Rethinking environment:  Why Uganda’s diverse ecologies face extinction in absence of informed management and conservation

Rethinking environment:  Why Uganda’s diverse ecologies face extinction in absence of informed management and conservation

0

In Uganda, environmental conservation is done as a technical rather than an ecological and cultural undertaking. The unity of human communities and nature is continuously abused.

The reason for this conservation attitude and practice is traceable to our colonially designed education system, which has for decades held taught generations of Ugandan learners that we are apart from, not part of the environment.

In other words, we have been tuned to take the environment as something physical, which is there just for us to exploit to satisfy our needs and greed. Time has proved that this attitude towards the environment is the reason why we have done so poorly in the enterprise of environmental management and conservation, either as individuals or communities or government through time and space.

 There is need to rethink and change our individual and collective attitude towards the environment if we are to manage and conserve it effectively this century and beyond. The rethinking must start with accepting that we are not apart from the environment but part of it; that we are integral to it, not outside it. Then we must discard the thinking and attitude that the environment is just a physical thing. If we are integral to the environment then our historical, biological, psychological, ecological, social, cultural, moral, ethical and spiritual dimensions of our being, existence, survival, diverse belonging, identities and ecologies must be taken as essential dimensions in the enterprise of management and conservation of the environment.

Therefore, meaningful and effective environmental management and conservation is sensitive to the historical, biological, ecological, psychological, social, moral, ethical and spiritual unity between the physicality of the environment and the human populations or communities. Their diverse environmental histories, biologies, psychologies, ecologies, socialites, moralities, ethics and spiritualities must be factored into the environmental management and conservation environment for any success to be recorded.

Although in the universities there may be programmes focusing on environmental history, environmental biology, environmental psychology, environmental sociology, environmental morality, environmental ethics and environmental spirituality, they frequently contribute little to environmental management and conservation because they are taught in the disciplines with little effort to seek integration across disciplinary walls.

Besides, academics and academicisation are unreal human activities, that can have no meaning to the real enterprise of environmental management and conservation.

This means that our rethinking of the environment for effective environmental management and conservation must include revising the way we have been taking the environment to be: a physical being. We must also rethink the disciplinary science, which has dominated education at university campuses and discouraged integration of knowledge and its application to environmental management and conservation. We must allow interdisciplinary science, crossdisciplinary science, transdisciplinary science and extradisciplinary science, which are knowledge-integration loving, to coexist on university campuses.

When this happens, universities will produce graduates and professionals who will think critically, reason broadly, and be future ready enough to address environmental challenges in the various dimensions of the environment.

Since, from the reasoning above, humanity is an essential aspect of the total environment, we must accept that a meaningful and accommodative definition and structure of the environment needs to include Man, Homo sapiens, in his diverse dimensions. We must abandon the thinking that the environment is just physical and that Man is the villain that must be contained to manage and conserve the environment for posterity. Until we separated humanity from the environment through formal education, environment and humanity needed each other to preserve each other and in fact co-evolved.

In this relationship, the non-physical aspects of humanity were critical to effective environmental management and conservation. 

For decades I have taught that the environment is multidimensional with its dimensions also being multidimensional. I have taught that the environment is four dimensions in one, each dimension constituting one-quarter or 25 per cent of the environment. I have taught that the dimensions are not mutually exclusive, are mutually inclusive and dynamically interact with each other to make the environment not just a physical being but a dynamic living being with non-physical dimensions. Meaningful and effective environmental conservation must take this in account.

Otherwise, a lot of time, energy and money will be cowed into environmental management and conservation without ever achieving meaningful effective environmental management and conservation. The people in their diverse communities will be taken as the enemies of effective management and conservation enterprise and separated further from the physical environment.

Yet, like in the past, we need the people and their communities to be at the centre of effective environmental management and conservation. Environmental management and conservation may be reduced to political management of people and the environment, which never succeeds.

The real enemies of effective environmental management and conservation are:

  • The universities that continue to teach environment as if it is just the physical environment and have persisted in separating the sciences – the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences from each other, yet together they constitute one science;
  • The political elite who make laws and policies for environmental management and conservation that target only the physical environment;
  • The bureaucratic elites that conceive strategies for environmental management and conservation that target only the physical environment;
  • Foreign international financial institutions (IFIs) that finance projects and programmes that end up destroying the environment further; and environmental refugees that are incessantly flocking into Uganda and disrupting environments and ecologies ecological-biologically, socio-economically and socio-culturally in time and space.

Byarugaba and Oweyegha-Afunaduula (1995) perceived the environment as consisting of or organised in three dimensions: ecological-biological, socio-cultural, and socio-economic. However, without the temporal dimension, the environment is incomplete. We wrote that all environmental and development problems, issues, and challenges can be assigned to these dimensions separately and interconnectedly. All physical aspects of the environment are assigned to the ecological-biological dimension, and all the non-physical aspects belong to the other three dimensions.

Unfortunately, the nonphysical aspects of the environment are ignored, yet they are more dynamic and impact society far more badly and in diverse ways (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2022).

The rethinking of the environment, which started long ago before the new millennium must, therefore, recognise four dynamically interacting dimensions of the environment, none of which is independent of the others, and are, therefore, intricately interlinked. The four dimensions are:

  • The ecological-biological dimension
  • The Socio-economic dimension
  • The Socio-cultural dimension
  • The Time (or temporal) dimension

When we talk of sustainable environment and development, we should see this as the balance between these four dimensions of the environment in such a way than none of them constitutes more than one -quarter or 25 per cent of the environment at the expense of the others and, therefore, that there is harmonious interaction between them. Unfortunately, as we emphasise sustainable environment and development (SED), the physical environment is losing out to the socio-economic and socio-cultural dimensions, in which most environmental changes take place as the time dimension is incessantly abused.

In fact, few environmental managers are aware that time is an integral component of the environment. They are also unaware that the environment is more than the physical environment (the ecological-biological) and include the socio-economic dimension, the socio-cultural dimension and the socio-cultural dimension (which includes the sociopolitical perspective).

Let me address the dangerous changes taking place in the various dimensions of the environment.

Changes in the ecological-biological dimension

In the ecological-biological dimension, refugees, former or current, own factories, separately or in joint ventures with Asians (Indians and Chinese); large, extensive farms and ranches; plantations of sugarcane and oil palm; aquaculture farms; mining enterprises; shops and supermarkets; hostels and hotels; petrol stations; private schools, hospitals and dispensaries; trailers, buses, et cetera.

A lot of land-grabbing, even in designated national park and game reserve areas and in whole communities, is being carried out by them or people connected to and protected by them. This is how and why public forests are endangered. Some of the grabbed land contains water resources and sacred resources, which the deprived public can no longer access. Natural water falls have been destroyed, ostensibly to produce and supply hydroelectricity to Ugandans.

However, increasingly, electricity has become too expensive for the majority of Ugandans to afford (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2022). It is in this dimension that we are witnessing climate change become a serious issue locally, regionally and globally. Our distinct seasons (two rainy seasons and two dry seasons have disappeared. Rain now comes any time it wants. This year, 2024, we have received rain throughout the year; a phenomenon that used to be the case only for Mabira Rain Forest before it was badly destroyed power (military and political

The rulers have illegally mined in national parks and game reserves for limestone and other natural resources; felled trees in game reserves and forest reserves to establish plantations of oil palm and sugarcane; removed natural vegetation and replaced it with foreign species of Eucalyptus and Cypress; and erected huge dams in national parks or elsewhere along the Nile, thereby erasing endemic species of plants.

In all cases, the academics in charge of government institutions responsible for the management and conservation of wildlife and other natural areas have publicly approved the above-mentioned human activities by saying/writing that the actions will not seriously harm the environment or by looking on with naked eyes as the government destroys our wildlife and the total environment in the name of development. They have approved so-called industrial parks in swamps and other wetlands.

Meanwhile, polluting activities have been okayed, thereby leading to enhanced levels of pollutants in our atmosphere and the threat of climate change. We no longer have two rainy seasons and two dry seasons. Rainfall is tending to come throughout the year, like was the case in Mabira Rain Forest. All this suggests that, on the whole, the academics in charge of managing and conserving our wildlife and the total environment are suffering from imposed environmental ignorance (Oweyegha-Afunaduula 2023).

Changes in the socioeconomic dimension

Refugees and former refugees, who have no historical, ecological, biological, psychological, moral, ethical and spiritual attachment to Uganda’s diverse ecologies and environments,  now predominate and dominate in the socio-economic dimension of the environment, where they have resisted reinstating the minimum and fare wages for Ugandans. This is causing many Ugandans to lose interest in their country and to flee to foreign countries.

Instead of encouraging investment in whole communities, refugees and former refugees in power have chosen the path of money bonanzas for a few select individuals, many of whom emerge as connected to them either politically or ethnically. This may explain why the absolute majority of Ugandans are not experiencing development, transformation and progress in the 21st century. Rather than ensuring that communities experience improvement in their income bases and livelihoods, refugees and former refugees are presiding over a country in which communities of indigenous Ugandans are getting poorer and poorer with the passage of time (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2022). They are instead grabbing land from the local communities to enhance their economic dominance and their monetary benefits.

The have erected huge mansions, petrol stations, supermarkets, hotels and other islands of economic enhancement, mainly in swampy areas, for themselves at the expense of Ugandans. Corruption has provided most of the funds they are using, denying the citizens quality social development. They have even captured the crop of prosperity – coffee, which they want to directly manage. Besides, they have captured the mineral resources of the country, which they exploit for themselves at the exclusion of the indigenes. I have elsewhere stated that the agroecological farming systems of Uganda, which used to sustain our food security, economic security, health security and social security of the traditional societies through the extended family system are being destroyed by the refugees and former refugees. Our future environmental security is in jeopardy.

It is in the socioeconomic dimension that ideas such as Bonna Bagaggawale, Myooga, Operation Wealth Creation and Parish Development Model have been introduced, ostensibly to empower the people economically.

However, they manifest like environmental pollutants since they do not target whole communities but select individuals. Their individual development, transformation and progress are supposed to trickle down into the communities, but this never happens. The communities continue to sink into debilitating income poverty. Besides, the beneficiaries of those schemes manifest as environmental destroyers, since they have to assault the environment to make ends meet. Or many the ends never meet and they sink farther into income poverty.

For God and country

Tell report / By Oweyegha-Afunaduula / Environmental Historian and Conservationist Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA), Seeta, Mukono, Uganda.

About the Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA)

The CCTAA was innovated by Hyuha Mukwanason, Oweyegha-Afunaduula and Mahir Balunywa in 2019 to the rising decline in the capacity of graduates in Uganda and beyond to engage in critical thinking and reason coherently besides excellence in academics and academic production. The three scholars were convinced that after academic achievement the world outside the ivory tower needed graduates that can think critically and reason coherently towards making society and the environment better for human gratification. They reasoned between themselves and reached the conclusion that disciplinary education did not only narrow the thinking and reasoning of those exposed to it but restricted the opportunity to excel in critical thinking and reasoning, which are the ultimate aim of education. They were dismayed by the truism that the products of disciplinary education find it difficult to tick outside the boundaries of their disciplines; that when they provide solutions to problems that do not recognise the artificial boundaries between knowledges, their solutions become the new problems. They decided that the answer was a new and different medium of learning and innovating, which they characterised as “The Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis” (CCTAA).

Some Further Reading

Byarugaba, Foster and F.C. Oweyegha-Afunaduula (1995). Environmental Refugees in Africa: Some Suggestions for Future Actions. Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Makerere University, 1995. 63 pages. Goggle Book https://books.google.co.ug/books/about/Environmental_Impact_of_Refugees_in_Afri.html?id=RM8wPwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y Visited on 17 November 2024 at 10.19am EAT

Hilary Heuler (2013). Missing the Forest for the Trees. IN: Earth Island Journal.

 Oweyegha-Afunaduula (1994). Towards Environmentally Conscious Curriculum Design at Makerere University, Uganda. In Dialogue, Uganda, Kampala. Vol 1 (1): 30-33.

Oweyegha-Afunaduula (2011).  The Mabira Rain Forest: Water, Energy and Food Security in Uganda. Nexus, Nexus Blog, https://www.water-energy-food.org/ru/news/nexus-blog-the-mabira-rainforest-water-energy-and-food-security-in-uganda Visited on 17 November 2024 at 10.31 am EAT

Oweyegha-Afunaduula (2022). Uganda’s Refugee Economy and its Linkage to State Interests. Netizen Posts, June 23 2022. https://netizenposts.com/2022/06/23/prof-oweyegha-afunaduula-ugandas-refugee-economy-and-its-linkage-to-state-interests/ Visited on 19 November 2024 at 9.38 am EAT.

Oweyegha-Afunaduula (2022). How Refugees and Former Refugees are Destroying the Environment in Uganda. The Kampala Report,  November 30, 2022, https://www.thekampalareport.com/talk-back/2022113021674/how-refugees-and-former-refugees-are-destroying-the-environment-in-uganda.html Visited on 19 November 2024 at 9.06 am EAT.

Oweyegha-Afunaduula (2023). Environmental Governance for Diverse Ecologies in Uganda: Is It Possible? MUWADO, December 1 2023. https://muwado.com/environmental-governance-for-diverse-ecologies-in-uganda-is-it-possible/?v=2a0617accf8b Visited on 17 November 2024 at 9.38am EAT

Oweyegha-Afunaduula (2023). Integrating Conservation, Biodiversity and Sustainability: The Case Of Uganda. Nile Post, 19 October 2023. https://nilepost.co.ug/opinions/175193/integrating-conservation-biodiversity-and-sustainability-the-case-of-uganda Visited on 17 November 204 at 10:35 am EAT.

Oweyegha-Afunaduula (1923). Is it right to academicise the environment, its leadership and management? Uganda Radio Network, August 6 2023. https://ugandaradionetwork.com/s/is-it-right-to-academicize-the-environment-its-leadership-and-management/ Visited on 18 November 2024 at 17. 10 pm EAT

Oweyegha-Afunaduula (2024). Why well-being of people, society is ever plummeting in Uganda. Ultimate News, March 11, 2024. https://ultimatenews.co.ug/2024/03/oweyegha-afunaduula-why-well-being-of-people-society-is-ever-plummeting-in-uganda/ Visited on 19 November 2024

Oweyegha-Afunaduula (2024). Uniting Climate Justice, Cooperation, Peace and Diplomacy in Environmental Security Building. In: Daily Express Uganda November 4, 2024. https://dailyexpress.co.ug/2024/11/04/uniting-climate-justice-cooperation-peace-and-diplomacy-in-environmental-security-building/ Visited on 17 November 2024 at 10.48am EAT

About author

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *