By Bill Slawski, on July 10th, 2008
Fighting the Sahara Desert with a wall of trees has been on the minds of people in North African nations since at least 2005. A Greenbelt would help stem the growth of the desert, and the first phase of the project would involved the creation of a strip of trees 7,000 kilometers long and 5 kilometers wide.
Maitre Abdoulaye Wade, President of the Republic of Senegal, recently described how alongside the wall would be built water capture basiss, to collect rain water during the rainy season, and enable farmers in rural areas to grow food all year long.
The organizers of this project have a model to look to in China, where a Great Green Wall is beiing built to try and stop the Gobi Desert from expanding. The wall is a planned 2,800 mile long network of forest belts that are hoped to act as a wind break.
By Bill Slawski, on October 13th, 2007
I suspect that I’m going to be reading more international news in exploring the topic of this new blog. One newspaper that I really haven’t read much before is the Times out of Johannesburg.
A story that caught my eye was one titled Restitution grinds slowly in land of diamonds and dust, which focuses upon farms and families in the Northern Cape, 280 families who live in an area named Pniel. Those families have an ancestrial claim to the land that their ancestors lived upon; land which may contain countless millions of dollars worth of diamonds.
It seems that some groups like this are trying to make their claims through communal property associations, and may be teaming with big businesses, which have an interest in mining that land:
The pattern of perpetual delay defeats land reform, the claimants say, and bears all the hallmarks of a neo-colonial land grab: same tricks, different faces. Gone are the missionaries, chiefs and whisky-bottle bribes; the new kingmakers are chief directors and chairmen of communal property associations.
Read: Reclaimation, Reparations, and Restitution in Pniel
