Human Ecosystems: Introduction
16.3.1 THE HUMAN LANDSCAPE
The natural ecosystems outlined in Chapters 5-9, remember, relate to the environment, without modern people. The landscapes that we see around us today are the visible manifestations of human ecosystems: the concepts of 'wild landscapes' or 'natural landscapes' that imply some sort of landscape that has evolved without the aid of people is nonsense.
For the greater part of our history, people have lived in ecological balance with the environment. We lived as viable people exploiting the ecosystems of which we were part in a sustainable manner. Thus our ecosystems remained healthy and were able to continue to supply the resources that we required from them.
Now, viable landscapes - the landscapes of viable people - are so rare that they are often preserved as National Parks (an irony, because the very people who have created these landscapes are suddenly excluded from them!) such as the Lowland Equatorial Monsoon forests of the Oban Hills in Cross River State.
These viable landscapes contrast, often dramatically, with the landscapes of modern people such as are found in most parts of South Eastern Nigeria, such as Akwa Ibom and the Lowland Equatorial Monsoon parts of Rivers State next door. These landscapes generally represent an unsustainable use of ecosystems for two reasons:
- first, because population densities have increased faster than the ability of societies to evolve new ways of maintaining a viable relationship with the ecosystems of which they are part; and
- second, because exploitation of the ecosystems by individuals or interest groups for short term financial benefits with no consideration for the longer term economic cost (such as the oil industry).
Two important principles pertain to the present environmental condition and trends of these areas the market impact and the "tragedy of the commons."
16.3.2 THE MARKET IMPACT
Viable human ecosystems can support remarkably high human populations. This is because viable human communities will never cultivate more land, or hunt and gather more forest products than they need for their own immediate survival (or to trade with similar neighbouring communities, for things that they cannot produce, e.g. palm-oil for fish). However this relationship is upset where human communities become part of a trading community which stretches beyond their immediate locality especially when unnecessary consumer items (trade goods) are introduced. Thus land is cultivated beyond local needs, the limiting factor being the supply of labour, so that the criterion for cultivation is not local need but market demand. In the present times, in much of South Eastern Nigeria, demand for agricultural and forest products is effectively infinite, the limiting labour factor being overcome by importing excess labour from other areas. In the end, the only limiting factor becomes the resource itself, which is exploited to exhaustion because of what has been called the "tragedy of the commons."
16.3.3 "THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS"
This explains why, once conservation traditions have broken down (and viable communities have many such traditions, examples of which can be found, still, throughout Nigeria), resources are exploited to exhaustion very quickly where there is an infinite demand for them. The usual example is a forest in a country where there is an
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