Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (61 page)

may sometimes be realized, and that Rwanda may be a distressing model of
that scenario in operation. Severe problems of overpopulation, environmental impact, and climate change cannot persist indefinitely: sooner or
later they are likely to resolve themselves, whether in the manner of Rwanda
or in some other manner not of our devising, if we don't succeed in solving
them by our own actions. In the case of Rwanda's collapse we can put faces
and motives on the unpleasant solution; I would guess that similar motives were operating, without our being able to associate them with faces, in the
collapses of Easter Island, Mangareva, and the Maya that I described in Part 2 of this book. Similar motives may operate again in the future, in
some other countries that, like Rwanda, fail to solve their underlying problems. They may operate again in Rwanda itself, where population today is
still increasing at 3% per year, women are giving birth to their first child at
age 15, the average family has between five and eight children, and a visitor's
sense is of being surrounded by a sea of children.

The term "Malthusian crisis" is impersonal and abstract. It fails to evoke
the horrible, savage, numbing details of what millions of Rwandans did, or
had done to them. Let us give the last words to one observer, and to one sur
vivor. The observer is, again, Gerard Prunier:

"All these people who were about to be killed had land and at times
cows. And somebody had to get these lands and those cows after the owners
were dead. In a poor and increasingly overpopulated country this was not a
negligible incentive."

The survivor is a Tutsi teacher whom Prunier interviewed, and who survived only because he happened to be away from his house when killers ar
rived and murdered his wife and four of his five children:

"The people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the
people who could buy shoes for theirs."

CHAPTER
11

One Island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: The Dominican Republic and Haiti

Differences Histories Causes of divergence Dominican environmental impacts Balaguer
» The Dominican
environment today ■ The future
■

T

o anyone interested in understanding the modern world's problems, it's a dramatic challenge to understand the 120-mile-long border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the two nations dividing
the large Caribbean island of Hispaniola that lies southeast of Florida (map,
p. 331). From an airplane flying high overhead, the border looks like a sharp
line with bends, cut arbitrarily across the island by a knife, and abruptly dividing a darker and greener landscape east of the line (the Dominican side)
from a paler and browner landscape west of the line (the Haitian side). On
the ground, one can stand on the border at many places, face east, and look
into pine forest, then turn around, face west, and see nothing except fields
almost devoid of trees.

That contrast visible at the border exemplifies a difference between the two countries as a whole. Originally, both parts of the island were largely
forested: the first European visitors noted as Hispaniola's most striking
characteristic the exuberance of its forests, full of trees with valuable wood. Both countries have lost forest cover, but Haiti has lost far more (Plates 23, 24), to the point where it now supports just seven substantial patches of for
est, only two of which are protected as national parks, both of them subject
to illegal logging. Today, 28% of the Dominican Republic is still forested, but
only 1% of Haiti. I was surprised at the extent of woodlands even in the area
comprising the Dominican Republic's richest farmland, lying between its
two largest cities of Santo Domingo and Santiago. In Haiti and the Dominican Republic just as elsewhere in the world, the consequences of all that de
forestation include loss of timber and other forest building materials, soil
erosion, loss of soil fertility, sediment loads in the rivers, loss of watershed
protection and hence of potential hydroelectric power, and decreased

rainfall. All of those problems are more severe in Haiti than in the Domini
can Republic. In Haiti, more urgent than any of those just-mentioned consequences is the problem of the loss of wood for making charcoal, Haiti's
main fuel for cooking.

The difference in forest cover between the two countries is paralleled by
differences in their economies. Both Haiti and the Dominican Republic are
poor countries, suffering from the usual disadvantages of most of the
world's other tropical countries that were former European colonies: corrupt or weak governments, serious problems of public health, and lower agricultural productivity than in the temperate zones. On all those counts,
though, Haiti's difficulties are much more serious than those of the Do
minican Republic. It is the poorest country in the New World, and one of
the poorest in the world outside of Africa. Its perennially corrupt government offers minimal public services; much or most of the population lives
chronically or periodically without public electricity, water, sewage, medical
care, and schooling. Haiti is among the most overpopulated countries of the New World, much more so than the Dominican Republic, with barely one-
third of Hispaniola's land area but nearly two-thirds of its population (about 10 million), and an average population density approaching 1,000
per square mile. Most of those people are subsistence farmers. The market
economy is modest, consisting principally of some coffee and sugar produc
tion for export, a mere 20,000 people employed at low wages in free trade
zones making clothing and some other export goods, a few vacation en
claves on the coast where foreign tourists can isolate themselves from Haiti's
problems, and a large but unquantified trade in drugs being transshipped
from Colombia to the U.S. (That's why Haiti is sometimes referred to as a "narcostate.") There is extreme polarization between the masses of poor people living in rural areas or in the slums of the capital of Port-au-Prince,
and a tiny population of rich elite in the cooler mountain suburb of Pe-
tionville a half hour drive from the center of Port-au-Prince, enjoying ex
pensive French restaurants with fine wines. Haiti's rate of population
growth, and its rates of infection with AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, are
among the highest in the New World. The question that all visitors to Haiti
ask themselves is whether there is any hope for the country, and the usual
answer is "no."

The Dominican Republic is also a developing country sharing Haiti's
problems, but it is more developed and the problems are less acute. Per-
capita income is five times higher, and the population density and popula
tion growth rate are lower. For the past 38 years the Dominican Republic

has been at least nominally a democracy without any military coup, and
with some presidential elections from 1978 onwards resulting in the defeat
of the incumbent and the inauguration of a challenger, along with others marred by fraud and intimidation. Within the booming economy, indus
tries earning foreign exchange include an iron and nickel mine, until re
cently a gold mine, and formerly a bauxite mine; industrial free trade zones that employ 200,000 workers and export overseas; agricultural exports that
include coffee, cacao, tobacco, cigars, fresh flowers, and avocados (the Do
minican Republic is the world's third largest exporter of avocados); tele
communications; and a large tourist industry. Several dozen dams generate
hydroelectric power. As American sports fans know, the Dominican Republic also produces and exports great baseball players. (I wrote the first draft of
this chapter in a state of shock, having just watched the great Dominican
pitcher Pedro Martinez, pitching for my favorite team the Boston Red Sox,
go down to defeat in extra innings at the hands of their nemesis the New
York Yankees in the last game of the 2003 American League Championship
Series.) Others on the long list of Dominican baseball players who have
gone on to achieve fame in the U.S. include the Alou brothers, Joaquin An-dujar, George Bell, Adrian Beltre, Rico Carty, Mariano Duncan, Tony Fernandez, Pedro Guerrero, Juan Marichal, Jose Offerman, Tony Pena, Alex
Rodriguez, Juan Samuel, Ozzie Virgil, and of course the
"jonron
king"
Sammy Sosa. As one drives along the Dominican Republic's roads, one can
not go far without seeing a road sign pointing to the nearest stadium for
beisbol,
as the sport is known locally.

The contrasts between the two countries are also reflected in their national park systems. That of Haiti is tiny, consisting of just four parks threatened with encroachment by peasants felling the trees to make char
coal. In contrast, the natural reserve system of the Dominican Republic is
relatively the most comprehensive and largest in the Americas, encompass
ing 32% of the country's land area in 74 parks or reserves, and it incorporates all important types of habitat. Of course the system also suffers from
an abundance of problems and a deficiency of funding, but it is nevertheless
impressive for a poor country with other problems and priorities. Behind the reserve system stands a vigorous indigenous conservation movement
with many non-governmental organizations staffed by Dominicans them
selves, rather than foisted on the country by foreign advisors.

All those dissimilarities in forest cover, economy, and natural reserve system arose despite the fact that the two countries share the same island.
They also share histories of European colonialism and American occupa-

tions, overwhelmingly Catholic religion coexisting with a voodoo pantheon
(more notably in Haiti), and mixed African-European ancestry (with a
higher proportion of African ancestry in Haiti). For three periods of their
history they were joined as a single colony or country.

The differences that exist despite those similarities become even more striking when one reflects that Haiti used to be much richer and more pow
erful than its neighbor. In the 19th century it launched several major inva
sions of the Dominican Republic and annexed it for 22 years. Why were the
outcomes so different in the two countries, and why was it Haiti rather than the Dominican Republic that went into steep decline? Some environmental differences do exist between the two halves of the island and made some
contribution to the outcomes, but that is the smaller part of the explana
tion. Most of the explanation has instead to do with differences between the
two peoples in their histories, attitudes, self-defined identity, and institu
tions, as well as between their recent leaders of government. For anyone in
clined to caricature environmental history as "environmental determinism,"
the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a
useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies,
but the societies' responses also make a difference. So, too, for better or for
worse, do the actions and inactions of their leaders.

This chapter will begin by tracing the differing trajectories of political and economic history by which the Dominican Republic and Haiti arrived
at their current differences, and the reasons behind those different trajecto
ries. Then I shall discuss the development of Dominican environmental
policies, which prove to be a mix of bottom-up and top-down initiatives.
The chapter will conclude by examining the current status of environmen
tal problems, the future and hopes of each side of the island, and their effects on each other and on the world.

When Christopher Columbus arrived at Hispaniola during his first trans
atlantic voyage in the year
a.d.
1492, the island had already been settled by Native Americans for about 5,000 years. The occupants in Columbus's time were a group of Arawak Indians called Tainos who lived by farming, were
organized into five chiefdoms, and numbered around half a million (the es
timates range from 100,000 to 2,000,000). Columbus initially found them peaceful and friendly, until he and his Spaniards began mistreating them.

Unfortunately for the Tainos, they had gold, which the Spanish coveted but didn't want to go to the work of mining themselves. Hence the