i had lunch at a conference with an engineer from camaroon. in our brief conversation i learned that he is genuinely distraught over the oil situation in his homeland…the rest of the world just has no idea how bad it is he told me…the oil gets sold and the money disapears..while people are dislocated from home and sustainance…he then invited me..urged me even to bring my family to stay with his and see what is good about his country before it is all spoiled. such passion for the topic he had. i love the much maligned e-mail by the way..a wealth of connections.

i am reminded of atlantic city in our own back yard..such promises of new schools and rising property values…the temptation to be an economic buccaneer is great in our society..greed ain’t got all the answers as some economists would have it.

“An Afternoon in the Bush”

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Having worked with shit most of his life, Nathan knew his business. We had walked no more than half a kilometer when he found a turd that he identified by smell as lion. But we were safe because it was old and dry. “You see! No flies on it—the lion is long gone.”

Shortly thereafter, we stepped into a clearing swarming with flies. After sniffing the air and kind of chewing on it, like professional nose judging perfumes, Nathan announced, “Hyena shitting ground.” He quickly found dozens of elongated turds covered with flies. “At least two days old,” he said, “but not yet five.”

“How can you tell? I asked.

“When hyena shit is very fresh, it is very sticky. When the fly drops her eggs, the shit traps them the easy. But after five days it dries up and is no good for the flies. This shit is still a little sticky”

A mile further on, Father Pumpkin stepped in the middle of an enormous, glistening, pillow-shaped, pile of fresh dung.

“Well, look at this,” said Nathan, as Father Pumpkin delicately removed his foot from the viscous heap. “Very, fresh gorilla shit. Could be less than ten minutes old,” he said, looking about fearfully.

We all froze, and presently the air filled with a cloying, pungent fragrance, a musky jasmine. In a sun shaft just ahead, an enormous hairy hand reached up in slow motion to pluck a green shoot from a vine. The hand’s owner, a large silverback, materialized from the shadows. He lunged several yards in our direction and then rose up on his legs to thump his breast. The jasmine scent grew stronger, more fetid.

“Ugly beast,” Father Maxwell whispered.

Father Pumpkin slowly took out his Glock, but suddenly, from behind, a deafening explosion nearly shook us off our feet. With the top of his head neatly blown away, the silverback slumped to the ground.

All at once, four Gandans clambered out from the bush. One carried a large shotgun. Father Pumpkin put away the Glock. “If I’m not mistaken, this was the work of a nine-ball Chevrotine cartridge,” he said.

“What’s a Chevrotine cartridge?” I asked.

“Designed exclusively for dropping gorillas,” he said. “Made only by a wily old French firm in Kinshasa.”

The Gandan with the shotgun smiled as he walked by. “Chevrotine,” he said. “Chevrotine, very good.”

Without another word, they set about dressing the carcass. With a short blade, they slit his jugular and propped him up to drain the blood. Then they cut along the centerline of the belly from the neck to the base of the tail, first through the hide, then the belly muscle, being careful to avoid puncturing the intestines. To remove the gut without soiling the meat, they carefully cut a hole around the anus and pulled the whole mass out in one piece. In less than half an hour, the once proud beast was reduced to a dozen bloody portions that were summarily packed away in black plastic bags.

“I’m in such a quandary,” said Father Maxwell. “God forgive me, but it warms my heart to know that one more of these ugly beasts who stole my forest will make no more of his kind.”

Just then, an argument broke out among the Gandans, each of whom coveted the penis, which, contrary to expectation, looked like the end of a fat man’s pinky with the nail removed—little more than an inch in length.

“From an evolutionary perspective, the size of the vagina is the regulating factor for penis size,” explained Father Pumpkin. “And, of course, the size of the vagina is a function of the circumference of the offspring’s head.”

“In other words, your gorilla is a rather small brained beast,” said Father Maxwell.

“Chinese merchants in Kampala pay up to five hundred Euros if it is stretched out properly for drying. Otherwise it shrinks up,” said Nathan.

“You could easily get twice that in Hong Kong,” said Father Pumpkin.

Finally, the man with the shotgun forcibly took possession of the prized member and the Gandans slipped away into the bush with their booty.

After a short lunch—sandwiches made with a pickled meat that Father Pumpkin refused to identify, causing Father Maxwell to giggle—we began a steep descent into a river valley. Devastated by abandoned surface mines and piles of spoil, the valley floor resembled a tropical World War I battleground. The river had apparently dried up for moved elsewhere.

“Alas,” said Father Maxwell, “for a time this was truly the land of milk and honey. Hundreds of men were at work here and dozens of dealers were busy buying up the coltan for export. Even many Twa found work, because the money was so good. But when money got too good, and the war started in Congo, the Belgians put an end to it.”

“To protect the environment?” I asked.

“No, no, no,” said Father Pumpkin. “The environment is such a confusing abstraction; westerners need concrete issues—for example, the excessive quantities of gorilla meat found in the miner’s stew.

“Too much money in the pockets of the Twa miners, if you ask me,” said Father Maxwell, “the Belgians always hated the Twa.”

“Need I point out,” said Father Pumpkin, “that the Twa generally have no pockets to put money into.”

But what is this coltan?” I asked.

“Typical American question,” said Father Maxwell.

“Refined coltan yields metallic tantalum,” said Father Pumpkin, “It’s both heat-resistant and has unique electrical properties. Most of your high-tech gizmos, particularly the cell phone, depend on tantalum-based capacitors to control circuit flow.”

“Don’t believe in cell phones, myself,” I said. “The absence of solitude would drive me mad.”

“You might be onto something there,” said Father Maxwell. “I’ve never been able to understand why the young people in America haven’t taken to the streets, particularly after the last election. Too busy talking on the phone, you think?”

“Posh,” said Father Pumpkin. “I was in America once during an election and I couldn’t figure it out. The only issue seemed to be which candidate could spend the most money. And then afterwards they go around and ask the voters what the issues were.”

“It’s like reading tea leaves,” I said. “The young folks have grown up with it and know it’s a hoax.”

“So they prefer to sit around with some coltan-bearing device stuck in their ears,” said Father Maxwell.

Some craters were water-filled and overgrown with thick green algae, while others were dry. Surrounding each was a pile of spoil. In one especially deep pit, we came upon a young fighter from the Lord’s Resistance Army. Barefoot and dressed in rags, he was no more a young teenager surrounded by empty palm wine bottles. He began shouting when he saw us.

“What’s his problem?” I asked.

“He’s drunk,” said Nathan. “Someone stole his Nikes and his commander threw him in the pit.”

“Why would he do that?” I asked.

“Without his shoes, he was no longer invisible,” said Nathan.”

Where I found those stats

One possibility for this show would be to explore the effects of malaria, we hear about Aids in the news but not malaria.

There are at least 300 million acute cases of malaria each year globally, resulting in more than a million deaths. Around 90% of these deaths occur in Africa, mostly in young children. Malaria is Africa’s leading cause of under-five mortality (20%) and constitutes 10% of the continent’s overall disease burden. It accounts for 40% of public health expenditure, 30-50% of inpatient admissions, and up to 50% of outpatient visits in areas with high malaria transmission.

In eleven years around the turn of the century, King Leopold of Belgium used administrative massacres to reduce the population of the Congo from an estimated 20-40 Million to roughly 8 Million.

King Leopold’s brutality can never be forgotten when discussing the Congo.

I don’t think these things have much significant positive impact, and in practice they may make things worse by giving consumers the false iconfidence that they are making a bigger difference than they are.

So, some tiny group of social activists, Kumbayaa-singing church-basement Unitarians, tree-hugging liberals etc, make a point of buying “fair-traded” coffee or products made by companies that demonstrate their social consciousness by signing a pledge and putting a picture of some charismatic megafauna on their package. Meanwhile the Walmarts and cellphone manufacturers and all those vast factories owned by the PLA in the PRC consume more stuff in a day than the “think global act local” types consume in a year.

This world is run by money – and I’m not talking about plutocrats at the top – I’m talking about the daily decisions made by BILLIONS of consumers around the planet with the money in their pockets and credit cards. If you want to change the world you have to give them economic and rational incentives to make decisions that have a positive impact. On a worldwide basis it is an atypical consumer who will pay more money or accept a compromised product just for philosophical reasons.

If you can’t think of a way to do that, then you have to use the heavy, clumsy hand of governments, but N.B. that sometimes this works as in the case of ozone depleting chemicals, where recent studies show that we’ve finally started to close the ozone holes thanks to aggressive enforcement.