ABSTRACT
The chapter investigates the origin of the African environmental crisis hypothesis. It reports how applications of land-use schemes, technology and development were used to generate the crisis narratives. Using the theory of “nature-culture trap” and “environmental policy change” it investigates relations between scientific predictions, indigenous systems of land use and government policies. From these emerged narratives as to the origin of the hypothesis. We consider the global and local narratives that linked environmental crisis to indigenous land use. The narratives, by focusing on the global scientific theories developed elsewhere and imported into African scientific research, show the irony of applying the crisis to the African situation. What was clearly the cause of the crisis was land-use policies enforced by colonial governments. It shows how colonial land-use policies not only failed to reverse an “environmental crisis” but triggered the very problems the officials hoped to address. The colonial development policy made a shift from small-scale indigenous production systems to large-scale commercial ones, to capitalize on economies of scale. Such preferred schemes inevitably altered systems of indigenous land tenure and methods of land use. None of the large-scale schemes solved the perceived environmental crisis or succeeded in development outcomes. This is illustrated by the groundnut schemes that were responsible for deforestation of millions of hectares of land and using mechanical technologies to plough land exposing bare soils to erosion by rains. Application of inappropriate technology caused far greater environmental damage than the indigenous systems of land use.
