STATEMENT OF AMBASSADOR ROBERT M. PRINGLE, DIREC- 

 TOR, OFFICE OF ECOLOGY AND TERRESTRIAL CONSERVA- 

 TION, BUREAU OF OCEANS AND INTERNATIONAL ENVIRON- 

 MENTAL AND SCIENTIFIC AFFAIRS, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF 

 STATE 



Mr. Pringle. Thank you, Madam Chairperson, both for that gen- 

 erous introduction, and for the opportunity to appear before you on 

 this fascinating and crucial topic. With your permission, I would 

 like to submit my full statement for the record, and just try to 

 summarize it. 



Ms. Ros-Lehtinen. Without objection, we will put it into the 

 record. 



Mr. Pringle. To try to summarize it rather briefly. 



I would like to begin by referring to the rather famous article by 

 Robert Kaplan that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly about a year 

 ago, which raised the specter of ecocatastrophe largely in Africa; of 

 endemic and systemic failure of the environment. It is an article 

 that made a lot of very good points. I happen to think that his 

 main thrust was wrong. I am not myself an Afro pessimist. 



What got me was the end of it where he describes, I think that 

 at the very end of his travels he is coming down for a refueling 

 stop, and it happened to be in Bamako, the capital of Mali. He is 

 describing how ne is pulled down from his lofty thoughts in the air- 

 plane when he sees the tin shacks of the city looming through the 

 red dust of the Sahara. And he is thinking that is the real world 

 down there, and that is where the future is going to come from, 

 with a very menacing implication. 



I was thinking, having just lived there for 3 years, that you can- 

 not be pessimistic about Mali. The people are just too good. There 

 is too much cultural self-confidence and real progress going on. I 

 admit that it looks pretty awful from the air when you are coming 

 down like that. And maybe it is that difference in perspective. It 

 is the human factor that is going to save us in Africa, based on my 

 experience. 



But certainly, the risk of environmental failure is enormous. And 

 that is what 1 wanted to say or what I tried to say in my testi- 

 mony, which I must say you have covered in your statement. You 

 said it all and with much the same kind of perspective. 



There are three main points I want to emphasize. 



First of all, environmental failure in Africa on a systemic basis 

 will certainly have global consequences. Eventually it will affect 

 our own environmental welfare. But it would certainly also fall 

 with particular force on the African people, because they are closer 

 to the land. Environmental failure is going to have more direct im- 

 pact on Africans than on people in most other parts of the world. 



The second point that I would like to make is that despite our 

 own negative perception of the environmental situation in Africa, 

 it is certainly not far from hopeless. 



There is a lot of experience out there since the great Saharan 

 droughts of the 1970's. There is an awareness on one hand of this 

 that the environment can be a source of profit. Look behind the re- 

 cent human tragedy of Rwanda to the way that the government 

 and the people's attitude has changed toward the famous mountain 

 gorillas, from the period when the gorillas were sort of an embar- 



