On environmental brink, Haiti scrambles for a lifeline
By NATHANIAL GRONEWOLD of Greenwire
Published: November 9, 2009 First of a four-part series. PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A hard rain can be deadly here. A family of four was reported killed late last month when rushing stormwater loosened soil under their hillside house and brought the structure down on them. The denuded slopes around this city of 2 million turn stormwater into lethal torrents. Trees, shrubs and other vegetation that anchor soil and buffer runoff are rare here. They mark private compounds of the wealthy, islands of green protected by fences and armed guards in a sea of slums that have sprawled up sandy hills as the city’s population tripled over the past 20 years. “They are informal human settlements with very, very weak construction methods,” said Stephanie Ziebell, an aid worker with the Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haiti, or MINUSTAH, the United Nations’ only peacekeeping mission in the Americas. “There’s nothing to protect them from water flooding down from the hillside.” Haiti — the developing world’s first and oldest independent nation — is today a ward of the United Nations, dependent on foreign aid and the $612-million-a-year peacekeeping operation that only recently managed to smother the violence that has long plagued this country. But it is violence done to the environment that is haunting Haiti now. Degradation of natural resources here is both a consequence and an amplifier of poverty and disorder. The country has become a poster child for environmental neglect, and many fear Haiti is close to total ecological collapse. Haiti has few and weak environmental laws. Its dense population has just two small national parks where no agency protects resources. Its forests have been overharvested, its marine resources overexploited. “The environmental degradation has gotten to such a point that there’s danger everywhere,” said Jean-Cyril Pressoir, a Haitian native and owner of a new tour company here. …
