CURRENT ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND EDUCATION IS DESTROYING UGANDA 'S ENVIRONMENT

 

By

F.C. OWEYEGHA- AFUNADUULA

Website: http://www.afuna.org or http://www.afuna.o-f.com

Email:afunaduula2000@yahoo.co.uk or afunaduula@afuna.org

Tel: +256 78 555 222 or +256 71 845461

 

 

2 nd February 2005

 

 

Way back in 1949 Aldo Leopold, writing in his famous book “A Sand County Almanac”, had this to say:

 

Despite nearly a Century of propaganda, conservation still proceeds at a snail's pace: progress still consists largely of letterhead pieties and conventional oratory. On the back forty we still slip two steps backwards for each forward stride. The usual answer to this dilemma is “more conservation education”. No one will debate this, but is it certain that only the volume of education needs stepping up? Is something lacking in the content as well?”

 

Perhaps nowhere is this still as true as in Uganda . We got our first institute of environment and natural resources, the Makerere University Institute of Environment and Natural Resources (MUIENR), way back in the 1980s but the words of Aldo Leopold are to a very large extent applicable to this institute as if we were still in 1949.

 

In fact, throughout Makerere University many environmental programmes have mushroomed across the curriculum but, except for that in MUIENR, which manifests more as a multidisciplinary one (not very different from a disciplinary programme in the sense that there is no disciplinary mixing), virtually all of them are taught in a disciplinary manner. Interdisciplinarity, which entails interaction of the disciplines and their products and requires day-to-day interaction between persons from different disciplines and, therefore, some learning of the other disciplines' basic language and interchange, in interactive mode, of samples, ideas and results, is still unfashionable in environmental conservation education.

 

What is evident, therefore, is that there has been an explosion of disciplinary environmental education and for that matter conservation education, but what is taught has not changed appreciably from what was taught twenty five years ago. Although it has been recognised for sometime that environment consists of four basic, interconnected, interdependent, dynamically interacting dimensions -the ecological-biological, the socio-economic, the socio-cultural, and time –in most departments and institutions where environment is taught, it is taught as if it is confined to the ecological-biological dimension. This way of teaching environment is what we inherited from the colonialists. It is of course mistraining for the environment.

 

In fact, environmental policy and education in Uganda remain as solidly based on Western beliefs about nature rather than on reality as it was before the country was ostensibly granted political independence by Great Britain . By what we include or exclude from the curriculum, we are continuing to instill in our students or graduates the dangerous attitude that environmental conservation is an apolitical, non-cultural and non-activist undertaking. We are also perpetuating the erroneous belief that conservation is more of a techno-bureaucratic and scientific than an ethical, moral and social programme.

 

To a very large extent, the perspectives of our rural people continue to miss in our official concept of environmental conservation. With Government choice of uncritically embracing and applying the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank sponsored modernisation-privatisation model of development in Uganda , the dominant scientific and economic forces have stepped up their erroneous assumption that our local/indigenous and traditional people must change to meet “modern standards”. Until they change, according to the modernists, then the label “primitive” must continue to be affixed onto them.

 

It is, therefore, easy to see that science, economics and technology as pursued today seldom embrace the value of local knowledge and traditions and very rarely employ the language of rights and local control over access of resources. It is for this reason that ever since I joined Makerere University as a lecturer in 1991 I have never stopped talking about the poverty and irrelevance of science, economics and technology to harmonising human-environment relations in Uganda .

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While the modernists are convinced that our local/indigenous people should change to fit modernity, our disempowered people feel the opposite must occur: science, education, environmental policy and education, technology and industry must begin to respect local diversity and what Professor Durrell Posey has called “The Sacred Balance”. Sacred Balance is a system of knowledge based on a solid spiritual foundation. It reflects the fact that spirituality is the highest form of consciousness while spiritual consciousness is the highest form of awareness, including awareness of the environmental problems, issues and challenges.

 

For that matter, a dimension of traditional knowledge is not conservation knowledge but knowledge of the universal as expressed in the local. To this end, The Sacred Balance is the links between life, land and society from the view of the rural indigenous and traditional people. Unfortunately instead of recognizing that we cannot seriously conserve the environment without conserving The Sacred Balance, we are arrogantly going on with our colonially-based rhetoric of partnerships and sustainable development, while at the same time expanding biodiversity and environmental conservation education with little or no consideration of the culture-environment interconnectivity and reciprocal solidarity in conserving life and the ecological-biological basis of survival.

 

Although in terms of policy and education we now recognise that all humanity is an integral component of the sphere of life (Biosphere) in our universe, we continue, unfortunately, to emphasise that we, the elite, together with selected Western interests, are the legitimate transformer and protector of the current environment while we see those whose culture, spirituality and traditions were responsible for ensuring that what we call ours is there as enemies of the environment.

 

Using Western rational thought and scientific analysis, we assume that our perceptions of environmental problems, issues and challenges and their solutions are the correct ones. To enforce our assumptions, we do not hesitate to employ militaristic approaches as the now well-known “Nyakaana” phenomenon in conservation accosts. In the National Environmental Management Authority (NEMA) and the various environmental training programmes at the University, we present ourselves as the ones who know best what is to be preserved and managed. What is then left for us to do is to coerce the people to follow our prescriptions of how the environment should be conserved.

 

Quite often, our elitist views of the environment and our own self-interests for its current and future use are presented as unchallengeable. This can be seen in the current craze for foreign investment. The political elite now want the President of Uganda to have absolute sovereignty over land and the environment so that he can just decree that such land or environment should be sacrificed to foreign investment. There will even be no room for evaluation. Just like when God was doing His Creation Act and said “Let there be the Sun”, so do the political elite want the President to do when deciding whose land or environment should be freely given away to foreigners.

 

What all this means is that more so today than yesterday and more so today than tomorrow, a key component of the “environmental solution” to our environmental problems, issues and challenges -the indigenous/traditional people -will be left out of environmental and development policy implementation by word of the President. In any case, according to President Museveni's Cabinet Proposals towards reviewing the Uganda Constitution 1995 and presented in a White paper as part of Government's roadmap to political pluralism, the word of the President, if legislatively agreed, will be law.

 

Critical examination of our current university environmental education programmes and environmental leadership in the country will reveal that both are strongly biased by “elitist” urban perceptions of the total environment, let alone the problems, issues and challenges of the urban environment. Apparently many who participate in the environmental programmes and environmental leadership may not even have lived in a rural setting at all for any significant length of time.

 

Therefore, increasingly there is a real danger that the perceptions and experiences of the poor who are the most closely linked to the land and who have firsthand understanding of their surrounding natural environment are set to be completely excluded from the human enterprise of environmental conservation. They will be unimportant to the ultimate goal of conservation now and in future.

 

This is absolutely dangerous. It means that our people will be environmentally and ecologically excluded and of course suffer immeasurable environmental and ecological injustices as their environmental and ecological rights are abused with impunity in the name of educating and managing for an open economy.

 

It should be emphasised that environmental policy and education reflect and must reflect a collective perception of nature and the consolidation of what is held to be true about the natural world and what is necessary to pass on to the future generations just as did our ancestors for millennia. It is this perception, which underlies and is shaping the vision of alternative actions towards environmental conservation. Unfortunately the question of how accurate and sound this vision is does not appear to be guiding conservation in Uganda at the moment either academically or intellectually or practically.

 

What, therefore, seems to matter just as we enter the latter half of the first decade of the new millennium is that the perceptions and knowledge of the environment desired by the status quo are being dictated by the political elite rather than the common beliefs, basic experiences and scientific research that value the contributions of our great traditions? The dictate is being guided by certain patterns of behaviour consonant with Western traditions of environmental thought and conservation, which promote consumerism, materialism and epicurianism.

 

It seems to me that we can no longer postpone challenging the validity of the widely held environmental truths among the academic, intellectual and political elite. It is no longer a virtue, if at all it ever was, to just accept scientific findings as the gospel truth because a scientific truth is really a conclusion usually drawn from a limited set of data. It is nothing more or less than an explanation of what the scientist (s) knows to-date about a topic based on the disciplinary training and interpretation of the information available. The truth so derived is, therefore, subject to replacement by another truth in light of new information that does not fit the old belief. This means truths are transient and should be seen as such.

 

We should also know that there are many accepted truths today relating to the environment that are nothing but myths about nature and which have come from non-scientific sources. One example is the wilderness idea, which started in the United States of America and on which the concept of national park is based. It holds that an area of wilderness interest should be without people. It is the idea dictating environmental thought and policy in Uganda today. The recent onslaught of NEMA onto people who have built houses in swamps is driven by this idea. However, much wilderness has long been influenced by human activities.

 

It is myths like this combining with the concept of the balance of nature that have led to unrealistic contradictory tenets in our natural resource management policies in the past and continue to do so. On the one hand, our current policies are impregnated with an acceptance of destructive practices generated from the belief that mitigating measures can halt or reverse environmental degradation. On the other hand, conventional resource management policy also includes practices based on the belief that setting aside wilderness lands will automatically preserve biological integrity.

 

Yet it is true that natural resource management that seeks to integrate alternative environmental perceptions and current scientific information have much to offer in terms of environmental conservation. We have to accept that nature is no longer an object to be molded by Man, Homo sapiens , any way he likes. Nature is a complex system whose living components are often personified and deified in local myths. Some of these myths are based on generations of experience and their representations of ecological relationships may be closer to reality than scientific knowledges.

 

As Gomez-Pomba and Kaus (1992) put it, conservation, which so much dominates environmental education at our Universities and shape our legislative, policy, judicial and executive processes relating to environment, may not be part of the vocabulary of the local/indigenous people. However, it certainly is part of their way of life and their perception of the human relationship to the natural world.

 

Therefore, our official environmental managers in NEMA should recognise that throughout the world communally-held resources have been managed and conserved by diverse human societies via cultural mechanisms that attach symbolic, social and spiritual significance to land and resources beyond the immediate extractive value. This is true, for example, with the nearly 2.5 million Basoga, who belong to more than 100 Clans, all of which are ecologically, ethically, morally, communally, socially, and spiritually integrated in the Bujagali Falls, which will be submerged in case the political elite succeed in politically engineering the construction of Bujagali dam at Dumbbell downstream. Therefore, it is biocultural diversity rather than biodiversity which should be the focus of conservation by NEMA.

 

All indications, however, are that powerful government and corporate business interests with myopic perceptions of environment-development connections, or how land and resources should be used or managed, will continue to erect policies or support education and research that violate traditional resource management systems well into the future. As a result, we should expect further degradation, decay and collapse of our environment.

 

Therefore, it is absolutely important that we should not go on as if what the West planted in our country as a environmental resource management system is correct and nothing is thus wrong with it. We must rethink our current environmental policy and education so that in their place we have education and policy that are environmentally friendly and do not perpetuate arrogance and fundamentalism in conservation, with resultant relegation of the poor from the environmental decision-making process.

 

All this will, however, be a dream if the current plot by the political elite to allocate absolute sovereignty over land and environment to the President gets legislative approval. This will be the greatest case of the arrogance of humanism during our lifetime. Its legacy will be accelerated environmental destruction in the name of large-scale projects, which will be presented as “development” as the quality of life of the absolute majority poor continues to plummet. NEMA whose policy committee is chaired by the Prime Minister and every line Ministry is a member is likely to endorse every large project desired by the President.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOME BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

BOTKIN, D.B.(1990). Discordant harmonies: a new ecology for the Twenty-First century. Oxford University Press, New York

 

FEENY, D. ET. AL. (1990). The tragedy of the commons: twenty0two years later. Human Ecology, 18: 1-19

 

GOLLIHER, J. (1999). Ethical, moral and religious concerns. In: UNEP (1999). Cultural and spiritural values of biodiversity: a comprehensive contribution to the global biodiversity assessment. Intermediate Technology Publications, p. 437-497.

 

GRAY, A. (1999). Indigenous Peoples, their environment and territories. In: UNEP (1999). Cultural and spiritual values of biodiversity: a comprehensive contribution to the global biodiversity assessment. Intermediate Technology Publications, p. 61-114

 

LEOPOLD, A. (1949) (1966). A Sand County Almanac . Oxford University Press, New York .

 

McCAY, B.J. and J.M. ACHESON (EDS) (1990). The question of the commons: the culture and ecology of communal resources. University of Arizona Press, Tucson .

 

POSEY, D.A. (1999). Introduction: Culture and nature –the inextricable link. . In: UNEP (1999). Cultural and spiritual values of biodiversity: a comprehensive contribution to the global biodiversity assessment. Intermediate Technology Publications,

 

SONANAYAKE, R. (1999). Voices of the Earth. . In: UNEP (1999). Cultural and spiritual values of biodiversity: a comprehensive contribution to the global biodiversity assessment. Intermediate Technology Publications,

 

THIRD WORLD WATER FORUM (2003). Water and Cultural Diversity. Kyoto international Conference Hall, 16-17 March 2003.

 

UNEP (1999). Cultural and spiritual values of biodiversity: a comprehensive contribution to the global biodiversity assessment. Intermediate Technology Publications.