Kalahari.
The Kalahari is so haunting because its immensity feels, like outer space, so utterly indifferent to life.
For tens of thousands of years Bushmen and their ancestors had thrived in this unforgiving landscape.
According to geneticists, linguists, and ecological scientists the Bushmen people constituted the remnants of the world’s oldest and most successful civilisation.
But over recent centuries almost all were violently uprooted and displaced by colonization in it’s many forms.
Across the Kalahari stretched the most extensive unbroken expanse of sand on the face of the earth. Yet this is where the Bushmen made a real life. With knowledge of sustaining their livelihood and their numbers so as not to overwhelm the resources and the Ecology of this fragile Environment.
Yet even from here and from the most accessible water holes, they were driven off. Mainly by violence, disease and starvation. It is the same story as that of the first Peoples and native bands of humanity across the globe. Same as played out with the indigenous Peoples everywhere. Successive waves of Colonists hunted them down. The better armed slave traders, the colonials, the settlers and the white farmers and ranchers always encroaching from the south, black Bantu herders moving in from the north and the white big game hunters that hunted the Bushmen too, placed the small bands of Bushmen in the claws of an unforgiving ever closing vice.
Where half a million to a million Bushmen populated the subcontinent as its sole inhabitants, barely a tenth of that remained into the last century. Today maybe a few thousand remain at large, typically intermarried or assimilated into the margins of the region’s cattle farms and mining posts or in the fringes of the economies of Windhoek, Gaborone, Bulawayo, Johannesburg and Cape Town…
And the Bushmen are lingering on as an abject underclass, eking a meager survival and exchanging their vast humility for plain food charity, because they are not allowed to live in their desert home lands of Kalahari anymore.
If the world wrote off Africa as a hopeless case, and if urban Africans dismissed rural tribes as ignorant and crude, even the poorest country bumpkin Africans look down on the “destitute and miserable” Bushmen as a useless lot.
As such they are scheduled to go extinct within this decade, as all the elders are dying off deprived of their beloved ancestral land of the inhospitable Kalahari. You see the Botswana government has turned their desert home into a game preserve and disallowed them access.
Yet they remain the only ones who really know how to live with the immense lack of water in that arid Kalahari desert…
If desertification could be confined to Botswana alone, that unhappy fate might merely be sad for them and comforting to those of us living a safe distance away.
Unfortunately climate scientists say this Kalahari scenario — hotter, drier and longer droughts punctuated by progressively rare odds of sudden deluge that can’t easily be contained — appears to be coming soon to a landscape and at home near you.
The geographically blessed United States has enjoyed an exceptionally cool, wet era during which we progressed from agricultural and mercantile economies through a post-industrial Information Age of 300 million highly urbanised people.
Even so, during the wettest century of the past millennium a few dry “speed bumps” have profoundly destabilised us, suggesting the level of risks water scarcity held. A relatively mild six-year drought in the 1930s wreaked agricultural and social mayhem throughout the Dust Bowl. A less acute but more widespread drought pressed down across the midwest during the 1950s, extinguishing many rural economies. Over subsequent decades the already arid south-west and west grew increasingly dry. Starting this century, even laypersons across America have been observing everyday weather that is hotter and drier than normal, each and every month.
Scientists confirm that in fact it is, and will likely worsen in the decades ahead. As humans burned and cleared vast forests, converted land to irrigation agriculture and powered industrial growth with fossil fuels, we were unwittingly baking the earth in what appeared to be an irreversible process.
Irreversibly rising heat, migrating jet stream, booming industry, thirsty populations, helpless leaders: The Age of Drought.
The spread of aridity initially confounded early climate modelers. Scientists were thinking that a warmer world should in theory lead to a wetter world. Yet for many dense populations the reverse was unfolding: the proportion of the planet’s land surface suffering drought had doubled, due to the heat.
From Eurasia and Australia to the Americas and Africa, tropical regions were experiencing dry conditions that had not been seen for the last seven hundred years. Scientists confirmed that no place was safe; climate change was revealing its ability to spawn mega-droughts anywhere on the planet.
What’s more, it turns out that the self-proclaimed climate sceptics were correct to incessantly reassure us that global warming is as old as time and it produces winners and losers. But the less comforting wrinkle they leave out is how, time after time, whenever climate changed in the past, North America lost, big time.
New hard evidence, accumulated from tree ring data and pollen counts, suggests that devastating droughts have shattered human settlements dating back to the epoch when people first arrived in North America.
Paleoclimatology remains a young and inexact science, and no one could pinpoint the precise stages at which high temperatures and dryness caused local human extinctions. But the correlation was sobering. Wherever scholars searched, further and farther, they discovered how the sudden change from a wet to dry climate caused most extinction of flora and fauna and all of the living habitat on which humans depended.
Unusually severe and protracted drought ranked highest among the most devastating and calamitous of all climate events because the resulting water scarcity brought wildfires, crop failures, livestock deaths, food shortages, and famine.
At the end of the Pleistocene period, temperatures in America warmed by roughly thirteen degrees Fahrenheit [about 7° Celsius]; with less moisture to moderate, cold winters grew frigid and hot summers fried. The climate transformed entire forests and withered grasslands, wiping out or driving off the prey base humans fed upon. Some 5,000 years ago, flourishing Native American cultures suffered prolonged exposure to climate only slightly hotter than it is today and nearly went extinct.
Prehistoric collapse might be dismissed as the weakness of “primitive” cultures who would be overrun by European newcomers equipped with the proverbial guns, germs and steel to dominate the New World. But again, new evidence reveals that despite superior technology, immunity and weaponry, America’s first colonies were in fact far less adept at coping with protracted thirst.
Even if You don’t believe me - just ask the Anasazi and the Hopi Peoples about it - that is, if you can find any one around.
Yours,
Pano
PS:
There is no need for you to venture into the inhospitable Kalahari; the deserts are coming to us.
But we don’t know how to deal with them.
Certainly we don’t know how to live with them or in them…
Apparently only our desert living ancestors managed at smaller numbers to survive.
Yet these very same Bushmen, are our common ancestors… too.
And it might be in our interest to preserve them – for selfish reasons alone:
They can be our Guides.
Our Guides on how to live in a Thirsty world.
For they just know how to survive in the Age of Drought…
For their knowledge ensconced in their DNA and oral mythologies, will surely be lost… if left unattended.
If so; it will be to our lasting peril, as we are scheduled to live within their climatic conditions for our next eons…
