DEFORESTATION AND REFORESTATION IN NAMIBIA: THE GLOBAL CONSEQUENCES OF LOCAL CONTRADICTIONS
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DEFORESTATION AND REFORESTATION IN NAMIBIA: THE GLOBAL CONSEQUENCES OF LOCAL CONTRADICTIONS
CHAPTER 1.
Firearms and iron technologies influenced native southern African landscapes in nonlinear and surprising ways. Some invasive pathogens triggered catastrophic virgin soil epidemics in Africa, mirroring the impact of smallpox in the Americas and laying the way for colonial conquest.
However, some of the invasive germs, firearms, and steel turned against colonialism, causing colonial undertakings to deviate significantly from course, with unanticipated environmental repercussions.
Environmental change, whether caused by colonialism, population pressure, technology, or invasive species, should be viewed as multidirectional, involving various sub-processes with diverse results.
Despite groundbreaking research over the last two to three decades, the study of local and global environmental change is limited by the assumption that change is a single, linear, and homogeneous process. Global consequences.
This conceptualisation generates two paradoxes that cannot be fully explained within current frameworks, which are referred to as the Palenque Paradox and the Ovambo Paradox. The idea rejects depicting environmental development in a linear fashion within a Nature-Culture dichotomy.
In reality, however, environmental change is frequently evaluated in terms of unique and exclusive degradation, improvement, or stability/equilibrium results.
The degradation-or-improvement-or-equilibrium framework is based on the modernisation, declinist, and inclinist paradigms, all of which assume that environmental change occurs via a single and irreversible Nature-to-Culture conduit.Global consequences.
The modernisation paradigm views environmental development as a transition from a primitive state of nature to an advanced level of culture, culminating in a state-controlled and scientifically exploited environment.
Human intervention with pristine nature, according to the declinist paradigm, is a disturbance that leads to a downward-spiraling process of environmental degradation that may eventually result in the destruction of the Earth’s biosphere.
In contrast to the declinists’ primarily negative attitude, and like the modernisers, the inclinists believe that humans may alleviate the damaging consequences of environmental change.
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