloody revolution that brought independence to the country in 1804, its leaders increased hardwood exports to pay off onerous foreign debts. By the 1940s, all but a few timber stands were gone.
Eighty percent of Haitian terrain is mountainous, and those mountains have lost 98 percent of their original forests. Without tree roots to anchor it, Haiti’s topsoil flows down rivers, moves down mountains in landslides, or blows away as dust at an annual rate of 37 million metric tons -- the equivalent in weight of 112 Empire State Buildings. As the topsoil is carried downstream, it clogs rivers; when it reaches the ocean, it smothers beaches and buries coral reefs. The loss of shade and moisture leaves the land parched, and Haiti’s rivers are going dry -- 28 of the nation’s 30 main watersheds are "completely depleted," according to Arnaud Dupuy, head of the United Nations Development Program’s Haiti environment and energy unit. Water tables have dropped dramatically.
Debbie Hammel
Q&A with Debbie Hammel, senior resource specialist with NRDC’s forests project and an internationally recognized expert on forest management.
Why should we be so concerned about protecting the world’s remaining forests?
Forests have a vital role to play in the fight against climate change. They are the largest terrestrial store of carbon, and they provide ecosystem services such as protecting water quality and preventing soil erosion. They are also home to much of the world’s biodiversity. Logging and conversion to agriculture destroy natural habitat for wildlife and release large quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, deforestation and degradation are continuing at an alarming rate. We lose more than 32 million acres of tropical forest each year -- the equivalent of 36 football fields a minute.
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Topsoil loss is permanent, and without it, farmers’ yields have plummeted, consigning them to work plots so degraded that in less poverty-stricken countries they would be left fallow. The decline in crop yields has increased malnutrition and forced an exodus of rural Haitians to the crowded slums of the capital, Port-au-Prince, 100 miles to the south of Gonaïves. The meagerness of Haitian diets has lowered resistance to disease, deepening the cholera epidemic that has killed nearly 5,000 people since it began in October 2010. It’s all part of a vicious circle: deforestation intensifies Haiti’s debilitating political instability; the instability deepens poverty; and poverty leads to more deforestation, as peasants cut trees for small amounts of cash.
Deforestation may even have played a part in triggering the cataclysmic earthquake that killed 300,000 Haitians on January 12, 2010. Four scientists led by University of Miami geophysicist Shimon Wdowinski suggest that over the centuries so much sediment has left the mountains above the tremor’s epicenter -- at an average rate of a quarter-inch of soil per year -- that the reduced pressure on the fault may have freed it to rupture. The earthquake, in turn, has caused further deforestation, by driving 600,000 residents out of Port-au-Prince and back into the depleted mountains and creating a surge in demand for wood sticks and planks to construct shelters for the many displaced Haitians.
Today, tree-felling consists mainly of cutting down unhealthy, immature, or unguarded trees for charcoal and burning ground cover to clear agricultural plots. Under the pressures of overpopulation and extreme poverty, those practices have accelerated in the past couple of decades.
Ninety percent of Haitians use charcoal as their cooking fuel; Port-au-Prince alone uses 80 percent of the country’s production. To feed the demand, the charcoal industry -- if that word can be applied to an enterprise so low-tech and low-paying -- engages at least 200,000 people, one in every 50 Haitians. In the mountains, men cut trees and limbs, sort the sticks into stacks, and cook them in pits to make charcoal; in acts of stunning, unsung athleticism, women march up and down the mountains balancing huge bundles on their heads, bringing the charcoal to city markets. Most of the laborers barely make a subsistence wage. According to the United Nations Development Program, the industry generates $50 million a year. That means that a charcoal worker’s average income is less than a dollar a day.
In Port-au-Prince, we wandered through the narrow passageways of the Marché Salomon, one of the capital’s largest outdoor markets, until we found its Dickensian heart: a charcoal section that looked like a coal mine. The pathways were black, the shops stacked 10 feet high with charcoal bags were black, and black-clothed, black-skinned vendors sat on stools amid piles of charcoal: black on black on black. One of them, Gladys Norvelus, 67, struck me as the Queen of Charcoal, oozing dignity despite her charcoal-blackened hands and clothes and her shack of rusting corrugated tin. It was a bad location, she said, too deep inside the market, yet she’d worked in it for 50 years. She answered our questions without emotion: her husband was blind, she’d lost eight of her thirteen siblings in the earthquake, she’d never heard that charcoal was bad for the environment.
All this might render Timoté Georges’s ambition quixotic, were it not so vital. As the Haiti project coordinator of a U.S.–based nonprofit called Trees for the Future, Georges, a gentle, gangly 30-year-old with a thoughtful mien, intends to set in motion so many community reforestation projects that the whole country eventually will catch on. "Reforestation is a very slow process," he said, in deliberate, precise English that he learned in school. "The problem is huge, and we are not able to solve all of it." He thought for a moment, as if unwilling to sound downbeat, and added, "But if we have enough resources, we can do it." Since late 2008, Trees for the Future has planted 2.5 million trees in Haiti, including 750,000 around Gonaïves. These are modest numbers -- and at least a quarter of the trees will not survive -- but they probably make the small nonprofit the leader in tree-planting among the thousands of nongovernmental organizations now working in Haiti.