Act of God or of Profit?

So often a natural disaster proves to be actually a man-made one. The Herald reports that much of the floods in Pakistan was less of an "act of god" but more an act of capitalism in the pursuit of profits. When Pakistan became independent from Britain in 1947, thick riverine forests lined the Indus on its thousand mile journey across the plains. These forests used to absorb the ferocity of the floodwaters. By 2005 Pakistan had lost 25% of the forest cover that existed in 1990. Experts predict at current rates of exploitation – more than 100 square miles of trees clear-felled annually – the remaining forests will all be gone by 2010. It means this year’s catastrophic floods will be repeated again and again
Trees felled by so-called illegal loggers – an infamous “timber mafia” that has representatives in the Pakistan Parliament and connections right to the top of government and the military bring this mafia billions of dollars yearly. Warnings given by all manner of experts had been ignored for decades that if the country’s timber mafia continued to strip the country’s forests at a faster rate than anywhere else in Asia then floods of Biblical proportions would be inevitable. They would not be acts of God. They would be man-made catastrophes. And so it came to pass.

This year’s monsoon lashing northern Pakistan with unusual intensity would historically have been absorbed by extensive forests, much like layers of blotting paper, allowing the rains to run off more sedately than in modern times. But this month the mud and water deluge cascaded off the tree-bare mountains and hills with exceptional force. Trees felled and stacked in the innumerable steep narrow valleys, gorges and ravines turned into instruments of destruction, smashing all in their wake. Rivers and dams turned black with timber. Relief workers said bridges, homes and people were destroyed and swept away by the hurtling and swirling logs before the waters spread on to the plains below, engulfing an area of more than 60,000 square miles, more than twice the land area of Scotland. 8000 schools were either destroyed or partially destroyed by the torrents.
The riverine forests were the first line of defence against the raging floods which have inundated the plains annually for thousands of years. They have been cut everywhere from Murree, a hill station on the Jhelum River before it fans out onto the plains, to lower Punjab, in the heart of the plains to upper Sindh, the province where the Indus flows into the Arabian Sea via a massive delta. Dawn, daily newspaper, said 80 million trees had been chopped down in the “protected” Khebrani and Rais Mureed Forest in the three years before the floods inundated the plains this month. In just 36 months the forest had shrunk from nearly 20 square miles to barely three square miles, causing serious damage to the environment. 900 miles to the north, in the Ayubia National Park – legally a government-protected forest – the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported, before the current flooding happened: “The forest is disappearing fast, threatening the lives and livelihoods of thousands of people.” 400,000 cubic feet of forest wood was illegally cut in that year, and one million cubic feet was extracted illegally in the next three years.

As a consequence of political interventions, the corruption of forest officials and the nexus between land grabbers and the timber mafia over the last 25 years, the forests of Sindh are on the verge of extinction. They have been ruthlessly exploited by the law enforcement agencies, politicians and bureaucrats for their own vested interests. Policemen took bribes from the timber mafia in return for allowing them to fell trees. The Pakistan government’s much trumpeted reforestation strategy exists only on paper, while on the ground you will find ruthless deforestation. Forestry officers are involved in unauthorised wood-cutting and issuing of unauthorised passes for the transportation of forest wood and disposal of government machinery. The government allowed the illegal timber to be exported to other provinces without a fine, which encouraged the timber mafia to cut down ever more trees knowing it had political clout. The government did begin to fine fellings, but the fine was so small that it encouraged the timber mafia instead of discouraging them.
Ghulam Hussain Khoso, a cattle herder within the Khebrani and Rais Mureed Forest, said: “I do not trust that the forest department will ever improve forest conditions. The dacoits [bandits] were better custodians of the forest than the forest department itself. The thick forests served as a hideout for the dacoits: therefore they protected them and did not allow anyone to destroy them.”

“The claims and slogans of officialdom are completely divorced from reality,” said the Dawn newspaper editorial. “The government is promoting ‘Green Pakistan’ even as trees continue to be slaughtered across the country in the name of development. The timber mafia is denuding the country’s woodlands. The situation is desperate and is deteriorating by the day.”

John Muir, the great Scottish naturalist, once said: “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.”
SOYMB would also add , "Nor from rapacious capitalists"