Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (21 page)

Gabriel told us that his own wife, who had cost him eighty-nine cows, had just run out on him. Heilberg offered him some tea. “We Are the World” blared from the hotel’s speaker system.

“Did you call Dr. Joseph?” Heilberg asked. The doctor—a powerful figure in Unity state who served as the south’s minister of health—was another Jarch board member. “Call Dr. Joseph, and see if he’s around.”

Dr. Joseph wasn’t around.

“We Are the World” came on again—the music was on a loop.

“Is that Bruce Springsteen?” Heilberg asked. We fell silent, listening.

“I think that one is Michael Jackson,” said Gabriel.

“Michael Jackson,” Heilberg agreed. We waited for the next verse.

“That’s Cyndi Lauper,” I said.

“Bob Dylan,” Heilberg said next.

“What’s this guy called, the blind one?” asked Gabriel.

“Uh, Ray Charles . . . no, Stevie Wonder,” Heilberg said. We waited. “And there’s Ray Charles!”

Gabriel finally secured a meeting with Dr. Joseph for 6:00 that evening. Heilberg put on a dark suit and dark tie; Gabriel wore a gold-colored tracksuit. Just before sunset, we climbed into the Land Cruiser and bounced along potholed dirt tracks in the direction of the jebel, Juba’s landmark mountain, passing an open-air market and a field of huts that had just been razed by the government. Now the area was populated by mounds of burning trash.

Dr. Joseph lived in a rare non-shipping-container house surrounded by a thick white wall and attended by a servant, who sat us on plush faux-leather couches below a languid ceiling fan and offered each of us a Coke and a bottle of water. Across from us were three Sudanese dignitaries watching a Nigerian soap opera on a wide-screen TV. “Stay away from my wife!” yelled one actor. “Which wife?” asked the other.

Dr. Joseph had yet to return home. We sank back into the couches. Heilberg began talking nonstop, filling the silence, keeping up appearances. That a supposed ally was too busy to meet with him—that his farmland deal could be speculative in more ways than one—didn’t fit the Randian narrative.

He counseled Gabriel about his dad. The general refused to leave his compound until he could discuss the recent attack with the president. “It’s called anxiety,” Heilberg said sympathetically. “Everyone gets it. It builds up in your mind.” Gabriel looked worried.

“Have you ever seen the movie
Analyze This
?” Heilberg asked.

“Analyze what?”

“No, no—it’s a movie with Robert De Niro. He’s a mob boss, and he’s getting really angry, and Billy Crystal tells him, ‘You know what I do when I’m really angry? I hit a pillow.’ So he takes out his gun and starts shooting a pillow. Crystal’s like, ‘Feel better?’ and De Niro says, ‘Yeah, I do.’ Your dad needs to feel better. I know the way he is. He should get it all out.”

We waited until 10:00 p.m. Dr. Joseph never showed. When we left, Heilberg looked sick. “Are you sure he’s still with us?” he asked Gabriel.

But any hit to his confidence was buried, temporary. The next morning, Heilberg was back to his old self. If any of his allies had been bought off by the Dinkas, it was only more proof that Matip and Gadet needed to sweep away the rot.

A week went by. We drove to Matip’s compound. We drove back. We drove to Gadet’s compound. We drove back. We smoked hookahs at the hotel. We ordered pizza. We drove to the Nile. We drove back. To an outsider in Juba on the cusp of independence, listening to the Nuer whisper about the Dinkas and the Dinkas about the Nuer, waiting for meetings, waiting for savanna to become farmland, waiting for Abyei and sovereignty and all else, it was like being in a hall of mirrors. Either Heilberg had South Sudan all wrapped up, or he had little but his capitalist ideals and a strange friendship with some Nuer generals.

On one of our last mornings, Gabriel disappeared. He didn’t show up at the hotel. He stopped answering his phones. Finally, just before dinnertime, he walked in. “These guys were following me on the road,” he said. He’d pulled off on a side street, and one of his pursuers had cut around him, blocking his escape. When the man stepped into the road, holding a gun, Gabriel ran him over. The second attacker came up from behind. “I opened the door and hit him, and then he fell on the ground,” Gabriel said.

“What did you say to them?” I asked.

“We don’t say anything,” Gabriel said. “I collect their phones and their guns.”

“And kick them in the nuts!” Heilberg said.

By now, Heilberg wasn’t bothering to ask about signatures or meetings. The next day, when the European arbitration court announced its ruling on Abyei, it wasn’t so bad for the south that it caused immediate fighting, but it wasn’t so good that it calmed anyone down. Just in case, the Juba’s cell phone service was jammed. There was nothing to do but watch CNN. Heilberg was waiting for his generals to clean house, to create a country where business could get done. He looked at Gabriel. “I was there with your father two years ago, when he told them he would burn down Juba,” he said. “I think this is coming. It is coming soon. It’ll be short.”

 • • • 

WE SAT WITH
the general once more in the courtyard, guards and elders and wives flitting by in the shadows, a television flickering a few feet away. Matip was still slouching, but this time he looked Heilberg in the eye as he spoke. “What he can tell you is this,” Gabriel translated for his father. “All the things going on here, they are not good. You should go. Go to America, and he will call you. He’s not happy about the way the government works. He will find out what things happen, and why. In a short time, we’ll rise, and put on the Internet, and you will read in America.”

“Thank you,” Heilberg said. “I know you’ll be successful. I agree: The way they’re doing things can’t last. History has shown us that’s how revolutions happen. But I hope you will call me back soon, documents in hand, and we will all smile and be happy. Luckily, it’s not all up to us.” He gestured to the sky. “There is a higher power.”

That night, Heilberg went straight to his shipping container, downed a dose of NyQuil, and passed out. The next morning, we were on a flight back to Nairobi.

It was the same view out the window as before. Green. Heilberg’s million acres were in the opposite direction, but the soil was similar—just fewer stones. Nuer tribesmen liked to boast about how fertile the land was. Plant a mango tree, they said, and it would be waist-high in six months. Plant green beans, and the vines would be waist-high in weeks. Plant anything, and it would grow. There might be more war before Heilberg tilled his first seeds. He could wait for it. Demand for food was inelastic.

“Which do you think matters more in Africa?” he asked me. “Military power or political power?” He was sweating in his seat, wearing a baby-blue Lacoste shirt with an alligator on it, and had just been listening to Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” on his iPod.

“Military,” I said. He nodded. “People say it’s going to be north versus south,” he said. “I say it’s going to be a free-for-all. It’s going to be a free-for-all for about a week. Mass hysteria. Juba burned to the ground. Khartoum burned to the ground. Then we’ll look around and see who’s still standing. They’ll form a new government. A period of chaos isn’t a bad thing. It’ll release that tension. You can’t escape the physics.”

Like Greenland, South Sudan would soon vote yes in its referendum—an overwhelming 99.57 percent in favor of independence. In the months that followed, northern forces occupied Abyei, burning
tukuls
and hospitals and driving thousands of civilians from their homes, and launched a brutal bombing campaign in the nearby Nuba Mountains. Less noticed outside Sudan was Peter Gadet’s post-referendum rebellion in Unity state, fought against the fledgling South Sudanese government in the very fields that Heilberg may someday farm. It was chaos.

“The reason I’m so open with you is so you can see I’m not a bad man,” Heilberg told me on the plane. “I’m a guy with a big heart who also wants to make some money.” He put his headphones back in. “You know what I give them? I give them hope.”

EIGHT

GREEN WALL, BLACK WALL

AFRICA TRIES TO KEEP THE SAHARA AT BAY; EUROPE TRIES TO KEEP AFRICA AT BAY

T
he main highway out of Dakar, a band of blacktop linking the crowded Senegalese capital and the empty Sahel, was dusty and clogged on a summer day—jammed not only with cars but with people. Young men walked against the flow of traffic hawking peanuts, inflatable airplanes, steering wheel covers, oriental fans, telephone cards, and shrink-wrapped apples. Others stood where the sidewalks would have been, manning makeshift kiosks that sold French-language versions of Yahtzee and Monopoly, posters of sheikhs and imams, and drinking water in plastic sandwich baggies. The highway led to the desert, and the youths of Senegal were doing what they could to go in the opposite direction. Sell enough in a day, and they might be able to afford rice, the national staple, which now cost twice as much as six months earlier. Sell enough in a year, maybe two, maybe five, and they might be able to pay a smuggler to take them to Europe. Every minute or two, a new group approached our jeep, waving their wares expectantly. My host, Colonel Pape Sarr, a thin man who greeted everything else with a cavernous smile, wore a blank expression, staring resolutely ahead into the haze.

I was across the waist of Africa from Heilberg’s Sudanese tracts, some three thousand miles west, in the country that imports more food per capita than any other on the continent. Senegal gets three-quarters of its staples from abroad, including 150 pounds of rice a person each year—even as it, too, is a target of foreign farmland buyers. India would soon announce a 370,000-acre deal with Senegal’s Ministry of Agriculture, while Saudi Arabia’s Foras International would lay claim to 12,000 acres of rice paddies in the fertile Senegal River valley, the first piece of a planned 500,000-acre megafarm. But the scheme that drew Pape Sarr and me to the Sahel, the arid borderland between Africa’s humid tropics and the encroaching sands of the Sahara, was something else entirely: the Great Green Wall, Africa’s own response to climate change, a forty-seven-hundred-mile-long, ten-mile-wide barrier of trees meant to keep the Sahara at bay. If completed, it would cross eleven countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea, from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east. Pape, a camouflage-clad officer of Eaux et Forêts, Senegal’s directorate of water and forests, was one of its architects. We were driving to see his men put the first seedlings into the ground.

The Great Green Wall was proposed in 2005 by Nigeria, where officials claimed desertification was consuming some 900,000 acres a year, and in 2007 it was officially endorsed by the African Union (AU). But in every country except Senegal, it so far existed only on paper. Standing before the press at the Copenhagen climate conference, Senegal’s president at the time declared that his nation would be like “the old Greek philosopher” Diogenes, “who proposed that you could prove the existence of motion” by standing up and walking. Senegal wouldn’t wait for AU studies or UN approval or World Bank funding. It would prove the viability of the wall by going out and planting—and was hoping that the money would catch up. The government framed the Great Green Wall as a matter of national survival. “Rather than let the desert come to us,” said the minister of agriculture, “we will take the fight to it.”

It was convenient to think of the Sahara’s advance as being like that of a slow-moving army, a single front line against which another easy-to-imagine line—of trees—could form the perfect bulwark. But in the roughly ten billion acres of slowly degrading dryland regions around the world—not only in West Africa, but also in Spain, China, Australia, Mexico, Chile, and nearly sixty other climate-threatened countries, rich and especially poor—desertification is usually a messier process. “The Sahara spreads rather like leprosy,” wrote the Briton Wendy Campbell-Purdie, one of the first to try to check the Sahara with large-scale plantations, in her 1967 book,
Woman Against the Desert
. “Little bad spots here and there go unnoticed, until suddenly the whole area is infected.”

As a barrier to such an insurgent threat, most scientists agreed, a phalanx of green was largely futile. As a symbol, however—of the protective crouch the world was beginning to adopt in the face of warming, of Africa’s particularly lonely position, of how much money rich, high-emissions countries would pay to save themselves from warming’s effects versus how little they would pay to save poorer countries—the Great Green Wall was much more potent. For me, it represented a shift toward the third stage of humanity’s response to climate change: engineering as refuge, when talk of opportunities rings especially hollow and we begin erecting our defenses. For developing, mostly agrarian countries, closer to nature, this means defenses against what nature is becoming. For richer countries, it means the same thing, plus something more: defenses against migrants and other spillover.

We drove east and then north in Pape’s jeep, the land becoming increasingly yellow, the traffic increasingly thin, and began passing billboards celebrating the president’s other prestige projects: Plan GOANA, announced after street protests during the food crisis, aimed to expand domestic rice production fivefold by 2015. Plan REVA, or Retour vers l’Agriculture—“Return to Agriculture”—was GOANA’s controversial predecessor. Funded in large part by Spain, which in 2006 saw its Canary Islands deluged by more than thirty thousand boat people from Senegal, REVA aimed to turn unemployed youths into agricultural workers rather than illegal migrants. REVA’s test cases were planeloads of deportees recently returned from Spain under an arrangement with the Senegalese government. Street-smart young men were promised a hundred hectares and subsidized seeds, expected to remake themselves as farmers, and were so angry at the government’s complicity in their forced return that they formed the National Association of Repatriated People. The Great Green Wall was seen in the context of these other make-work projects—especially as it picked up international support. “Failure to act now,” wrote the authors of a joint 2009 European Union–African Union study, “could result in many land users becoming environmental migrants—potentially transferring problems north.” Whatever else it was, it was in part a scheme to keep Africans out of Europe.