Flight over Africa: 100,000 pictures and a dire warning

We think there is an environmental problem in the US? Think again. During the last 50,000 years, humans have done significant damage to the environment. One has to wonder at what point will we have an unsustainable ecosystem? I suspect it's rather sooner than later. Fish populations in the Oceans are down precipitously. The world is so preoccupied with energy, it is ignoring sustainable food supplies. The US continues to leech trace elements out of our soils by chemical farming. Yields will likely at some point fall. And we are looking for ways to turn flora into energy while people are starving from the droughts in Africa without aid.
We need to pay attention.
the Daily Irrelevant

For seven months, US pioneer and environmentalist Michael Fay flew low over Africa in a small plane. He brought back 100,000 photographs and a dire warning of an environmental and human debacle. Called “Megaflyover,” the ambitious project sponsored by the National Geographic magazine took Fay last year from South Africa to Morocco by way of Madagascar, Tanzania, Chad, Niger and 15 other nations in Africa.

[...]
As the months flew by in his plane, Fay noticed a visible decline in the animal population in several regions of Africa. Across a region taken up by the Central African Republic, Congo and Chad, there appeared to be 90 percent fewer animals, especially elephants, compared to 25 years ago. In the Sahara desert, some rare species of antelope have practically disappeared. “There used to be hundreds of thousand of antelopes crossing that desert and we searched for days and days and we found two of probably the last of 150 addax left,” he told reporters.


In Tanzania he witnessed hippos slowly dying in Katavi national park as their wetland habitat was being drained by irrigation projects financed by the World Bank for rice cultivation.


In Kenya, lake Naivasha “from which water is extracted to feed … farms to produce roses is dying very quickly. “Over the past 15 years, the human population around Lake Naivasha has gone from tens of thousand of people to hundreds of thousand of people,” Fay added.


“In virtually every ecosystem we visited, humans have completely colonized the landscape,” he said. “There are few places left in Africa that people would classify as wild.” Niger and Darfur would be spared their current humanitarian crises, he added, if they had taken care to protect their environment 30 years ago.


Fay, however, said there was reason for hope in some sustainable development projects in South Africa and Namibia. “When I listen to Bono, I listen to (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair and I listen to (World Bank President Paul) Wolfowitz and I hear them speaking about poverty alleviation in Africa, I think to myself, that is not what we need to talk about, we need to be talking about sustainable development,” he said. “All that poverty alleviation means is an increase in exploitation of the resources, and it provides short-term and relatively superficial gains for people in Africa,” Fay said.