A Journey, Part 9. Small Is Beautiful
June 23, 2013
The sea was like glass when dawn broke the following morning, with not even a ripple save those made by the ship. It was sweltering already and in the sticky heat we were surrounded by a dense mist or steam which when combined with the eerie silence of the sea, lent an atmosphere of ghostliness to our position. As the bow of the ship broke the perfection of the surface, the sea scrambled in our wake to repair the disturbance and it was almost as though nature was conspiring to ensure that we left no trace in the water or the air. A little after sunrise we reached the outer waters of the port and the engines stopped. For two hours we drifted silently on the oily sea, waiting for a pilot boat to lead us in. By mid-morning we had African soil under our feet once again.
And Eritrea is Africa. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, but to me there’s something uniquely light-hearted about African people. No matter where you are and despite hardship, smiles and laughter are never far away and easily bubble to the surface. From the stifling heat and humidity of Massawa, we took a bus to Asmara, 110km by road but less than half that distance as the crow flies. It’s a steep climb almost all the way, starting off barren and dry at the coast and becoming progressively more lush as you ascend the 2400m to the capital city. As if by order, the bus was as typically African as could be; filled to the brim with all manner of luggage and possessions, breastfeeding mothers and their doe-eyed babies, and live hens roaming the floor. On route we passed familiar acacias, flame trees, jacarandas, and bougainvilleas – further welcome reminders of where we were.
Asmara is a small and charming city. Wonderfully temperate as a result of its altitude, it has a distinctly Italian feel with many pizzerias and coffee bars. As halfway houses go, we couldn’t have picked a better city to wait for our possessions to arrive from Jeddah and with not much to see nearby, we made the most of the time relaxing and fraternizing with other travelers. But of all the memories I have of Eritrea as a country, the one that has endured is that of the near complete absence of litter and waste. I’m not sure whether this was a result of a wartime mentality from the recently ended thirty year war with Ethiopia, or whether it’s something particular to Eritrean people, but I was struck by how value was assigned to seemingly every item that would have been discarded elsewhere. In Asmara, I vividly recall visiting the Medeber – a kind of open air recycling market and a hive of activity where hundreds of workers turn all manner of would be waste, from tins to tires, into something useful. I did quick search on YouTube and it appears that it’s still going strong after all these years.
This year is the 40th anniversary of first printing of Small is Beautiful, E F Schumacher’s seminal study on economics as though people mattered, and I find myself asking what progress has been made since 1973 on dealing with the issues that he raised. The way I see it, the prognosis is not good. Even at a superficial level, if I compare the way we, as middle class South Africans lived in the 70s to today, consumption and waste has increased astronomically. We’ve moved from an era of paper bags, loose veggies and glass milk bottles to one in which we’re downing in a sea of packaging and it’s little wonder for instance that the Rausing family, founders of Tetrapak, count themselves near the top of the Forbes rich list. Some of us recycle, but others of us couldn’t be bothered or see it as something we’d like to do but simply can’t fit into our busy schedules. But even recycling is no panacea and we have to be careful not to lull ourselves into a false sense of greenness through relatively minor eco-friendly actions and without striving for more holistic and sustainable lifestyles.
It seems in general that the more affluent we become, the more we consume and the more we waste, if only as a result of us assigning less value to the waste we generate. I stumbled across the art of Chris Jordan a year or two ago and the impact it had on me was immense. He paints pictures not with paint, but with replicated images of the waste we generate and the things we consume, for example a painting of a forest using 139,000 cigarette butts, which is equal to the number discarded in the USA every 15 seconds, or 20,500 tuna, the amount fished from our oceans every 15 minutes. I find his works mind-numbing and for me they really bring home the complete unsustainability of the Western way. In the so-called developed world, we love to lay the blame for the world’s problems on overpopulation and the rampant breeding of the masses, but an honest appraisal shows the truth that our problems are actually rooted in the conspicuous consumption of the few. Well over half the world’s resources are consumed by a little over a tenth of the global population and these are not people living in Asia or in Africa. Despite the starkness of this statistic, we continue to believe in the gospel of Westernization and industrialization, with complete blindness to the fact that were the ninety percent to rise to parity with today’s privileged few, then our consumption and waste as a species would be more than quadrupled from what it is today. To think that we can persist in this is nothing but delusion, denial, and madness.
The problem is that it’s just too easy for us to turn a blind eye to the consequences of our consumption, and almost all business marketing and spin is aimed at making us do just that. But somehow, if we are to overcome the problems we’re facing, we all have to begin to be responsible and to consider our lives and actions, bit by bit, and start to count the cost of everything that we do; To think about the fuel burned when flying in those avos from Spain or the mushrooms from China. About the true cost of jetting around the country or the world. To remember that plastics are derived from fossil fuels and to make an effort to buy local and loose, rather than freighted and packaged. To make a point of squeezing our own OJ, cooking food for our pets, and planting and tending our veggie gardens, even if it seems at first that we can’t afford the time. We may all feel to a lesser or greater extent that we’re living in glass houses and are afraid to speak out, but if we are to shatter our illusions then we all need to start throwing stones…
It took just over two weeks for our car and possessions to reach Massawa from Jeddah and by the time they arrived and had cleared customs we were itching to get moving again. From Massawa, we climbed the mountain pass to Asmara one last time and set out the following morning for the border, travelling with a Swiss couple that we had met on the Red Sea ferry. We crossed into Ethiopia in mid-afternoon, hoping to get to Axum, but dusk soon approached and we were forced to find an isolated spot to free camp. On the morning of this day in 1997, we woke on our first morning in Ethiopia. A dozen or so onlookers must have surrounded us noiselessly in the dawn and they stood quietly, some ten or twenty yards off, surveying us as one might survey an alien spacecraft that happened to land in a field near one’s home. Although we tried to engage with them, they were shy and intimidated by our presence and preferred to keep their distance. Shortly after breakfast we were back on the road to Axum.