13. Going Green in Dar Salaam

What if I said that my village had ‘gone green?’

Would you think that I am making a cynical joke about the inadequacy of “environmentalism” in the developed world?

Would you believe me?

Or would you start to think about the concept of being ‘environmentally conscious’ from the standpoint of a small village in Africa?

Well this post aims at all three.

Really! It is fascinating to examine life here, in a small village in Africa, from the standpoint of ‘environmentally conscious living’ that has come to be so important a part of upper middle class living in America— to juxtapose what have become standards of an environmentally friendly life in the US, with what is simply life for people living here.

I don't mean anything too particular when I say “environmentally conscious living in middle class America.” I refer simply to the response(s) of the upper and middle classes to an environmental crisis that they themselves largely defined. (And created, for that matter)

And for what I can tell, this response has focused almost exclusively on individual consumption patterns. 

I do not mean to say here that the concern that people have for the environment is not deep/legitimate. This is actually besides the point. What I mean to say is just that environmentalism-- lifestyle changes made 'for' the environment--  in the suburbs, has amounted to little more than a selecting a different brand, or sometimes store.

Now that we are environmentally conscious, we scoff at the obliviously non-eco Scott brand paper towels, and reach past them for something with a more redeeming, green, logo. Our toilets and shower heads are low-flow, and our food comes from enlightened and organic farms in less packaging, and our cars make less noise and use marginally less gas.

All of these shifts in purchasing habits might represent real, meaningful, if incremental, environmental progress. Or they may just be marketing ploys.

But I'm not interested in that right now. For the purposes of this blog, I'm only interested in how we frame environmentalism—what­ we consider to be ‘environmentally friendly behavior.’ Whether or not an environmentalism based on individualized market choices can actually succeed is another conversation[1].

So to determine if one is ‘green’ or not, we, in rich countries, ask questions about what and how we consume:

“What brand of beef are you buying? Is it locally raised?” “Do you unplug the power strip when you leave the house?” “Do you recycle?”

On the other hand, when you look at how people live here, and the way they live, with an environmental lens, the lifestyle differences are so vast that you simply can not ask the same questions. 
Instead of “How much ____ did you buy, and where did it come from?” one must ask  “Do you buy ____?” (And the answer is usually no.)

People don't buy recycled toilet paper, they wipe with their hand. They don't pay a dollar more for local milk, they drink it when their cows are fat, and don't when their cows are skinny. They don't unplug appliances when away from the home because they don't have appliances.

The point is that by any metric of environmentalism Dar Salaam is far and away more 'eco-friendly' than anywhere I have ever know of or even conceived of in the US.
Obviously this is not a value judgment, or an explaination about why or how this is. 
But it is true.

[At the very least I like to imagine an eco-conscious suburban mother actually getting behind a donkey with a plow and growing all of her own organic rice.]

Everything about life here is simply ‘greener’ than things are in the US.

Every time I get into a car, for example, which is a rare occurrence^[2], it is the ultimate model of carpooling; an epic exemplification of the full potential of what carpooling to work could possibly be. Very green indeed! I could get into all sorts of detail here, (Google image search‘African transportation’) but nothing I can say could match how very green it really is.

Within Dar Salaam, fossil fuel consumption is miniscule. There are maybe 6 motor bikes in the whole village, and one motor-pump used to irrigate the garden. The village also rented a tractor for about one week to farm the rice fields, but this is the first year that this happened.

Other than that, cows, donkeys, and now, a horse (vaccinated for tsetsi), work the land, powered only by the grass they eat, and people bike or walk basically anywhere they need to go. 

What an eco-conscious community!

And the food. The food we eat here is very local. And organic. And sustainably harvested. And any other buzzword you could possibly conjure up.

And when I say 'local' I don't just mean that it was bought at the farmers market, I mean that my family grew it. All within a mile or so from the house.

The diet is rather simple of course. It consists almost exclusively rice, corn, peanuts, leaves, beans, cassava, and occasionally we will kill a (‘locally raised’) goat or sheep whose meat will be shared by the entire village.

All of this means that we buy almost no food.

Raw, recently gathered, shea nuts. Kids eat the greenish pulp

In fact, except for rare occasions such as baptisms and weddings, the only foodstuffs bought are sugar for the porridge (which is generally 'black market' Gambian), vegetable oil  for the sauces, which could come from anywhere, and I think we also buy salt.

And we buy vegetable oil only rarely because the women process shea nuts to make shea oil most of the time. Interestingly, when they have money, they go for the crappy vegetable oil, instead of the amazing local shea (that we would pay $$ for in the states). 

This seems counterintuitive, but processing the nuts is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. If you could buy oil, why bother with Shea?

Fatoumata processing shea nuts into oil

When I installed in early December, the whole village was in harvest mode. Everyday boys would come marching in from the fields carrying big sacks full of corn, rice and peanuts on their heads. The bags all got piled into a room in our compound, forming a great mountain by the end of it all. This mountain has dwindled steadily since the end of harvest, but I checked on it recently and it is still pretty substantial.

It is honestly difficult for me to believe that we really get 100% of our staple grains from our own fields. Especially considering that my host mothers also cook for about 20 Koranic Students (talibé) living in the compound. I have never lived anything like this before, and it blows my mind.

So sometimes I ask my host dad, 'have we bought any grain or rice this year?' and the answer is always no. Or I’ll ask, 'where is this rice from,' and invariably he will chuckle, and point, with almost childish pride, behind the house towards the rice field. 'A bé bo xan jan!' It all comes from here!

Going green is hard work

However, as I said, this diet, along with the amount that I work and bike around, leaves me almost constantly hungry. My stomach gets 'full' every meal, but I rarely feel truly satisfied by eating basically only corn and rice. Usually it's not bad, and it is a very healthy, mild feeling of hunger. But sometimes I lay on my bed after a morning of work when it is 100 degrees in my hut and there are still 2 hours until lunch and my stomach feels like it's gnawing at itself. And I wallow for a while in amazement at this feeling. I try to appreciate it.

Obviously I am a long way from real hunger. This is just my overstretched American stomach adjusting to the diet of the real world. But it is still something that I really feel, a true sensory experience.

It also means that, in truth, my diet, personally speaking, is supplemented by food bought when I go into Kédougou city. This could include tomatoes from Dakar, avocados from Guinea, coffee grown in Côte d'Ivoire and processed in Belgium, meat from cows raised in the western part of the region, or bread made of grain from Canada. A typical global diet.

I could go on and on about how green Dar Salaam is. How little water is used, how the materials for construction projects are all locally sourced, and how little demand we put on the electricity grid... (None)

Sometimes I put a humorous twist on what I see here, imagining a Huffington Post article:

"Tips to Reduce your Impact on the Food and Energy Nexus-- An interview with Aminata Minté of Dar Salaam."

Huffington Post: "So Aminata, how do you reduce your water usage? Low flow toilets and shower heads? Using grey water to water your garden?"

Aminata: "I pull all of my water from a well."

HP: "And what tips do you have to reduce electricity usage? Eco-light bulbs? Unplugging your appliances when you leave the house?"

A: "Not having electricity"

HP: "And as far as food is concerned, what brands do you recommend to our readers who don't want to support companies that are environmentally irresponsible?"

A: " I don't know. I haven't bought any food this year."

Remember, every one of us makes choices every day as individuals and consumers that collectively have a big impact on the environment. By making simple, everyday choices like not buying food, not using electricity, and having no central plumbing, all of us can make a difference and save the earth.

A little bit absurd.
I took an ‘environmental footprint’ quiz online, filling in the questions as if I was a resident of my village. Most of the questions just made no sense.

“Where do you obtain most of your food?” The greenest answer was ‘local farmers markets. There was no option for ‘Seriously, I am a peasant, I grow virtually all of it, and none of it ever got moved by a truck.’

Other questions were equally senseless in this context.

“What percentage of your electricity comes from solar panels?” Or “Do you have energy saving features such as extra insulation on your homes?”

Needless to say, this produced a very low theoretical carbon footprint.

Thinking about this stuff also leads me to consider some interesting, more serious things.

I have a map of the US on the wall of my hut, and sometimes I look at it, astonished by what all of those black dots represent. Each is a city with thousands of people, and in every single one of those cities, almost everyone takes, (or at least could take—thinking about my brother here) a warm shower every day. Most people have a fridge, a dishwasher, and a stove. The streets are usually well paved and often have sidewalks. The kids play on grass soccer fields, which are sometimes watered daily, and almost everyone can read.

I ponder this inconceivable luxury for a few moments and soon questions start to form. Can these luxuries be extended to people in a socially, environmentally, economically just fashion? If so, how? What is keeping the world from doing so?

And conversely, can people who already enjoy such things find a way to do so in a more environmentally harmonious fashion?

And it occurs to me that I've been pondering this question for about a decade now. I have heard dozens of different answers to it, and I still can't say that I know what to make of it all.

But more and more I find myself increasingly hesitant to engage in such a debate. I am tired and increasingly wary of making generalized arguments. I am starting to think that it might be more useful for me, at least presently, to try to understand what is right in front of me.

And what I see here is rather complicated, and beautiful, and fascinating, and at the end of the day, it usually inspires optimism. Calling it ‘green’ makes no sense, and is rather beside the point. Dar Salaam is a beautiful place to live, and it certainly has a ways to go before the people need to begin worrying about their carbon footprint as we define it in the west.  

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[1] And the answer is no.

^[2] The last time I got into a car, by the way, was May 5th, and I will probably not get into one again until the end of July.