Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (65 page)

mosaics of traits formed by different sets of experiences that often do not
correlate with each other.

We may also be troubled that, if we really acknowledge Balaguer as an
environmentalist, his evil traits would unfairly tarnish environmentalism.
Yet, as one friend said to me, "Adolf Hitler loved dogs and brushed his teeth,
but that doesn't mean that we should hate dogs and stop brushing our
teeth." I also have to reflect on my own experiences while working in In
donesia from 1979 to 1996 under its military dictatorship. I loathed and
feared that dictatorship because of its policies, and also for personal rea
sons: especially because of the things that it did to many of my New Guinea
friends, and because of its soldiers almost killing me. I was therefore sur
prised to find that that dictatorship set up a comprehensive and effective national park system in Indonesian New Guinea. I arrived in Indonesian New Guinea after years of experience in the democracy of Papua New
Guinea, and I expected to find environmental policies much more advanced
under the virtuous democracy than under the evil dictatorship. Instead, I had to acknowledge that the reverse was true.

None of the Dominicans to whom I talked claimed to understand Bala
guer. In referring to him, they used phrases such as "full of paradoxes," "con
troversial," and "enigmatic." One person applied to Balaguer the phrase that
Winston Churchill used to describe Russia: "a riddle wrapped in a mystery
inside an enigma." The struggle to understand Balaguer reminds me that
history, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an en
terprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

In light of that history of environmental impacts in the Dominican Republic, what is the current status of the country's environmental problems, and
of its natural reserve system? The major problems fall into eight of the list of
12 categories of environmental problems that will be summarized in Chapter 16: problems involving forests, marine resources, soil, water, toxic sub
stances, alien species, population growth, and population impact.

Deforestation of the pine forests became locally heavy under Trujillo,
and then rampant in the five years immediately following his assassina
tion. Balaguer's ban on logging was relaxed under some other recent presidents. The exodus of Dominicans from rural areas to the cities and overseas
has decreased pressure on the forests, but deforestation is continuing espe
cially near the Haitian border, where desperate Haitians cross the border
from their almost completely deforested country in order to fell trees for

making charcoal and for clearing land to farm as squatters on the Domini
can side. In the year 2000, the enforcement of forest protection reverted
from the armed forces to the Ministry of the Environment, which is weaker
and lacks the necessary funds, so that forest protection is now less effective
than it was from 1967 to 2000.

Along most of the Republic's coastline, marine habitats and coral reefs
have been heavily damaged and overfished.

Soil loss by erosion on deforested land has been massive. There is
concern about that erosion leading to sediment buildup in the reservoirs
behind the dams used to generate the country's hydroelectric power. Salin-
ization has developed in some irrigated areas, such as at the Barahona Sugar
Plantation.

Water quality in the country's rivers is now very poor because of sediment buildup from erosion, as well as toxic pollution and waste disposal.
Rivers that until a few decades ago were clean and safe for swimming are now brown with sediment and unswimmable. Industries dump their
wastes into streams, as do residents of urban barrios with inadequate or
non-existent public waste disposal. Riverbeds have been heavily damaged
by industrial dredging to extract materials for the construction industry.

Beginning in the 1970s, there have been massive applications of toxic pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides in rich agricultural areas, such as the
Cibao Valley. The Dominican Republic has continued to use toxins that
were banned in their overseas countries of manufacture long ago. That
toxin use has been tolerated by the government, because Dominican agri
culture is so profitable. Workers in rural areas, even children, routinely ap
ply toxic agricultural products without face or hand protection. As a result, effects of agricultural toxins on human health have now been well docu
mented. I was struck by the near-absence of birds in the Cibao Valley's rich
agricultural areas: if the toxins are so bad for birds, they presumably are also
bad for people. Other toxic problems arise from the large Falconbridge
iron/nickel mine, whose smoke fills the air along parts of the highway between the country's two largest cities (Santo Domingo and Santiago). The Rosario gold mine has been temporarily closed down because the country
lacks the technology to treat the mine's cyanide and acid effluents. Both
Santo Domingo and Santiago have smog, resulting from mass transit using
obsolete vehicles, increased energy consumption, and the abundance of pri
vate generators that people maintain in their homes and businesses because
of the frequent power failures of the public electricity systems. (I experi
enced several power failures each day that I was in Santo Domingo, and af-

ter my return my Dominican friends wrote me that they were now suffering
under 21-hour blackouts.)

As for alien species, in order to reforest logged lands and hurricane-
damaged lands in recent decades, the country has resorted to alien tree
species that grow more quickly than does the slow-growing native Domini
can pine. Among the alien species that I saw in abundance were Honduras
pine, casuarinas, several species of acacias, and teak. Some of those alien
species have prospered, while others have failed. They raise concern because
some of them are prone to diseases to which the native Dominican pine is
resistant, so that reforested slopes could lose their cover again if their trees
are attacked by disease.

While the country's rate of population increase has decreased, it is
estimated as still around 1.6% per year.

More serious than the country's growing population is its rapidly grow
ing per-capita human impact. (By that term, which will recur in the remain
der of this book, I mean the average resource consumption and waste
production of one person: much higher for modern First World citizens
than for modern Third World citizens or for any people in the past. A soci
ety's total impact equals its per-capita impact multiplied by its number of
people.) Overseas trips by Dominicans, visits to the country by tourists, and television make people well aware of the higher standard of living in Puerto
Rico and the United States. Billboards advertising consumer products are everywhere, and I saw street vendors selling cell telephone equipment and
CDs at any major intersection in the cities. The country is becoming increasingly dedicated to a consumerism that is not currently supported by
the economy and resources of the Dominican Republic itself, and that de
pends partly on earnings sent home by Dominicans working overseas. All of
those people acquiring large amounts of consumer products are putting out
correspondingly large amounts of wastes that overwhelm municipal waste
disposal systems. One can see the trash accumulating in the streams, along
roads, along city streets, and in the countryside. As one Dominican said to me, "The apocalypse here will not take the form of an earthquake or hurri
cane, but of a world buried in garbage."

The country's natural reserve system of protected areas directly addresses all of these threats except for population growth and consumer
impact. The system is a comprehensive one that consists of 74 reserves of
various types (national parks, protected marine reserves, and so on) and
covers a third of the country's land area. That is an impressive achievement for a densely populated small and poor country whose per-capita income is

only one-tenth that of the United States. Equally impressive is that that reserve system was not urged and designed by international environmental
organizations but by Dominican NGOs. In my discussions at three of these
Dominican organizations
—the Academy of Sciences in Santo Domingo,
the Fundacion Moscoso Puello, and the Santo Domingo branch of The Nature Conservancy (the latter unique among my Dominican contacts in being affiliated with an international organization rather than purely
local)—without exception every staff member whom I met was a Domini
can. That situation contrasts with the situation to which I have become ac
customed in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, and other
developing countries, where scientists from overseas hold key positions and
also serve as visiting consultants.

What about the future of the Dominican Republic? Will the reserve system survive under the pressures that it faces? Is there hope for the country?

On these questions I again encountered divergence of opinion among
even my Dominican friends. Reasons for environmental pessimism begin with the fact that the reserve system is no longer backed by the iron fist of
Joaquin Balaguer. It is underfunded, underpoliced, and has been only
weakly supported by recent presidents, some of whom have tried to trim its
area or even to sell it. The universities are staffed by few well-trained scien
tists, so that they in turn cannot educate a cadre of well-trained students.
The government provides negligible support for scientific studies. Some of
my friends were concerned that the Dominican reserves are turning into
parks that exist more on paper than in reality.

On the other hand, a major reason for environmental optimism is the
country's growing, well-organized, bottom-up environmental movement
that is almost unprecedented in the developing world. It is willing and able to challenge the government; some of my friends in the NGOs were sent to
jail for those challenges but won their release and resumed their challenges.
The Dominican environmental movement is as determined and effective as
in any other country with which I am familiar. Thus, as elsewhere in the
world, I see in the Dominican Republic what one friend described as "an ex
ponentially accelerating horse race of unpredictable outcome" between de
structive and constructive forces. Both the threats to the environment, and the environmental movement opposing those threats, are gathering
strength in the Dominican Republic, and we cannot foresee which will
eventually prevail.

Similarly, the prospects of the country's economy and society arouse di
vergence of opinion. Five of my Dominican friends are now deeply pes
simistic, virtually without hope. They feel especially discouraged by the
weakness and corruptness of recent governments seemingly interested only
in helping the ruling politicians and their friends, and by recent severe setbacks to the Dominican economy. Those setbacks include the virtually
complete collapse of the formerly dominant sugar export market, the devaluation of the currency, increasing competition from other countries with lower labor costs for producing free trade zone export products, the
collapses of two major banks, and government overborrowing and overspending. Consumerist aspirations are rampant and beyond levels that the
country could support. In the opinion of my most pessimistic friends, the Dominican Republic is slipping downhill in the direction of Haiti's grinding desperation, but it is slipping more rapidly than Haiti did: the descent
into economic decline that stretched over a century and a half in Haiti will
be accomplished within a few decades in the Dominican Republic. Accord
ing to this view, the Republic's capital city of Santo Domingo will come to
rival the misery of Haiti's capital of Port-au-Prince, where most of the population lives below the poverty level in slums lacking public services, while the rich elite sip their French wines in their separate suburb.

That's the worst-case scenario. Others of my Dominican friends re
sponded that they have seen governments come and go over the last 40
years. Yes, they said, the current government is especially weak and corrupt,
but it will surely lose the next election, and all of the candidates to become
the next president seem preferable to the current president. (In fact, the
government did lose the election a few months after that conversation.)
Fundamental facts about the Dominican Republic brightening its prospects
are that it is a small country in which environmental problems become
readily visible to everybody. It is also a "face-to-face society" where concerned and knowledgeable private individuals outside the government have
ready access to government ministers, unlike the situation in the United States. Perhaps most important of all, one has to remember that the Do
minican Republic is a resilient country that has survived a history of prob
lems far more daunting than its present ones. It survived 22 years of Haitian
occupation, then an almost uninterrupted succession of weak or corrupt
presidents from 1844 until 1916 and again from 1924 to 1930, and Ameri
can military occupations from 1916 to 1924 and from 1965 to 1966. It succeeded in rebuilding itself after 31 years under Rafael Trujillo, one of the
most evil and destructive dictators in the world's recent history. From the