What color is God?

I sometimes forget that money is the true God of everything. Big business like timber, mining, extractive, destructive businesses rule, and the poor get poorer and the idea of a better “tomorrow” or even having a “tomorrow” remains something for people of the North. These businesses are run from Europe, America, China. They sign local contracts so that the locals can’t see the real faces behind the job. They bring in underpaid workers with few skills and provide them even fewer skills and a broken voice. Programs designed to protect the environment, to create gender parity or to attempt to close the economic gap will always take backseat as long as people living in wealthy countries need their iPhones, their 24mph cars, their 3-story homes. I, too, am as guilty as the rest for driving the demand for such destructive resources. I, too, have dirty hands.

I’ve recently been caught up in a story of consumerism and deceit. My reading list as of late has included: The Ecology of Commerce, Harvest for Hope, Globalization and its Discontent, and critiques of the UN’s REDD+ program.Despite Jane Gooddall’s call for hope at the end of her book, I still feel an overpowering sense of hopelessness when I think about “it” all too long. This is maybe especially true in having just suffered local elections here in Cameroon, knowing that my friends haven’t been paid by the government in 2 years, but watching a blatant pay-off of apathetic voters. Again, this is especially true watching the American primaries role out from a distance… They leave me wondering how Americans can still think these things. (When did “Anti-Abortion” become a viewpoint? Whatever happened to pro-life? At least the pro-lifers think positively.)

Politics aside, I’ve recently gotten involved in some heavy affair. My new work is focused around livelihood improvement for people living around the Campo Ma’an National Park. As a Peace Corps volunteer, this means very little that is different for my actual work aside from the fact that I have collaborators, an office, a driver, and a budget. Plus, it sounds way more official to say I work with the WWF because what is Peace Corps, really? The park was essentially imposed until the year 2020 on the local population as an environmental offset for the impacts of the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline (COTCO) which runs just north of the park limits. The new status meant that people could no longer perform any of their local activities in the park, which mainly includes collecting nontimber forest products (including animal protein) and slash and burn agriculture. Obviously, this was a huge change for people who formerly made their living from this land: now they have to watch for boundaries that they may not know the location of. In a part of the world where human rights are, one can say, nonexistent, how will the new management (specifically us at the WWF with the Ministry of Forestry) treat the ancestral rights of locals (including the Bagyeli pygmies and the local Bantu tribes) with regards to lower impact activities, like NTFP collection? Because management is not just limited to the local Ministry’s decision and the international focus of the WWF, conversation was opened up just a few years ago (surprisingly more than 5 years after the creation of the park… why this only recently became a talking point? I don’t know…) with the local populations. Already laws have been set in place to give special exemptions to the Bagyeli population, and negotiations are underway for the Bantu locals. This is good. This is progress.

During the holiday, just before the new year, a black pick-up truck came into town delivering the news to the Conservateur of the park that a mining company requested and was granted permission by the minister of mining in 2010 to search 70% of the park for iron ore. As any five year old knows, mining in a national park, regardless of what local legal code is imposed on it, is unquestionably illegal as it is so far from being low impact that it makes the logging companies look good. I think this is an especially shady affair because of the contract signed by Exxon-Mobil funding the securing of the park. Questions aside, they have the former minister’s signature, so to them there is no problem. The mining company can be traced, as many good exploitative businesses in Africa, back to Europe, specifically the country of Switzerland. While here in Cameroon you can only see black faces inside the company’s pick-up truck, it is no surprise that there is a white man manipulating it all. And then you see just how dirty business is. There was possibly some sort of major bribe involved to get the minister’s signature because even if he was completely incompetent (which happens often here) there had to have been some ringing of bells when he saw where the proposed mining action overlay on the map of Cameroon. And this was likely in fact to his benefit. He had the power of the signature that they wanted, and they had his pay-off that helped complete the construction of his cement megamansion outside of Yaounde.

And this mining company has us on our knees. We seem to just be hoping someone higher up will catch the error because all of the work of the past 10 years here will have been for nothing if this goes through. Development is a slow business, especially when it forces people to be conscience of their environment. The potential for gorilla tourism here is huge and can possibly bring in a real long term development to the area. There are many advantages to visiting Campo as opposed to flying into Cameroon to drive through to the DRC to visit Dzanga-Sangha to see gorillas. And the mining company could kill it (and the health of the communities) in such a short time. While mining offers development more obviously than conservation, quality must be regarded first and foremost. Look at the Grand Canyon, where recently the US (God Bless America) ruled that uranium mining would devastate the tourism industry, which is an industry that brings in far more financing than mining ever could. Ecotourism offers a healthy meal of beans and rice while the mining company offers candy and ice cream for lunch… such a tempting offer…

I’ve noticed that people generally do secretly like this reserve, knowing that they will be able to mildly exploit it and keep their heritage despite all of the other developments happening around the area. What message would be received by the people if what they’ve been excluded from for 10 years for the hope that local and empowering benefits would eventually reach the community suddenly went all to hell? People would know, for sure, that all of this hoping for a better tomorrow is a joke played by the elite on the poor of indebted countries.

One of the many problems I deal with in daily life here is the blatant racism from people. Yes, I am a white American. That doesn’t mean that I, personally have a ton of money. It is hard to separate the person, sometimes, from their nationality or the color of their skin. But when people get all of their information from the television, they see how “whites” all have computers, iPhones, personal cars, loaded refrigerators. I know that life is more complex than this, but we in the North have a personal responsibility to people in the South, sometimes for the sake of some of the most beautiful places in the world (like Campo Ma’an National Park), to curb our hunger for material goods. If we all combine our efforts, this green God of ours can be used for good, too.