What can Canada learn from Haiti? An election question

 

In 1492, when Christopher Columbus first landed in what is now known as Haiti he wrote in his diary, “This is the most beautiful land that human eyes have seen”. Part of that beauty was the soaring mountain sides covered with valuable forests of mahogany. Many – if not most – of the Indigenous Taíno died, with no immunity to the diseases the Europeans brought with them. Before he left the island, Columbus named and claimed the island for Spain, calling it Espanola. However, France also had claims and for years there were skirmishes and outright wars over the matter until Spain gave up and went home. The French interested in being wage slaves or worse in the cane fields and temporarily fled deeper into the forests. The French settlers brought over African slaves. As time passed and the slaves began to speak French, they heard about the start of the French Revolution in France. They took note. When the Slave Revolution started in Haiti there were 10 slaves to 1 European settler. They figured their odds were good.

 

By this time the population in Tahiti had been intermixing for several generations and a few of the slaves had gained their freedom. Some of these became educated the art of warfare. I think they could be considered the first guerrilla fighters, engaging in ‘pop up’ attacks. Their revolution started in 1791 and ended in 1803, when they ran the French soldiers with all their modem warfare out of Tahiti. They ended slavery and declared their land a nation. But the price they paid for their nation was its ruin. 

 

The French demanded unconscionable war reparations. And the Haitians were under the gun. Literally. Because if the Haitians didn’t pay, the French promised to send their gunboats. The Haitians had not had time to have developed a capitalist economy. The only real financial asset the Haitians had was their mahogany trees. So they began cutting and sending massive logs of mahogany to France.

 

The last of the money promised to France was paid in 1947. That’s well within my lifetime. Imagine enduring all those long years of dismay watching Haiti's forests disappear as logs to be finished into fine furniture and housing products for rich outside their land. And what is Haiti like today? From all reports it is a failed state. Their last president was assassinated with no real replacement, and they haven’t recovered from the horrible earthquake of 2010, with another devastating one this year. The country is also staggering under environmental devastation, poor access to food, virtually non-existent health, rampant crime and, perhaps worst of all, a political class that acts only in their own personal and partisan interest.

 

Haiti has much the same topology as British Colombia. Yes, the mountains here were once covered as far as the eye could see with forests of Cedar, Douglas Fir, and Pine. And these forests have disappeared in much the same order as in Haiti, except even faster as Canada has the latest forestry technology. But we are already suffering the same results of the massive cutting, like wildfires, flooding, and landslides; the same results that make a gigantic mudhole out of much of Tahiti during the rainy season. 

 

It seems that deforestation of a mountainous country brings poverty and ruin. When the environmental integrity of a country is lost, so the people become lost. The Haitians didn’t deliberately do this to themselves. After the incredible bravery of the Slave Revolution they found they had no other choice. We do. Yet we are allowing much the same thing to be done to us by our own economic elites. Politicians will only do what they are forced to do by the body politic. We all know that. So if you run across one or two in this election season, ask them what they would do about the very last ruination of our forests, especially out at Fairy Creek. They are hoping you won’t ask this because all they know about the forests decline is “talk and log”. They have all been doing this for many years which is why we are being “talked and logged” into a ruined state ourselves. But go ahead and try. Serendipity does happen. Next time.