MARSA ALAM, Egypt — ON Tuesday, I visited a bakery in Cairo’s dirt-poor
Imbaba neighborhood, where I watched a scrum of men, women and children
jostling to get bread. You have to get there early, because the baker
makes only so many subsidized pita loaves; he sells the rest of his
government-subsidized flour on the black market to private bakers who
charge five times the official price. He has no choice, he says, because
his fuel costs are spiking. You can watch the subsidized-flour bags
being carried on shoulders out the side door. “This is the hardest job
in Egypt,” the bakery owner told me. Everyone is always mad at him,
especially those who line up early and still leave with no bread.
These are difficult days in Egypt. It is running out of hard currency
and can’t buy enough gasoline and diesel for power stations. Long lines
are forming at gas stations, worsening Cairo’s titanic traffic jams, and
electricity cuts are commonplace. Around the corner from the bakery, on
an unpaved street, a small knot of men have two manhole covers lifted,
exposing a sickening black sludge that has backed up almost to street
level; they’re fishing down the hole for the blockage with a long, thin
rod. There is much arguing about how best to solve this problem. In the
background, through an open window, you hear children in a Koranic
school cheerfully repeating verses for their teacher.
This is Egypt in miniature — so many problems built up over so many
years that are all about to spill onto the street. No one can agree on
what to do about them — and the only tool they have looks like a
30-foot-long, jury-rigged, straightened coat hanger.
As if things weren’t bad enough, who should show up to add to Egypt’s
stresses but Mother Nature herself. Climate, water, food and population
pressures are now interweaving with the political and economic ones in
ways that would challenge even the best of leaders, and Egypt today has
far from the best. In the last month, Cairo has seen temperatures as
high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit, 20 degrees above the daily average high.
And the headline news in Cairo last week was Ethiopia’s construction of
the biggest hydroelectric dam in Africa, on the Blue Nile. As the
reservoir behind the dam is filled up, the water supply to Egypt is
likely to be reduced, and since Egypt’s 85 million people get 97 percent
of their fresh water from the Nile, this has become a huge issue. Some
senior Egyptian officials speak of possible military action to prevent
the dam from being completed. President Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim
Brotherhood, on Monday declared publicly of Ethiopia: “We are not
calling for war, but we will never permit our water security ... to be
threatened.” Egypt, he said, will keep “all options open.” Ethiopia has
responded with defiance, with its prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, saying “nothing and no one” would stop construction.
Invading Ethiopia may be Morsi’s only open option. His government has
been a huge disappointment for many Egyptians. Many non-Islamists voted
for Morsi — it was the only way he got elected — because they felt they
could not vote for the candidate favored by supporters of the former
dictator Hosni Mubarak, and because they believed his promise to be
“inclusive.” These pro-Morsi non-Islamists are known here as “lemon
squeezers,” from an Egyptian expression — when you are forced to do or
eat something unpleasant you say: “I squeezed lemon all over it first.”
When you talk to these lemon squeezers today — the liberals,
conservatives and nationalists who make up the opposition — you can feel
a palpable hatred for the Muslim Brotherhood and a powerful sense of
theft: a widespread feeling that the Brotherhood tricked the lemon
squeezers and the poor into voting for its members and now they have
failed to either fix the country or share power, but are busy trying to
impose religious norms. This opposition has mounted a nationwide
petition drive that has garnered 10 million signatures so far calling on
Morsi to resign and to call new elections. On June 30, their campaign
is set to culminate in a nationwide anti-Morsi protest. Morsi still
enjoys support in the more traditional countryside, so this could get
very ugly.
WHAT to do with such a mess?
In trying to answer that question I did something different on this
trip. I did not talk to any politicians, but focused instead on Egypt’s
impressive but small group of environmental activists, many of whom were
also involved in the 2011 uprising that toppled Mubarak. I focused on
them because I believe that while they may not know what is sufficient
to fix Egypt (who does?) they do know what is necessary:
Egypt needs a revolution.
Wait, isn’t that what happened two years ago? Not really. It is now
clear that what happened two years ago was more musical chairs than
revolution. First the army, using the energy of the youth-led protesters
in Tahrir Square, ousted Mubarak, and then the Muslim Brotherhood
ousted the army, and now the opposition is trying to oust the
Brotherhood. Each, though, is operating on the old majoritarian politics
— winners take all, losers get nothing.
But the truth is that any faction here — the youth, the army, the Muslim
Brotherhood — that thinks it can rule Egypt alone and make the others
disappear is fooling itself. (Ditto in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Libya.)
Because Egypt is in such a deep hole, and the reforms needed so painful,
they can be accomplished only if everyone shares in the responsibility
and ownership of the transition through a national unity coalition. In
that sense Egyptians today desperately need a “peace process” — not with
Israel, but with one another.
Everyone has to take responsibility for the commons, rather than just
grabbing their own. That is the real cultural revolution that has to
happen for Egypt to revive. And that’s where the environmentalists here
have such an advantage over the politicians, because all they think
about is the commons — resources that have to be shared. Egypt’s commons
— its bridges, roads, parks, coral reefs — are crumbling.
I’m here looking at how environmental stresses contributed to the Arab
Awakening, as part of a documentary for Showtime: “Years of Living
Dangerously.” This week we traveled to Marsa Alam, on the Red Sea, with
Ahmed el-Droubi, a campaigner for Greenpeace in Egypt, and Amr Ali, the head of the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association,
or Hepca, a Red Sea conservation group, to look at how overbuilding,
overfishing and rising water temperatures have led to the bleaching of
some of the Red Sea’s spectacular coral reefs. As we set out for a dive
to look at these reefs, Droubi tried to explain Egypt’s central problem
to me by using the example of Cairo’s jammed traffic, among the worst in
the world.
“The other day,” Droubi said, “I was standing on a main intersection in
downtown Cairo, where two one-way roads meet. As I stood there, I saw
cars going both ways down both one-way streets — cars were coming and
going in four different directions — and other cars were double-parked. I
was standing next to a shop owner watching this. ‘This is a complete
mess,’ he said. ‘No one has any civic responsibility. They each only
care about themselves getting to where they are going.’ ”
A few minutes later, Droubi continued, a car that was parked right in
front of the man’s shop drove away and a new car tried to slip in. “This
same owner came out with a chair, put it in the parking space and told
the new driver not to block his store but to double-park and block part
of the street instead!” Droubi told me. “So, the shop owner saw the
problem. He knew the reasons for the problem. He knew the solution, but
he wouldn’t do his part because he thought others would not do theirs.
The net result was that the traffic was worse for everyone. We have to
break this cycle — to show people if they act in the common good they
will each benefit more.”
What happened on Cairo’s roads happened along the Red Sea coast. Each
hotel owner looked out for himself, while a corrupt government looked
the other way. Some hotel owners, to expand their land or gain some
beach, simply put landfill over the coral reefs on their shores. Marine
activities were unregulated, stressing dolphins in their own resting
areas, where they try to sleep safe from the sharks. Fishermen
overfished — especially for sharks, which they sold for meat and for
fins — and they used dynamite and mesh nets that killed the multicolored
reef fish, along with the grouper they were trying to catch. As a
result, the whole reef ecosystem became less resilient to global
warming.
“In 1997, one of the hottest years on record, coral bleaching became a
problem around the world,” but not in the Red Sea, Ali told me. Coral
bleaching means that the photosynthetic algae that give the coral its
rainbow of colors and nutrition are evicted by the coral after it is
stressed beyond certain natural limits and it all turns bone white. But
in 2012, when water temperatures in the Red Sea rose by about two
degrees Celsius above their average, said Ali, the coral died “all over
the place,” especially in the most tourist-filled and fished areas.
Healthy coral are critical for fish spawning.
Hepca was formed by the diving community in 1992 to protect the reefs.
“These coral reefs are the rain forests of the marine environment,”
Droubi explained. “There are 800 species of coral here and 1,200 species
of fish.” It all, though, requires a healthy ecosystem, starting with
the apex predator — the sharks. If too many sharks are killed, too many
of the midlevel predators survive and they then eat too many of the
smaller plant-eating fish that keep coral healthy by eating the algae
off substrates to clear space for coral to colonize. A reef rich in
herbivores will be more resilient.
But for a long time the local government and fishermen were not
interested and certainly could not grasp global warming’s impact on the
region. So Hepca helped them understand the problem by putting it in
their vernacular. They estimated that every shark in the Red Sea was
worth about $150,000 a year in business from tourists (who fly in to see
or swim with the sharks) and lived for 30 years, while a shark killed
for meat and fins for soup brought in about $150 one time. So if
everyone worked together, if the government passed new zoning laws where
people could fish, and dive-tour operators respected them and Hepca was
empowered to enforce the regulation with its own speedboats — the
Egyptian coast guard has no boats — everyone would be better off. It
sounds simple, but it was a revolution here.
“The national government was not really interested in helping,” Droubi
said, “but the local government and fishermen realized they were losing,
so everybody came together for a local solution,” which was creating
protected zones. “Everybody realized that they were stakeholders,” he
added — the environmentalists because of their priorities, the local
government, which wanted the tax base from tourism and fishing, and the
tourism and fishing industries because this was their livelihood. “We
made everyone aware of how their interests intersected if they worked
together. It was all about revolting against an old paradigm and
creating a new one.” So far the results seem promising.
I HAVE no illusions, and neither do Droubi and Ali, about how hard it
would be to bring this kind of “shared commons” thinking to the national
level here, but the absence of it is what ails almost every one of
these Arab Awakenings today, where one group or another thinks it can
have it all and too few people are thinking about the common good and
how it has the potential make them all better off. Syria is the most
extreme version of this disease, but Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen are
all struggling with the same issue.
What is different about Egypt, though, is that it is bursting with
talented young people who understand that Egypt needs an inclusive,
long-term, sustainable plan for national renewal. And what they also
understand is that those who say that the Arabs have tried everything —
Nasserism, socialism, Communism, Baathism, liberalism and Islamism — but
that nothing has worked, are wrong. There is one ism they haven’t
tried: environmentalism. The only way Egypt and the other Awakening
states will have sustainable democracies with sustainable economies is
to elevate an environmental ethic to the center of political thinking.
Without that, it’s all just musical chairs.
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com
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