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Anniversary Forum
Africa's Environmental Footprints
James C. McCann
| THE HISTORIOGRAPHY of Africa's environmental past in the first decade of the twenty-first century reflects its germination in a number of sites and national academic cultures in Europe and America where both African and Western environmental historians publish and received their training. One can nevertheless argue also that the shape of the field will derive from some aspects of Africa's demographic and environmental exceptionalism. Most Africans nowadays are under sixteen years old and will live their lives not as idyllic environmental managers but in complex relationships to cities, national markets, and in life paths buffeted by global forces. Moreover, Africa is the globe's most rapidly urbanizing area. In these circumstances we can argue that local knowledge will be an important dynamic force in environmental management, but one that we know far too little about. We thus face continuing questions about what African landscapes looked like in the past and how they will appear in the future. |
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These questions are probably best answered by contributors to this journal, by assemblies of graduate students in Europe and the United States, and by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and foundations that fund research. Those groups certainly will include Africans, but regrettably probably not those based in African universities and ministries. Much or most of the environmental study by African colleagues consists of short-term consultancies driven by external priorities of NGOs or multilateral organizations rather than long-term research support. There is, however, a new trend I detect in which multilateral research organizations and foundations now have a set of international geographers and anthropologists—including Africans—situated in key leadership positions to set out new research agendas that we can hope will include environmental social science in a visible and influential role. (Here I mean collaborative international research organizations such as the International Centre for the Improvement of Wheat and Maize, the International Livestock Research Institute, and the West African Rice Development Agency.) |
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