Just burn it

The fire approaching our house

“Don’t worry,” is what I believe the guard was telling me in Swahili, “we won’t let it get past here.” I walked out of my house this morning to find a part of our yard on fire, and land in front of our house singed from a fire earlier this morning. “Why are they burning the bushes?,” I asked my roommate. “My gut tells me that whatever reason they give you, they are really doing it because of the snakes. I heard them talking about them this morning.”

Taking initiative is good, I wanted to tell the guards, but destroying habitat is bad. Fewer snakes near houses in a part of the world where there are about 197 known species, of which 47 are believed to be toxic to humans, sounds objectively like a good idea. But not all snakes are bad, and in fact many species, including some of the poisonous ones (and a good conservationist would say all of them) are quite good for a variety of ecosystems, including backyards. I know one couple who say they breathe easy when they have a cobra in their yard because cobras are territorial and help to keep the really scary snakes – like puff adders and black mambas – at bay.

But how can I justify letting our guards burn the land around our house – habitat for an endemic species – when at the very same time I am at the office working to help turn a charred landscape back into habitat for a different species? Who’s to say that the species I am trying to help is any better than the snakes around my house?

These are questions I pondered this morning as my yard continued to go up in smoke. The problem, which I am now complicity contributing to, is that burning seems to be the solution to too many challenges here. It is used to dispose of garbage – a fact I bemoan when walking through clouds of burning plastic on my way home from work at night. It is also used to eliminate tall grasses around people’s homes, to help keep bandits from sneaking-up on them; to generate new grass for cattle to graze, as the grasses here tend to store enough energy to regenerate once every dry season if burned; and to clear land for cultivation. Whether someone is getting rid of something or making room for something else, it seems that too often the mantra here is: just burn it.

I was once enjoying a sunset with friends when a blaze began on an adjacent hill and spread quickly. As we wondered how far it would reach and how fast, I asked “why do people here build fires that seem designed to spread out of control? Why isn’t just burning their land enough?” The female in the group rolled her eyes and said, “They’re trying to look macho.” And if the camping trips I have taken with my friends in DC are illustrative of the male mentality here, we are lucky there aren’t garbage bags full of propane and twenty-something Tunisians in Kigoma.

Another friend added that clearing land by burning is technically illegal now, so when people burn their field they also tend to burn their neighbor’s for good measure. That way if the police come to investigate, they can say “don’t look at me – Achmed started it. Just look at his land!”

This concerns me because so much of the landscape we are trying to conserve is land that was once fertile forests and is now barren and scarred from fires. To clear land for cultivation, people usually set fires to remove brush, grass and snakes. But too often those fires are not controlled, and in the dry season they can spread and destroy ecosystems tens of kilometers away from the region that will be cultivated. I have seen huge hillsides lining the lake that show no signs of cultivation, but which are totally destroyed from the fires that regularly sweep through the area.

And because the top soils are thin on the hillsides, agriculture can usually only be sustained for a handful of years before the top soil washes into the rivers and settles at the bottom of Lake Tanganyika. And when that happens, the families must move their crops to an adjacent slope, where first they have to clear the land, and the cycle continues.

Luckily the fire at our house is a small one, and is being monitored and beaten with a mango branch whenever it wanders beyond the “snake zone” (and if that is not the case, you can imagine what I will be writing about on Monday). But I have to wonder, if every household were to burn their shrubs, and communities continued to burn so much of their crop land, where would all the snakes live? Suddenly the couch at the Kigoma airport doesn't seem like such an unsuitable habitat after all.

The charred ground below our mango tree