(Credit: Erinn J Hale Photography)
A paradox exists on the beautiful, littered beaches of Senegal. The biosphere here is incredibly productive. Nature provides. Life flourishes. And the flourishing natural world provides a lot for humans. The basics of human life – food, shelter, love, time to simply ‘be’ – are abundant here.
Here is the paradox: Nature provides abundance and life is good; then, populations grow past the carrying capacity of that abundance and life is bad.
I remember learning about the Lynx and the Hare in grade school. (Probably from a CWF curriculum handbook… Remember?) After a good summer and abundant resources, the Hare population increases. This causes the Lynx population to increase until there are more Lynx than the Hare population can feed. Both populations decline and a natural cycle exists.
I thought about the Lynx and the Hare as I walked through the slums of Saint-Louis, Senegal. Children’s faces were caked in dried snot. Flies hovered over and landed on their faces. Their tiny tummies bulged. All that was missing was a slow-motion camera, a black and white filter and some dramatic music. Sigh.
Please don’t get me wrong. This sight is sad, but in my ironic experience it’s much less sad to see poverty in person, than to watch it on TV – One of the many paradoxes of West Africa.
What I see in Senegal are a people who are strong, resourceful and intelligent. Many people are poor, yes. Many more, though, believe that they are poor. Paradoxically, they live a life on the beach that many Westerners “achieve” after 30 years of working a job that they hate. Regardless of where we live and how much we have, we must count our blessings. Poverty is still rude, putrid and intolerable, but it is exacerbated by an impoverished mindset.
When I think about our mandate with the CWF to promote conservation, I become even more convinced of this idea: Poverty and the impoverished mindset both need to be addressed before the beaches can be clean.