Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (22 page)

In Touba, a Sahelian boomtown founded by the country’s most famous Sufi mystic, Pape stopped to confer with another Eaux et Forêts official. I took a moment to walk amid the minarets and madrassas on the city’s dusty streets, where I met boys selling stacks of tapes and CDs to passing cars. “Take me to America,” said one. “I will go to Europe,” said another.

Pape and I drove onward through the garrison town of Linguère and into the Ferlo, an expanse of featureless savanna named after a long-dry riverbed, where Fulani nomads made their encampments and parrots flitted through sparse trees and yellow grass. The paved road became a dirt road, and the dirt road became a pair of faint tracks, and the jeep began bucking like a horse. At dusk appeared dozens of parallel ditches running through the red earth, some dotted with faint tufts of green. Pape turned proudly toward me. “This,” he said, “is the Great Green Wall.” The trees were eight inches tall.

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ON A MAP,
Senegal, almost as close to Brazil as it is to the Spanish mainland, is not an obvious launching point for sub-Saharan Africans trying to reach Europe—not even for reaching the Canary Islands, which sit in the Atlantic due west of Morocco. But GPS technology had turned everyone into a navigator, the Canaries had unpoliced flights to the rest of Spain, and seemingly easier routes—across the Mediterranean via the heavily patrolled Strait of Gibraltar, over the newly heightened fences from Morocco into the Spanish enclaves Ceuta and Melilla—had been successively sealed off. In the months before I reached Senegal, migrants set out daily from the beaches of M’Bour and neighboring fishing towns, each paying nearly $1,000 to be ferried nearly a thousand miles to southernmost Europe. The boats were fishermen’s pirogues: brightly painted wooden canoes equipped with two engines and two GPS units and packed with dozens of young men. The passengers’ mantra, a mashup of French and local Wolof, was “Barça ou Barzakh”—“Barcelona or Death.” Some pirogues capsized in storms; some simply disappeared. The weeklong crossing sometimes stretched to two weeks when captains got lost, leaving boats desperately short of food and water. In record-breaking 2006, thousands died en route—as many as six thousand, according to a Spanish estimate, meaning that one out of every six migrants got death, not Barcelona.

There were idle fishing boats in towns like M’Bour because Senegal was running out of fish. The country was running out of fish in large part because industrial trawlers from France, Spain, Japan, and other foreign countries had been scouring the coast of northwest Africa since at least 1979, when the European Union negotiated its first fishing deals in the region. Over the course of twenty years, Senegal had signed seventeen different agreements with the EU, the most recent one the same week an EU-commissioned study found that the biomass of key fish species had declined by 75 percent in Senegalese waters. Gone were the schools of lucrative tuna, gone were the sharks, and left behind were smaller herring, along with unemployed fishermen, who found new work as human traffickers. In 2009, a University of East Anglia study of the effects of climate change and warming oceans on fishing economies suggested a further problem: Out of 132 nations surveyed, Senegal was the fifth most vulnerable.

Whether the men fleeing for Europe should be considered some of the world’s first climate refugees was debatable. If creeping sands and emptying oceans were pushing them out, cities and distant countries, with their promises of electricity, jobs, and education, also exerted a pull. Senegal’s greatest population flow was internal—from rural to urban, hut to slum—and it followed a pattern being repeated across the globe in the new millennium, the first time in human history when more people have lived in cities than in the countryside. Rare was the Senegalese migrant who went directly from Sahel to pirogue. Rarer still was one who could point to a single cause—the changing climate—in explaining his move. But the many factors, in aggregate, were exactly what Europe feared. Africa would warm 1.5 times faster than the rest of the world, warned the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)—and the Western Sahara region would warm the most. “Climate change is best viewed as a threat multiplier which exacerbates existing trends, tensions and instability,” wrote the Spanish diplomat Javier Solana, the EU foreign relations chief and former head of NATO, in 2008. “There will be millions of ‘environmental’ migrants by 2020 with climate change as one of the major drivers of this phenomenon . . . Europe must expect substantially increased migratory pressure.”

Today’s boat people could be but a hint of what was to come. And the Continent’s response, notwithstanding its efforts at emissions cuts in Copenhagen and at other climate summits, was also a hint of what was to come. It was creating a “Fortress Europe,” in the words of Amnesty International—an “armed lifeboat,” in the words of the journalist Christian Parenti.

Senegal, Africa’s testing grounds for the Great Green Wall, was also Europe’s testing grounds for a virtual wall to keep Africans out. The European effort was not as conspicuous as the new fence I saw near the All-American Canal along the United States border with Mexico—where by 2080, according to a recent Princeton study, climate change’s effects on agriculture will cause the exodus of up to 10 percent of the adult population. Nor was it as conspicuous as the twenty-one-hundred-mile fence India was completing around sinking Bangladesh or the twin fences Israel announced in 2010 to seal off the Sinai from sub-Saharan migrants. But it was comprehensive: Spanish and Italian patrol boats, emblazoned with the logo of Frontex, the new, pan-European border agency founded in 2005, were already cruising the Senegalese coast by the time I arrived. European planes and helicopters ran aerial surveillance. Soon, a satellite link would connect immigration-control centers in Europe and Africa to help track boat people, and the Continent would be secured by the proposed European Border Surveillance System: a complex of infrared cameras, ground radars, sensors, and aerial drones. The European Parliament would pass its controversial Return Directive, a common deportation policy that allowed migrants to be held without charge for up to eighteen months before being shipped home.

Spain, known for its comparative tolerance of immigration, was trying to offer carrots as well as sticks. It opened six new West African embassies in four years under its migration-focused Plan África, and its development spending jumped sevenfold. Before Spain’s recession sent unemployment rates to heights not seen since the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, it began a quota program for guest workers. If they came to Spain legally, laborers escaping high food prices and barren seas could win yearlong stints on massive corporate farms or in a still thriving fishing industry. Some Senegalese got contracts with Acciona, one of the world’s biggest builders of desalination plants, which Spain was constructing at a frenzied pace matched only by Israel and Australia, trying to keep up with its own drought and desertification.

Spain spent millions of euros each year luring northern European tourists to its beaches. At the height of the Canaries crisis, it launched a marketing blitz in Senegal, too. With the help of the advertising multinational Ogilvy, it plastered Dakar’s buses with images of shipwrecks and ran radio ads warning of the dangers of illegal migration. In one television spot, the legendary Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour sat alone in a wooden pirogue, waves crashing in the background. “You already know how this story ends,” he said in Wolof. “Don’t risk your life for nothing. You are the future of Africa.”

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IN THE FERLO,
planting operations for the Great Green Wall were based in a former German research station in the village of Widou Thiengoly, a collection of mud homes and stick fences surrounded by trampled red earth. Next to a dirt soccer pitch was the village’s communal well, dug by the French in the 1940s, where nomads with donkey-drawn carts spent hours filling water containers made of plastic or from old truck inner tubes. A makeshift nursery of tree species selected by the Great Green Wall’s scientific committee—hundreds of thousands of acacia, balanites, and ziziphus seedlings, their roots wrapped in black plastic bags—was behind the three-room building where Pape and I stayed with the other officers. The building had couches and buzzing flies and ancient electric fans, and in the corners were stacked piles of decaying German pulp fiction, from
Unruhige Nächte
(Restless nights) to
Suche impotenten Mann fürs Leben
(
In search of an impotent man
). We took our meals here, the Eaux et Forêts men arguing the finer points of planting while eating with their hands from a shared platter. After dinner, we cut the lights so we had enough power to run Widou’s only TV. The screen attracted dozens of villagers and hundreds of giant moths, and under the African sky we watched a French-dubbed Jack Bauer fight Middle Eastern terrorists in Los Angeles.

The officers’ argument the first morning, held over a loaf of bread and a pot of coffee, was about precipitation. The so-called rainy season in this part of the Sahel lasted but a few summertime weeks, making the planting schedule all-important. If the seedlings went in before the last rain, they might live; if they didn’t, they would almost certainly die. Pape, who was forty-eight—he was born two months before Senegal’s independence—laid out an idea for a new planting regimen. “Imaginez,” he said. “Imaginez!” He continued making his point in Wolof, then turned to me to translate. “The problem here is the rain,” he said solemnly. “There is not enough.” A tall captain heartily agreed. “C’est vrai!” he exclaimed. Outside, a truck began blaring its horn, and I went to the nursery to watch dozens of men clamber into the back, then cheer as it took off for the front at a wild clip. Nearby, a bucket brigade loaded a second truck with seedlings, carefully passing them one by one, hand to hand, until the bed was full. It rumbled off after the first, kicking up a cloud of dust.

Dirt roads radiated out of Widou like spokes, and after the officers dispersed, Pape and I followed one southeast until there was nothing but savanna grasses and baobabs. After thirty minutes, we passed a cluster of army-green tents—forester housing, Pape said—and soon we crossed the parallel ditches of the Great Green Wall, lines in the earth stretching as far as the eye could see. An Eaux et Forêts crew, a hundred or so machete-carrying youths in jungle fatigues, was waiting next to a water truck. Different parcels of the wall were being planted by different groups—from Eaux et Forêts to local villagers to members of the foresters’ union to university kids recruited by the Ministry of Youth—and Pape liked to foster friendly competition between them. It was a contest measured in seedlings used and hectares planted, and naturally he believed that his own men and women were the fastest.

This was a new parcel—a tractor had just dug the trenches—and the workers asked us to plant the first trees. One handed me a seedling and lopped off the bottom of the plastic wrapping with his machete. I took off the rest of the plastic and lowered it into the hole; a few inches of rich, wet soil were now all that insulated the roots from the cracked, sandy Sahel. Seven paces away, Pape planted the second tree and sprayed it with a few drops of water. Before we drove off, he gathered his crew for a speech, imploring them never to tire. “Fatigue?” he yelled. “Non!” they responded. “Fatigue?” “Non!” “Fatigue?” “Non!” “Fatigue?” “Non!”

Morale was important because, as I soon learned, money was scarce. Every time Pape needed to pay for more seedlings or repair a truck, he went begging to the director of Eaux et Forêts, and the director went to a minister, and then they waited. “Wait. Wait. Wait. We don’t know how he gets the money,” Pape said. There was support for the wall from Europe as early as 2009, but the money—a little over $1 million—went only to a feasibility study. In 2011, the UN’s Global Environment Facility (GEF) made headlines by pledging up to $119 million to build the Great Green Wall—but this was not additional funding, it clarified. If the eleven countries involved wanted to starve other projects and divert all the money, this would be allowed. And the GEF suggested that the name Great Green Wall should be used to brand a raft of development projects in the Sahel—dams, wells, animal husbandry—and not, in fact, to build a wall of trees. “In my vision of the Great Green Wall, there will be practically no place for plantations,” the GEF’s Senegal program officer told me. Even if Western money did get diverted to Pape’s trenches, the EU would be spending at least ten times more on a virtual wall around itself than on a green wall around the Sahara.

So far in Senegal, international support for the Great Green Wall came mostly from the Japanese spiritual group Sukyo Mahikari. In Japan, the Mahikaris’ main temple is an architectural marvel: five minarets topped with five Stars of David surrounding a cavernous hall with a traditional Japanese roof, inside of which is a koi-filled aquarium and a wall of water spewing from the heads of Mayan gods. In the Ferlo, they camped in green military tents in the savanna forty-five minutes from Widou. They had giant bonfires and religious lessons when not planting, and they marched around camp, chanting.

“Have you heard of them?” asked one of the Eaux et Forêts lieutenants in the jeep one afternoon. I’d looked them up, I said: “They believe in the healing power of light energy.” The lieutenant nodded. He was sweating and had bloodshot eyes, a likely case of malaria. “Un sect,” he said—a cult. “All they do is pray.”

Beside us was a civilian Eaux et Forêts official named Mara, a man of feline movements who described his job as “évaluation”: He traveled around the agency’s various projects, taking notes and asking long, philosophical questions. He had been staring out the window at the empty trenches of the Great Green Wall. “It’s good to believe in something,” he said. “It helps you do things.”

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WHEN FRONTEX INTERCEPTED
the flat-bottomed pirogues close to the Senegalese coast, the European Parliament’s resident migration expert told me, the encounters were unpredictable, sometimes violent. The men were at the beginning of their journey, and they wanted to go on. “They can be ferocious,” he said. “Sometimes, there is even the throwing of machetes. But if we approach them out in the open sea, when they have been out for a good amount of time, they are too exhausted to offer any resistance.” He cocked his head. “This is interesting.”