Ethiopia’s Church Forests Are a Last Refuge For Dwindling Biodiversity
Ecologists are working with the nation’s Tewahedo churches to preserve these pockets of lush, wild habitat.
If you see a forest in Ethiopia, you know there is very likely to be a church in the middle, says Alemayehu Wassie.
Wassie, a forest ecologist, has spent the past decade on a mission: preserving, documenting and protecting the unique biodiversity in pockets of forest that surround Ethiopia’s orthodox churches. These small but fertile oases — which number around 35,000 and are dotted across the country — are some of the last remaining scraps of the tall, lush natural forests that once covered Ethiopia, and which, along with their unique biodiversity, have all but disappeared.
Much of the nation’s forestland has been sacrificed to agriculture to feed the country’s mushrooming population — at more than 100 million, it is the world’s 12th largest. Deforestation was particularly encouraged during the country’s period of communism, in 1974–91, when the government nationalized the land, including the large estates of the church, and distributed it to people who converted swathes to farmland. Just 5% of the country is now covered in forest, down from 45% in the early twentieth century.
In the past few years, small international research programmes have started to document the depleted biodiversity. Wassie, who has long championed conservation work in the northern highlands of the country where he grew up, has forged an unusual collaboration with the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church to try to save the forests.
The project is a work in progress, says Wassie. But now, local residents, along with their priests, are helping to slow attrition of their church forests.
The church, to which more than half of Ethiopians belong, views the natural forest as a symbol of heaven on Earth, where every creature is a gift from God and needs its habitat.
“It’s a remote part of the world, where the natural environment has become part of the spiritual environment,” says Christof Mauch, director of the Rachel Carsen Center for Environment and Society at the University of Munich, Germany. “It is culturally, as well as scientifically, important to save these pockets of forests,” he says.
Oases of biodiversity
About 80% of Ethiopia’s people live in rural areas and rely on subsistence farming.
Growing more food has been necessary, says Wassie — Ethiopia has had many famines. “But productivity could have been increased by using technologies rather than expanding farmland,” he says. Reforestation efforts in Ethiopia have planted monocultures of eucalyptus, which need much more water than indigenous trees.
Forest biodiversity is important for agriculture because many of the birds and insects that populate the church woods pollinate crops and control pests, says Wassie. “We don’t know how much diversity has been lost,” he says. “But it appears there is a very significant amount left — more than we expected.”
The church forests — cooler and more humid than those in the lowlands — can range from 3 to 300 hectares and host evergreen trees, shrubs and flowering plants such as Justicia and Diospyros. They also sequester carbon, conserve water, reduce soil erosion and provide natural medicine.
For priests and local populations, they provide shelter for buildings, space for contemplation and prayer, and burial areas.
Local Involvement
Nearly 1,500 of the forests are in the South Gonder region, where Wassie was born in 1971.
He says his primary education in the local religious school ingrained in him a deep and abiding affinity for the church. But his love of nature and science led him to an academic career in forest ecology. He studied in Europe, and is now an adjunct professor at the Bahir Dar University in South Gonder, some 300 kilometres north of Addis Ababa.
When Wassie first started surveying the forests in the early 2000s — counting individual species and saplings — priests didn’t understand why he was doing his work, says Wassie. “It appeared to them to have no advantage to the church or the community.”
By the time he had finished his PhD thesis in 2007, at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, he had documented vegetation diversity in 28 church forests in South Gonder.
But he was feeling gloomy about his future — finding funding or local collaboration was proving difficult. Then, that year at a meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Morelia, Mexico, he met Meg Lowman, a forest ecologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, who was moved by his despair. They became “lifelong conservation soulmates”, she says, and began working together to raise money and to win the trust of the church’s priests.
With modest grants from the National Geographic Society in Washington DC, Wassie and Lowman began a series of workshops to educate priests about their conservation work and its importance. They took slide projectors to villages and showed them Google Earth’s bird’s-eye views of their churches. The dots of green scattered across arid plains gave the priests a perspective shift, says Lowman, as they saw the vastness of the forest loss contrasted with the treasure they had helped to preserve.
“The priests gave us limited permission to enter the forests and take samples,” says Wassie.
The pair have since organized various research activities to catalogue species of birds and insects in the forests, inviting international experts to help in identification.
Conservation Walls
Wassie has now surveyed the vegetation in more than 40 church forests.
Another part of the project involves encouraging church communities to build protective stone walls around their woods to save them from damage. Despite taboos about disrupting the forests, local people sometimes allow their animals to enter and graze on the undergrowth and saplings, or hunt for food there themselves. They often gather wood from the forests’ edges and allow their ploughs to damage vegetation.
Lowman and Wassie offer cash donations to churches that manage to build protection — 15 or so churches have now constructed walls. And some priests have become stewards of their forests and encouraged local people to help build conservation walls. Many now volunteer time to remove stones from fields for construction, which is also good for crop yields.
Some churches are also trying to extend their forests to invigorate their communities , says Wassie — a promising indicator for his conservation ambitions.
‘CIA-backed’ Mercenaries Spread HIV in S. Africa, ex-Member Claims
A Sundance documentary ostensibly about the 1961 plane crash which killed then UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold, contains explosive claims of a conspiracy to spread HIV among South Africa’s black population.
Directed by controversial Danish journalist, filmmaker, and provocateur Mads Brügger, ‘Cold Case Hammarskjold,’ debuted Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival.
It details an investigation into the largely unsolved death of Swedish diplomat and former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, whose DC-6 plane crashed near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (modern Zambia). Initial investigations identified the cause as pilot error or mere mechanical fault, though doubts have persisted in the 50+ years since the crash.
Throughout the course of the new documentary, Brügger and his team investigate a white militia, the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR). According to documents the filmmakers uncovered, the group operated with support from the CIA and British Intelligence and orchestrated the 1961 plane crash which killed Hammarskjold. The documentarians eventually encounter and interview a man named Alexander Jones who is allegedly a former member of the group.
Jones, who is not related to Alex Jones of InfoWars, claims the mercenary group used phony vaccinations to spread HIV with a view to wiping out the black population of South Africa, in addition to carrying out the Hammarskjold assassination.
“We were at war,” Jones says, as cited by The New York Times. “Black people in South Africa were the enemy.”
However, medical experts have already dismissed Jones’ claims as medically dubious and unscientific in the extreme.
“The probability that they were able to do this is close to zero,” said Dr. Salim S Abdool Karim, the director of Caprisa, an AIDS research center in South Africa, citing the immense resources that would be required to conduct such a far-fetched attempt at genocide.
Notwithstanding the technological limitations of the 1990s, including facilities to rival that of the Centers for disease control and prevention in the US in addition to millions of dollars in funding, HIV is extraordinarily difficult to isolate, transport and grow in a laboratory environment, let alone distribute en masse in a clandestine operation, Dr Abdool explains.
However, Jones claims he visited a research facility in the 1990s that was used for “for sinister experimentation” and that he was certain its intent was“to eradicate black people.”
Many have criticized the filmmakers for helping to sow distrust of the medical establishment in a country that already has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world while reviving dangerous conspiracy theories that have persisted since the Cold War.
The filmmaker, who has previously been described as a ‘fabulist’ and ‘provocateur’, according to the Hollywood Reporter, admits he has been unable to corroborate Jones’ ever-evolving story; As the documentary makers continued to question Jones, his accounts became more and more dubious as he professed firsthand knowledge of people that had seemingly been brought to his attention by the documentarians themselves.
Ethiopia Bans Street Begging By Syrians In Growing Numbers
Ethiopia is banning street begging by Syrian nationals who have startled people by showing up in growing numbers in recent months in major cities around hotels and mosques.
“We are now coordinating our security services to effectively ban Syrian citizens from begging. We have tolerated them for some time but we have now decided to ban the illegal practice. … They are becoming a burden,” the deputy head of Ethiopia’s immigration office told The Associated Press on Friday.
Some 560 Syrians entered between mid-August and mid-December and the majority leave when their tourist visas expire, said the deputy, Yemane Gebremeskel. While street begging is not illegal in Ethiopia – there is a large presence of children – the act of entering the country as a tourist and begging is, he said.
Nearly 120 other Syrians have applied for refugee status in the East African nation that hosts one of the world’s largest refugee populations, and they were provided with support equaling around $73.
“We gave them what we could afford but they are still begging,” Yemane said.
Many Ethiopians were baffled when the Syrians began appearing on the streets of the capital, Addis Ababa, displaying signs written in the local Amharic language appealing for help.
One Syrian told the AP his family fled the war at home and has moved from place to place as life in other countries became too expensive.
Khalid Youssef said he, his wife and three children first sought refuge in Lebanon then a year ago moved to Sudan, which neighbors Ethiopia, with the help of the United Nations. They finally moved to Ethiopia.
“We don’t have any money,” he said. “Besides, there was no work in Sudan even though people were generous. Here, people are even more generous and they help us a lot.”
To survive, he said, the family asks for charity during the day. “At night we go to sleep at the mosque.”
The U.N. refugee agency told the AP in December it was supporting Ethiopia’s government in caring for close to 80 “Syrian refugees and asylum seekers” whom it said started arriving in the country in 2014.
After several interviews the Syrians on the streets, the agency “was able to establish that these were new arrivals,” it said. Over the previous month three Syrian families composed of 20 people had applied for asylum, it added.
Ethiopia currently hosts 900,000 refugees mainly from neighboring Somalia, South Sudan, Eritrea and Sudan. Earlier this month the U.N. praised the government for a new law that will allow refugees to obtain work permits, go to primary schools, open bank accounts and more.
Ethiopia’s refugee law is now “one of the most progressive refugee policies in Africa,” the agency said.
