a leaf warbler's gleanings

When I think of Haiti, the image that comes to mind is of the view I saw from the air, flying over the island of Hispaniola en route between Puerto Rico and Miami in 2003. A striking feature of that island was a sharp demarcatation between a verdant, apparently forested eastern half and a barren dirt-brown western half. Upon glimpsing that demarcation, I first wondered if we were maybe flying over a national park boundary - for that's where I'm used to seeing such a stark constrast back in India. It turned out that I was looking at an international boundary - between the nations of the Dominican Republic (the green east) and Haiti (the brown west). Here's a satellite image of this boundary, courtesy of the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center - Scientific Visualization Studio:

Later, I heard Al Gore use a similar image to visually emphasize the connection between political systems and environmental problems. Last May, The Times had a story that provided historical context to Haiti: the land where children eat mud. Just a couple of months ago, the New York Times ran a series of articles (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6) on the troubled ecological legacy of a desperate human population living on the brink after decades of war and political strife. Here's a film about this, also from the NYT:

All that, before the earthquake struck this week! Its been difficult to watch scenes of the aftermath, being relayed on all media channels. Here's a more remote view, on Google's Haiti relief and imagery page which offers high resolution current imagery that might actually help relief efforts, as well as ways for you to donate to relief efforts.

via crunchgear.com

So the aid is coming in, quite generously, via governments, NGOs, and ordinary people texting in donations via SMS, and may it do all it can to alleviate the immediate suffering of Haiti's poor. But what of the longer term? How long is this helping hand from the rest of the world likely to linger, beyond the immediate crisis, beyong even the rebuilding of collapsed homes, to address the decades-long environmental tragedies of Haiti? What will it take to truly pull back this desperate nation not only from the current acute calamity of this earthquake, but from the chronic ecological catastrophe that is also Haiti's legacy? After all, rebuilding homes and cities may be hard and expensive, but its something we are good at when provided sufficient motivation like, say, from an earthquake. The business of rebuilding a tropical forest ecosystem after its been stripped so bare, on the other hand - of this, we know far less! Yet this ecological rebuilding, an undoing of human-made disasters, is what Haiti (like, indeed, many other parts of our planet) really needs if it is to regain any semblance of resilience in the face of such natural disasters.