Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (63 page)

were obvious during my visit, including a massive construction boom and
urban traffic jams.

With that historical background, let's now return to one of those surprising
differences with which this chapter began: why did the political, economic, and ecological histories of these two countries sharing the same island un
fold so differently?

Part of the answer involves environmental differences. Hispaniola's rains
come mainly from the east. Hence the Dominican (eastern) part of the is
land receives more rain and thus supports higher rates of plant growth. His
paniola's highest mountains (over 10,000 feet high) are on the Dominican side, and the rivers from those high mountains mainly flow eastwards into the Dominican side. The Dominican side has broad valleys, plains, and
plateaus, and much thicker soils; in particular, the Cibao Valley in the north
is one of the richest agricultural areas in the world. In contrast, the Haitian side is drier because of that barrier of high mountains blocking rains from
the east. Compared to the Dominican Republic, a higher percentage of
Haiti's area is mountainous, the area of flat land good for intensive agriculture is much smaller, there is more limestone terrain, and the soils are thin
ner and less fertile and have a lower capacity for recovery. Note the paradox:
the Haitian side of the island was less well endowed environmentally but developed a rich agricultural economy before the Dominican side. The explanation of this paradox is that Haiti's burst of agricultural wealth came at
the expense of its environmental capital of forests and soils. This lesson
—in
effect, that an impressive-looking bank account may conceal a negative cash
flow—is a theme to which we shall return in the last chapter.

While those environmental differences did contribute to the different economic trajectories of the two countries, a larger part of the explanation
involved social and political differences, of which there were many that eventually penalized the Haitian economy relative to the Dominican eco
nomy. In that sense, the differing developments of the two countries were
overdetermined: numerous separate factors coincided in tipping the result
in the same direction.

One of those social and political differences involved the accident that
Haiti was a colony of rich France and became the most valuable colony in France's overseas empire, while the Dominican Republic was a colony of
Spain, which by the late 1500s was neglecting Hispaniola and was in eco-

nomic and political decline itself. Hence France could and chose to invest in developing intensive slave-based plantation agriculture in Haiti, which the Spanish could not or chose not to develop in their side of the island. France imported far more slaves into its colony than did Spain. As a result, Haiti had a population seven times higher than its neighbor during colonial times, and it still has a somewhat larger population today, about 10,000,000 versus 8,800,000. But Haiti's area is only slightly more than half of that of the Dominican Republic, so that Haiti with a larger population and smaller area has double the Republic's population density. The combination of that higher population density and lower rainfall was the main factor behind the more rapid deforestation and loss of soil fertility on the Haitian side. In addition, all of those French ships that brought slaves to Haiti returned to Europe with cargos of Haitian timber, so that Haiti's lowlands and mid-mountain slopes had been largely stripped of timber by the mid-19th century.

A second social and political factor is that the Dominican Republic, with its Spanish-speaking population of predominantly European ancestry, was both more receptive and more attractive to European immigrants and investors than was Haiti with its Creole-speaking population composed overwhelmingly of black former slaves. Hence European immigration and investment were negligible and restricted by the constitution in Haiti after 1804 but eventually became important in the Dominican Republic. Those Dominican immigrants included many middle-class businesspeople and skilled professionals who contributed to the country's development. The people of the Dominican Republic even
chose
to resume their status as a Spanish colony from 1812 to 1821, and its president
chose
to make his country a protectorate of Spain from 1861 to 1865.

Still another social difference contributing to the different economies is that, as a legacy of their country's slave history and slave revolt, most Haitians owned their own land, used it to feed themselves, and received no help from their government in developing cash crops for trade with overseas European countries, while the Dominican Republic eventually did develop an export economy and overseas trade. Haiti's elite identified strongly with France rather than with their own landscape, did not acquire land or develop commercial agriculture, and sought mainly to extract wealth from the peasants.

A recent cause of divergence lies in the differing aspirations of the two dictators: Trujillo sought to develop an industrial economy and modern state (for his own benefit), but Duvalier did not. This might perhaps be

viewed just as an idiosyncratic personal difference between the two dicta
tors, but it may also mirror their different societies.

Finally, Haiti's problems of deforestation and poverty compared to
those of the Dominican Republic have become compounded within the last 40 years. Because the Dominican Republic retained much forest cover and began to industrialize, the Trujillo regime initially planned, and the regimes
of Balaguer and subsequent presidents constructed, dams to generate hydro
electric power. Balaguer launched a crash program to spare forest use for
fuel by instead importing propane and liquefied natural gas. But Haiti's
poverty forced its people to remain dependent on forest-derived charcoal
from fuel, thereby accelerating the destruction of its last remaining forests.

Thus, there were many reasons why deforestation and other environmental problems began earlier, developed over a longer time, and proceeded fur
ther in Haiti than in the Dominican Republic. The reasons involved four of
the factors in this book's five-factor framework: differences in human envi
ronmental impacts, in variously friendly policies or unfriendly policies of
other countries, and in responses by the societies and their leaders. Of the
case studies described in this book, the contrast between Haiti and the Do
minican Republic discussed in this chapter, and the contrast between the
fates of the Norse and the Inuit in Greenland discussed in Chapter 8, provide the clearest illustrations that a society's fate lies in its own hands and
depends substantially on its own choices.

What about the Dominican Republic's own environmental problems,
and what about the countermeasures that it adopted? To use the termi
nology that I introduced in Chapter 9, Dominican measures to protect the environment began from the bottom up, shifted to top-down control after
1930, and are now a mixture of both. Exploitation of valuable trees in the Republic increased in the 1860s and 1870s, resulting already then in some
local depletion or extinction of valuable tree species. Rates of deforestation
increased in the late 19th century due to forest clearance for sugar planta
tions and other cash crops, then continued to increase in the early 20th century as the demand for wood for railroad ties and for incipient urbanization
rose. Soon after 1900 we encounter the first mentions of damage to forest in
low-rainfall areas from harvesting wood for fuel, and of contamination of
streams by agricultural activities along their banks. The first municipal
regulation prohibiting logging and the contamination of streams was passed
in 1901.

Bottom-up environmental protection was launched in a serious way be
tween 1919 and 1930 in the area around Santiago, the Republic's second
largest city and the center of its richest and most heavily exploited agricultural area. The lawyer Juan Bautista Perez Rancier and the physician and
surveyor Miguel Canela y Lazaro, struck by the sequence of logging and its
associated road network leading to agricultural settlement and watershed
damage, lobbied the Santiago Chamber of Commerce to buy land as a forest
reserve, and they also sought to raise the necessary funds by public subscription. Success was achieved in 1927, when the Republic's secretary of
agriculture contributed additional government funds to make possible the
purchase of the first natural reserve, the Vedado del Yaque. The Yaque River is the country's largest river, and a
vedado
is an area of land to which entry is
controlled or forbidden.

After 1930, the dictator Trujillo shifted the impetus for environmental
management to a top-down approach. His regime expanded the area of the
Vedado del Yaque, created other
vedados,
established in 1934 the first na
tional park, set up a corps of forest guards to enforce protection of forests, suppressed the wasteful use of fire to burn forest in order to clear land for agriculture, and banned the cutting of pine trees without his permission in
the area around Constanza in the Central Cordillera. Trujillo undertook
these measures in the name of environmental protection, but he was proba
bly motivated more strongly by economic considerations, including his
own personal economic advantage. In 1937 his regime commissioned a fa
mous Puerto Rican environmental scientist, Dr. Carlos Chardon, to survey
the Dominican Republic's natural resources (its agricultural, mineral, and forestry potential). In particular, Chardon calculated the commercial log
ging potential of the Republic's pine forest, by far the most extensive pine
forest in the Caribbean, to be around $40,000,000, a large sum in those
days. On the basis of that report, Trujillo himself became involved in logging of pines, and came to own large areas of pine forest and to be the joint owner of the country's main sawmills. In their logging operations, Trujillo's
foresters adopted the environmentally sound measure of leaving some ma
ture trees standing as sources of seed for natural reforestation, and those
big old trees can still be recognized today in the regenerated forest. Envi
ronmental measures under Trujillo in the 1950s included commissioning
a Swedish study of the Republic's potential for building dams for hydroelectric power, the planning of such dams, the convening of the country's
first environmental congress in 1958, and the establishment of more na-

tional parks, at least partly to protect watersheds that would be important
for hydroelectric power generation.

Under his dictatorship, Trujillo (as usual, often acting with family mem
bers and allies as front men) carried out extensive logging himself, but his
dictatorial government prevented others from logging and establishing unauthorized settlements. After Trujillo's death in 1961, that wall against
widespread pillaging of the Dominican environment fell. Squatters occu
pied land and used forest fires to clear woodlands for agriculture; a disorga
nized large-scale immigration from the countryside into urban barrios
sprung up; and four wealthy families of the Santiago area began logging at a
rate faster than the rate under Trujillo. Two years after Trujillo's death, the democratically elected President Juan Bosch attempted to persuade loggers
to spare the pine forests so that they could remain as watersheds for the
planned Yaque and Nizao dams, but the loggers instead joined with other
interests to overthrow Bosch. Rates of logging accelerated until the election
of Joaquin Balaguer as president in 1966.

Balaguer recognized the country's urgent need for maintaining forested
watersheds in order to meet the Republic's energy requirements through
hydroelectric power, and to ensure a supply of water sufficient for industrial
and domestic needs. Soon after becoming president, he took drastic action
by banning all commercial logging in the country, and by closing all of the
country's sawmills. That action provoked strong resistance by rich powerful
families, who responded by pulling back their logging operations out of
public view into more remote areas of forests, and by operating their
sawmills at night. Balaguer reacted with the even more drastic step of taking
responsibility for enforcing forest protection away from the Department of
Agriculture, turning it over to the armed forces, and declaring illegal log
ging to be a crime against state security. To stop logging, the armed forces
initiated a program of survey flights and military operations, which cli
maxed in 1967 in one of the landmark events of Dominican environmental
history, a night raid by the military on a clandestine large logging camp. In the ensuing gunfight a dozen loggers were killed. That strong signal served as a shock to the loggers. While some illegal logging continued, it was met with further raids and shootings of loggers, and it decreased greatly during
Balaguer's first period as president (1966 to 1978, comprising three con
secutive terms in office).

That was only one of a host of Balaguer's far-reaching environmental
measures. Some of the others were as follows. During the eight years when