UBL and the African elephant

July 10th, 2011 by Charles Cameron

[ by Charles Cameron — UBL, global warming, elephants, and Al-Shabaab ]

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“Natives with ivory tusks, Dar Es Salaam, Tanganyika” ca 1900, LOC

I’d like to quietly propose a few dots or data points…

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Alex Shoumatoff has a fine article titled “Agony and Ivory”, in Vanity Fair:

The riverbank is littered with elephant dung. Andrea kicks apart one of the boluses, and it is full of big, hard-shelled seeds — Pandanus, Drypetes, and Gambeya. A new study has found that forest elephants are essential to central Africa’s forests for tree-seed dispersal. They can carry heavy seeds like these (which wouldn’t get very far on their own) in their gut for 50 miles before voiding them. Another study measures the rapid, prodigious growth of the forest trees and concludes that central Africa is the second-most-important equatorial sink for atmospheric carbon after the Amazon, so elephants are important for controlling global warming, on top of everything else.

Here is Shaykh Usama bin Laden, in his radio message “The Way to Save the Earth” from As-Sahab Media:

This is a message to the whole world about those who cause climate change and its dangers — intentionally or unintentionally — and what we must do. Talk of climate change isn’t extravagant speculation: it is a tangible fact which is not diminished by its being muddled by some greedy heads of major corporations. The effects of global warming have spread to all continents of the world. Drought, desertification and sands are advancing on one front, while on another front, torrential floods and huge storms the likes of which only used to be seen once every few decades now reoccur every few years.

From UBL’s perspective, this is clearly a moral issue:

First, the corruption of the climate stems from the corruption of hearts and deeds, and there is a close relationship between the two types of corruption.

And here’s Shoumatoff again, on the situation in Kenya:

A few weeks ago, two poachers were killed and a ranger was wounded in a firefight in Meru National Park. Al-Shabaab, the Islamist youth militia which is in league with al-Qaeda and controls most of Somalia, has been coming over the border and killing elephants in Arawale National Reserve. Ivory, like the blood diamonds of other African conflicts, is funding many rebel groups in Africa, and Kenya, K.W.S. director Julius Kipng’etich told me, “is in the unenviable position of sharing over 1,700 kilometers of border with three countries with civil wars that are awash with firearms: Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan.” Nothing less than a full-scale military operation is going to stop the poaching in the north.

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Now, as EM Forster suggested, Only connect!

Posted in africa, al qaida, Charles Cameron, complexity | 3 comments

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  1. onparkstreet:

    July 12th, 2011 at 4:11 am

    "Only connect" and EM Forster! A favorite, Charles. I always loved the Merchant-Ivory films. I don’t care that others make fun.
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    Okay. I’ll play.
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    1. Green is hip. Green is cool. The Green movement is progressive, transgressive, regressive, anarchic, moral and moralizing.
    2. Al Shabaab in Africa.
    3. The internet and immigrant enclaves and jails and bored Western youths looking for adventure. For meaning. For chaos. "To make the world burn." To make the world new. Revolution.
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    I vote for a clever ploy to reel in sympathetic recruits. Cast a wide net at first, then see who "sticks".
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    The threat comes from Al Shabaab, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) – all of whom are capable and have desires to strike at US interests both globally and domestically. Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame represents the link between Al Shabaab and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which makes him potentially the most important Al Qaeda member captured outside Pakistan or Afghanistan since 9/11. If similar links between these organizations and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) exist, we are in serious trouble… and those links probably exist.

    Think about the map. Right now Libya is a dumpster fire with no local functioning security system, which means it represents a tremendous opportunity for organizations linked to Al Qaeda to move and operate freely around the current military contest for political control. Libya has all the makings of a prolonged, uncontrolled tribal war similar to Somalia where groups are likely to link up with elements of Al Qaeda like AQAP and AQIM for support towards taking political control once Gaddafi is removed.

    Folks also better start paying attention to the news on the western side of Africa, because another front is starting to open up in Africa (see here, here, and here) – and I’m not talking about Independence day in Sudan this Saturday – which is where the UN is focused.
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    http://www.informationdissemination.net/2011/07/stratcom-opportunity-of-ahmed.html
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    And the Pakistani Navy and Al Q and Karach-Mumbai crime traffickers and ships that sail everywhere.
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    Greenpeace like ships.
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    Oh, I don’t know. I’m totally playing and making things up. I have no idea what I am doing, really.
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    – Madhu

  2. Charles Cameron:

    July 12th, 2011 at 8:50 am

    Thanks for the pointer to Galrahn’s piece, Madhu.
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    It looks like it may be time to re-read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness…

  3. Charles Cameron:

    July 12th, 2011 at 7:20 pm

    I posted this in the comments section at ChicagoBoyz, but wanted to raise these issues here, too:

    If you drop these two “pebbles” — the slaughter of elephants (supported by or supporting al-Shabaab) for their ivory, and bin Laden’s protestation on moral grounds against the extermination of animal populations — into the pond of thought, and watch their ripples intersect, all sorts of questions emerge.  
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    Was bin Laden pulling a hypocritical line to connect with ecologically minded others who might be dissatisfied with the environmental “state of play” — or was he sincere in siding with the “greens” — and whether or not he was sincere, does Islam in fact have lines of consideration relating to the deaths of entire species, comparable to its condemnation of the death of one innocent human as equivalent to the extinction of a world?  
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    Is al-Shabaab ignorant of — or simply heedless of — such moral considerations as they apply to the rapidly diminishing populations of African elephants — and if ignorant, could some of their co-religionist perhaps use moral suasion to deter them? Is there perhaps a plausible argument in Islamic theology that the butchery of elephants may be a necessary evil on the way to a greater good? What would hadith and qiyas have to say about that?  
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    Ah, but I am seeing this in terms of counterterrorism and religious studies, what of the perspective of ecologists — and of, gasp, the elephants themselves?  
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    What if, as William O. Douglas proposed, trees — and by extension, elephants — should have standing?  
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    I am juxtaposing the two — elephant slaughter and UBL’s ecological concern — because I want go further than simply raising the question of what to do about the elephants, and explore a whole congeries of related questions.

    What say you all?