10 ms·

Death of the Nile

156 points by dberhane 9y ago

11235813213455 9y ago
It might not be better for the Amazon, for example there are more than 2 million people in Manaus The only solution I see, is limiting people to have 1 child max, else it's really going to be bad
justboxing 9y ago
> From the controversial construction of Africa’s largest dam in the rugged hinterland just shy of the Sudanese border, to Addis Ababa’s alleged displacement of tens of thousands of villagers in order to lease their prime Nile-side land to foreign agribusinesses, an uneasy pall hangs over the entire area. Who are these "foreign agribusinesses"? Is it western corporations like "gourmet coffee" producers and such, or something more elementary / basic like wheat, rice, grain producers? And who is leading the prime Nile-side land to them? The government (which might be corrupt) or is it greedy individuals who are destroying their ecosystem at the cost of their fellow dwellers? > Just reporting there means navigating a complicated minefield of checkpoints, informants, and terrified interviewees. Why?
- pasbesoin 9y ago
  At a guess, China. Natural resources (including agricultural products -- not so "natural", I guess) are what China is getting in return for its carefully selective but large and wide-spread investment. Googling a bit: This article doesn't clarify who the investors are, but it does also/further describe the situation: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/14/ethiopia-villagisation-violence-land-grab https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/14/ethiopia-villa... I find it more than a bit... "ironic", that "Western" concerns are pushing "communes" -- which sound more than a bit like "communism", but appear to have a different construction, here; people aren't left on the land but are told to form "communes", um... somewhere else. But, they are pushing this "commune-ism" to the same ultimate effect: Pursuing their own interests, while screwing the people affected. More: https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/06/15/such-brutal-crackdown/killings-and-arrests-response-ethiopias-oromo-protests https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/06/15/such-brutal-crackdown/... Again, talk of a "Master Plan" but not of who and what, ultimately, is behind it. Ethiopia has been pursuing a lot of tech to control and monitor media and Internet access. For some years, now. To my limited knowledge, they were one of the first/leaders in African states doing so. Sound kind of familiar?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mc32 9y ago
  If you care to look, it's by and large South Asian and East Asian "from India, Turkey, Pakistan, China and Sudan as well as Saudi Arabia, have leased Ethiopian land."[1] [1]https://ig.ft.com/sites/land-rush-investment/ethiopia/?mhq5j=e6 https://ig.ft.com/sites/land-rush-investment/ethiopia/?mhq5j...
  - justboxing 9y ago
    Wow. I did not know that. India and China alone account for nearly 1/2 the world population. Don't think this leasing of land can be 'undone' any time soon...
    - pm90 9y ago
      And yet, India and China produce all the food they need (even if India has a horrible record of distributing that food to those who need it). I'm not sure why the Ethiopian govt. has allowed this to happen. Smells a lot like corruption.
      - Synaesthesia 9y ago
        There were horrible famines in India, under British rule. Ever since independence there hasn’t been one major famine in India.
        pm90 9y ago
        The horrible famines during British times were also caused by distribution problems and not solely due to lack of grains/foodstuffs. Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for showing that. While its true that there hasn't been a catastrophic famine in India, it still suffers from widespread hunger and undernourishment of its children.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    That’s the new colonialism.
firefoxd 9y ago
Around a decade ago, chickens were infected (I don't remember with what) and were making people sick in Cairo. So most people slaughtered them and threw them in the nile. The nile is also the source of Bilharziasis. The nile is where a vast number of people throw their trash.
baxtr 9y ago
This is very sad and sickening. I wonder where we are headed with this. I hope that these countries will somehow start treating this stream as scarce resource, but I believe western style environmentalism is quite a stretch. If the Nile collapses Europe will see refugees streams of unimaginable magnitude.
- f2f 9y ago
  No community which experiences overpopulation will survive... If you want a good walkthrough of historical evidence that population control leads to a stable community check Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed". I suggest you read it and form an opinion before you check the discourse on it.
- calcifer 9y ago
  > If the Nile collapses When, really. > western style environmentalism is quite a stretch Africa's natural resources have been raped and pillaged by the west for many decades. Even today, most people in the west simply don't realize how the effects of that era are still felt strongly. Millions living under extreme poverty do not have the luxury of thinking about the environment when the price of that thought is not putting food on the table. Same can be said for the massive population growth. Birth control requires education, which requires prosperity, which Africa lacks almost completely. > If the Nile collapses Europe will see refugees streams of unimaginable magnitude. As someone in Western Europe who definitely believes this day will come, soon, I can only say we reap what we sow. The crimes of past European powers (think Belgian Congo for a single example) are slowly but surely catching up with the current generation and I think it's way too late to avoid the consequences.
  - wbl 9y ago
    Mauritania already underwent the demographic transition. The Nile is no worse then the rivers of the US 50 years ago.
  - UweSchmidt 9y ago
    "We reap what we sow" assumes an old testament concept of multi generational collective guilt and picturing your migration scenario penance, or divine(?) punishment sounds a little weird. Also, give Africa a little credit, literacy rates are up, maybe the problems can be tackled right over there? https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ourworldindata_literacy-rate-by-age-in-middle-east-and-northern-africa.png https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ourwor...
gumby 9y ago
A side point but these BBC articles are essentially unreadable, with huge pictures, weird scrolling that only works with a mouse (no space-for-next-page) etc. No text-only link. Could they get a warning similar to the [video] title amendment?
- noja 9y ago
  Space works for me. The readability view works for me.
- pmontra 9y ago
  I'm reading those stories on my Android phone with Firefox and they work very well. I'll try them on my laptop and remember to use the space bar to scroll (touchpad is more natural to me.)
  - gerdesj 9y ago
    It is a bit weird but (to me) works well once I got used to it. I can see what they are trying to do and in some parts it is quite a clever form of presentation. On my laptop (Linux, Chromium) it works fine with a two finger scroll on the touchpad - ie "mouse". I also tried space bar and that does work but most of the "roller blinds" stop halfway until the next press. All the content was readable. To me, the mechanism does work but I'm not sure it actually improves the medium. I really am in two minds as to whether the effort is really worth it. The transitions and so on do have an impact but I'm not sure it lends itself to everyone's reading style. It feels more like a presentation and less like an article, and that could be the nagging feeling at the back of my mind. Maybe I need to read more of these things to get a proper perspective on this form of presentation.
- lobo_tuerto 9y ago
  Space works, arrow keys work, page up/page down keys also work. What are you talking about?
  - gumby 9y ago
    I am on Safari under High Sierra. Space doesn't get the next block of text reliably. Safari's "reader" mode doesn't enable for these pages (for me). Plus, by design, there are small blocks of text and huge distracting pictures. Personally I vastly prefer a single block of text to snippets scattered here and there. It's like reading a comic book.
QAPereo 9y ago
A lot of this appears to be due to climate change, and it is happening up and down the Nile valley. Yes, and the ensuing political and social instability is driving mass migration; this is an accelerating process. What will happen when tens of millions of desperate Africans flee to Europe? The first, small, pulse of immigration is changing the political landscape of Europe! I really don’t know the answers to these questions, but holy shit they worry me!
- Spooky23 9y ago
  A: War and ethnic strife.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    Right, but now with modern armies, navies, and air forces against... what... just masses of humanity? There won't be a question of the outcome, it will be wholesale slaughter.
    - Spooky23 9y ago
      See 1861-2017. We are very efficient at wholesale slaughter.
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        I need a hug from an optimist.
- gurkendoktor 9y ago
  Should questions like these already influence whether/where we buy property or whether to have children? It's hard to find anyone who's optimistic about Europe 30-50 years into the future.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    I honestly don’t know. I struggle with a somewhat depressive outlook, but horrifically reality and that outlook have been slowly converging. I hope that I’m wrong, just a cranky guy, because the alternatives are genuinely terrifying me.
aisofteng 9y ago
>"We’ve always treated the river badly, we’ve always assumed it was big enough,” said Youssef Abugroun, an engineer and part-time fisherman, whose regular evening sessions now net him around 10% of his catch a decade ago. “But maybe we’re just too many for that now.” And further down, mentions that the water is just "too filthy". Sounds like a large part of this is due to people shitting into the river they drink from. Makes it hard to have much sympathy.
- chewz 9y ago
  Oh no, people shit and threw thrash in a river their neighbors down the river drink from. Why should they worry?
kvee 9y ago
8 years ago on a felucca in the middle of the Nile in Luxor I saw a dead horse float by

156 points by dberhane 9y ago

It might not be better for the Amazon, for example there are more than 2 million people in Manaus The only solution I see, is limiting people to have 1 child max, else it's really going to be bad

justboxing 9y ago

> From the controversial construction of Africa’s largest dam in the rugged hinterland just shy of the Sudanese border, to Addis Ababa’s alleged displacement of tens of thousands of villagers in order to lease their prime Nile-side land to foreign agribusinesses, an uneasy pall hangs over the entire area. Who are these "foreign agribusinesses"? Is it western corporations like "gourmet coffee" producers and such, or something more elementary / basic like wheat, rice, grain producers? And who is leading the prime Nile-side land to them? The government (which might be corrupt) or is it greedy individuals who are destroying their ecosystem at the cost of their fellow dwellers? > Just reporting there means navigating a complicated minefield of checkpoints, informants, and terrified interviewees. Why?

pasbesoin 9y ago
At a guess, China. Natural resources (including agricultural products -- not so "natural", I guess) are what China is getting in return for its carefully selective but large and wide-spread investment. Googling a bit: This article doesn't clarify who the investors are, but it does also/further describe the situation: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/14/ethiopia-villagisation-violence-land-grab https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/14/ethiopia-villa... I find it more than a bit... "ironic", that "Western" concerns are pushing "communes" -- which sound more than a bit like "communism", but appear to have a different construction, here; people aren't left on the land but are told to form "communes", um... somewhere else. But, they are pushing this "commune-ism" to the same ultimate effect: Pursuing their own interests, while screwing the people affected. More: https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/06/15/such-brutal-crackdown/killings-and-arrests-response-ethiopias-oromo-protests https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/06/15/such-brutal-crackdown/... Again, talk of a "Master Plan" but not of who and what, ultimately, is behind it. Ethiopia has been pursuing a lot of tech to control and monitor media and Internet access. For some years, now. To my limited knowledge, they were one of the first/leaders in African states doing so. Sound kind of familiar?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mc32 9y ago
If you care to look, it's by and large South Asian and East Asian "from India, Turkey, Pakistan, China and Sudan as well as Saudi Arabia, have leased Ethiopian land."[1] [1]https://ig.ft.com/sites/land-rush-investment/ethiopia/?mhq5j=e6 https://ig.ft.com/sites/land-rush-investment/ethiopia/?mhq5j...
- justboxing 9y ago
  Wow. I did not know that. India and China alone account for nearly 1/2 the world population. Don't think this leasing of land can be 'undone' any time soon...
  - pm90 9y ago
    And yet, India and China produce all the food they need (even if India has a horrible record of distributing that food to those who need it). I'm not sure why the Ethiopian govt. has allowed this to happen. Smells a lot like corruption.
    - Synaesthesia 9y ago
      There were horrible famines in India, under British rule. Ever since independence there hasn’t been one major famine in India.
      - pm90 9y ago
        The horrible famines during British times were also caused by distribution problems and not solely due to lack of grains/foodstuffs. Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for showing that. While its true that there hasn't been a catastrophic famine in India, it still suffers from widespread hunger and undernourishment of its children.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  That’s the new colonialism.

firefoxd 9y ago

Around a decade ago, chickens were infected (I don't remember with what) and were making people sick in Cairo. So most people slaughtered them and threw them in the nile. The nile is also the source of Bilharziasis. The nile is where a vast number of people throw their trash.

baxtr 9y ago

This is very sad and sickening. I wonder where we are headed with this. I hope that these countries will somehow start treating this stream as scarce resource, but I believe western style environmentalism is quite a stretch. If the Nile collapses Europe will see refugees streams of unimaginable magnitude.

f2f 9y ago
No community which experiences overpopulation will survive... If you want a good walkthrough of historical evidence that population control leads to a stable community check Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed". I suggest you read it and form an opinion before you check the discourse on it.
calcifer 9y ago
> If the Nile collapses When, really. > western style environmentalism is quite a stretch Africa's natural resources have been raped and pillaged by the west for many decades. Even today, most people in the west simply don't realize how the effects of that era are still felt strongly. Millions living under extreme poverty do not have the luxury of thinking about the environment when the price of that thought is not putting food on the table. Same can be said for the massive population growth. Birth control requires education, which requires prosperity, which Africa lacks almost completely. > If the Nile collapses Europe will see refugees streams of unimaginable magnitude. As someone in Western Europe who definitely believes this day will come, soon, I can only say we reap what we sow. The crimes of past European powers (think Belgian Congo for a single example) are slowly but surely catching up with the current generation and I think it's way too late to avoid the consequences.
- wbl 9y ago
  Mauritania already underwent the demographic transition. The Nile is no worse then the rivers of the US 50 years ago.
- UweSchmidt 9y ago
  "We reap what we sow" assumes an old testament concept of multi generational collective guilt and picturing your migration scenario penance, or divine(?) punishment sounds a little weird. Also, give Africa a little credit, literacy rates are up, maybe the problems can be tackled right over there? https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ourworldindata_literacy-rate-by-age-in-middle-east-and-northern-africa.png https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ourwor...

gumby 9y ago

A side point but these BBC articles are essentially unreadable, with huge pictures, weird scrolling that only works with a mouse (no space-for-next-page) etc. No text-only link. Could they get a warning similar to the [video] title amendment?

noja 9y ago
Space works for me. The readability view works for me.
pmontra 9y ago
I'm reading those stories on my Android phone with Firefox and they work very well. I'll try them on my laptop and remember to use the space bar to scroll (touchpad is more natural to me.)
- gerdesj 9y ago
  It is a bit weird but (to me) works well once I got used to it. I can see what they are trying to do and in some parts it is quite a clever form of presentation. On my laptop (Linux, Chromium) it works fine with a two finger scroll on the touchpad - ie "mouse". I also tried space bar and that does work but most of the "roller blinds" stop halfway until the next press. All the content was readable. To me, the mechanism does work but I'm not sure it actually improves the medium. I really am in two minds as to whether the effort is really worth it. The transitions and so on do have an impact but I'm not sure it lends itself to everyone's reading style. It feels more like a presentation and less like an article, and that could be the nagging feeling at the back of my mind. Maybe I need to read more of these things to get a proper perspective on this form of presentation.
lobo_tuerto 9y ago
Space works, arrow keys work, page up/page down keys also work. What are you talking about?
- gumby 9y ago
  I am on Safari under High Sierra. Space doesn't get the next block of text reliably. Safari's "reader" mode doesn't enable for these pages (for me). Plus, by design, there are small blocks of text and huge distracting pictures. Personally I vastly prefer a single block of text to snippets scattered here and there. It's like reading a comic book.

QAPereo 9y ago

A lot of this appears to be due to climate change, and it is happening up and down the Nile valley. Yes, and the ensuing political and social instability is driving mass migration; this is an accelerating process. What will happen when tens of millions of desperate Africans flee to Europe? The first, small, pulse of immigration is changing the political landscape of Europe! I really don’t know the answers to these questions, but holy shit they worry me!

Spooky23 9y ago
A: War and ethnic strife.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  Right, but now with modern armies, navies, and air forces against... what... just masses of humanity? There won't be a question of the outcome, it will be wholesale slaughter.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    See 1861-2017. We are very efficient at wholesale slaughter.
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      I need a hug from an optimist.
gurkendoktor 9y ago
Should questions like these already influence whether/where we buy property or whether to have children? It's hard to find anyone who's optimistic about Europe 30-50 years into the future.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  I honestly don’t know. I struggle with a somewhat depressive outlook, but horrifically reality and that outlook have been slowly converging. I hope that I’m wrong, just a cranky guy, because the alternatives are genuinely terrifying me.

aisofteng 9y ago

>"We’ve always treated the river badly, we’ve always assumed it was big enough,” said Youssef Abugroun, an engineer and part-time fisherman, whose regular evening sessions now net him around 10% of his catch a decade ago. “But maybe we’re just too many for that now.” And further down, mentions that the water is just "too filthy". Sounds like a large part of this is due to people shitting into the river they drink from. Makes it hard to have much sympathy.

chewz 9y ago
Oh no, people shit and threw thrash in a river their neighbors down the river drink from. Why should they worry?

kvee 9y ago

8 years ago on a felucca in the middle of the Nile in Luxor I saw a dead horse float by