The heat is rising, the weathermen are lying... Quick, somebody call Sweden

I am on the side of journalism, of course, but there is one branch in particular that sometimes makes me wonder about its accuracy. The weather reporters have always struck me as a little bit... hinky.

Checking the temperature for Dar on a daily basis has yielded the same suspiciously “tolerable” 32 degrees centigrade for the past several days. This does not feel accurate at all; is there some kind of conspiracy at play to sell the city as more life-supporting during the summer months than it truly is? Could this be part of a sinister plot to promote... climate change denial?

This will go down as the year when the climate change community officially panicked. They believe there is some kind of threshold of irreversible change that we as humans have wrought that has them throwing their hands in the air and predicting some seriously adverse effects in the coming decades.

Two issues bother me about this whole situation. First, is my fear that Africa and her people will get the bottom end of this climate change stick. Poverty has a way of magnifying the effects of problems in a most injurious way.

Footage from the continent of people fleeing their homes, making perilous crossings whether it be southwards towards the lure of the South African economy or northwest towards an increasingly hostile Europe is a testament to our desperation.

That Africa isn’t poor per se always gets raised as a point: Valid, but perhaps only on papers printed out for the delectations of speculators in minerals, land and other natural resources? We struggle to translate this into real prosperity for ourselves and so here we are, perpetually vulnerable. Any kind of swing in the general temperature of the world, therefore, must be of particular concern to us.

The second worry is the climate change denial trend, ranging from generally being ignorant about it through to active hostility. Take the issue of energy, for example: So it is not in the interest of the fossil fuel companies to embrace the whole green movement thing directly but to actively try to undermine the whole shebang? That’s just mean.

At a more local level, our energy consumption habits could stand to change a little. I will be the first to admit that food cooked on charcoal has a beautiful smoky register that cannot be replicated by more modern fuels. But at what cost to the environment? Realistically speaking, there is not much reason left for most of us urban dwellers to continue the practice other than sheer, stubborn habit.

And what about our development discourse? A pet peeve of mine as a Tanzanian has been the way in which we treat our natural environment as a commodity to be sold rather than as a life-affirming and sustaining necessity.

I blame the tourism industry. Yes, yes, animals and the mountains and the game parks et cetera are all terribly important to the economy because high-end low-traffic tourism is a sweet earner of the almighty dollar. But what about beyond that?

Mazingira (the Kiswahili word for environment) is amazingly enough perhaps even less welcome than the word “feminism” in our public discourse. As Tanzania strives to become a “country of factories”— yes, that sentence is just as dubious in Kiswahili — will it factor in the environment as a primary consideration? Or is that something too wishy-washy, best leave your grandchildren to deal with the fallout from whatever decisions you make today?

I am not a pessimist. Just this year, Sweden managed to run out of garbage to recycle because that’s how efficient they are at recycling garbage. In other words, technology. Technology is what has allowed us to terraform this planet to this extent, it has helped humans infest every corner of the globe... oh, wait, nope. There is still the majority of it: The ocean. So much for hubris.

Anyway, so technology is how we got ourselves into both the glorious abundances of modernity and the horrible side-effects it has had on the environment and just about every other living thing.

It’s why I write this column in the comfort of air-conditioning; sometimes, you have to embrace the contradiction. Now if only we could air-condition an entire planet... Sweden, got any suggestions?

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]