Five of the ten days I was in Mali last March, I never saw the sun.  It was blotted out by an epic dust cloud that spread hundreds of miles in every direction, borne by the harmattan, the southwesterly gale that blows down from the Sahara during the dry season. Sandstorms have
always been a part of life here. They can be so thick you can’t even see your hand.

    Historically, the harmattan blows in December through February.  But since l968 Mali and the rest of the Sahel (the semi-arid band below the Sahara and above the humid savannas and forests to the south, that stretches from Senegal to Eritrea) have been experiencing a prolonged, devastating drought. Precipitation has dropped 30 percent — the most dramatic decline on earth—and the rainy season has been truncated to two months, July and August.

  At the same time, the population of the Sahel (“shore” in Arabic) has been exploding, compounding the demand for firewood, the main source of cooking fuel. A million acres of trees a year are being cleared and burned in Mali alone. Both these things— the drought, amplified by the deforestation — have brought catastrophic desertification to the Sahel. The sandstorms have
 increased tenfold since l968. They pick up an estimated two to three billion tons of Sahara sand and dust a year and now can come any time from September to June. The finest red particles are whipped up into the upper atmosphere, to 12,000 feet and higher, and are transported across oceans by the prevailing winds. In January 2004, cars in Florida and South Texas were coated with Sahara dust. 

In June a similar “blood rain” fell in England. In February the sun was blotted out in Austria. NASA satellite photos showed a cloud larger than Spain off the coast of Morocco. Sahara dust
 travels to Toronto and even Greenland. It is snuffing coral reefs and sea urchins in the Caribbean. So the Sahel’s desertification is not just a matter of local concern.

  During the first five years of the drought, until l973, 250,000 people and 3.5 million head of cattle in the Sahel died. In l984-5 rural Mali (a parched, land-locked country nearly twice the size of Texas whose top two thirds—from Timbuctu north—are in the Sahara, and whose bottom third is in the Sahel) again became uninhabitable, and many of the villages, where three-quarters of the population live, were vacated. Most of the environmental refugees poured
 into Bamako, the capital, whose population has grown from 800,000 to two million in the last 20 years.

  In 2003, the first good rains in 50 years fell, and 2004 was also a relatively wet year. But the rains triggered the emergence of billions of pink African desert locusts, which skeletonized whatever vegetation they landed on. In Niger, the next country to the east, where the rural population was already at the edge after three decades of drought, the scourge last summer
produced a famine of Ethiopian direness.  This year, too, the rains would be good, but there were still these epic sandstorms before they came. The drought may have subsided for now, but most scientists are in agreement that the processes that are desertifying the Sahel have reached the point where they are unstoppable. 
 

     Bamako, where my quest to understand these processes began, sprawls unprepossessingly on both sides of the Niger River.  Few houses are more than one story. The city seems more like a big village, an anarchic collection of bougous, or neighborhoods, where Mali’s various ethnic groups live in vast extended families—the Bamana with the Bamana, the Songhai with the Songhai, the Peulh with the Peulh. The women cook on charcoal braziers in the courtyards. The charcoal smoke mingles with the diesel fumes and the Sahara dust, so the pall over Bamako was
 particularly thick.

  The latest United Nations Human Development Report (released in 2003) ranks Mali as the 184th worst country in the world out of 187 to be living in terms of its annual per capita income ($350), mean education level (fourth grade), average lifespan (49), and infant mortality rate (119 out of 1000 live births). Yet Mali’s art—particularly its music and wood sculpture—ranks high among the world’s cultural treasures. And perhaps because there is so little to steal, there is very little crime in the country’s Sahel region (although there are Islamist terrorists and bandits in the north). Its government, though cash-strapped, is one of Africa’s most promising new democracies. Many families have a member in New York or Paris who wires home money, 
which bolsters the actual economic picture. But many villages are barely surviving.

      There are two schools of thought about the desertification, I discovered. The “degradation narrative,” as it is referred to by one of its critics, was first proposed during the Ethiopian
famine of l972-4, which actually gripped the entire Sahel and was run with by the media. It attributed the desertification to rampant deforestation, which is still going on: When the trees go,
 the grass below them dies; then the ground dries up, the soil blows away (adding to the dust in the atmosphere) and any remaining condensation in the soil  is evaporated or runs off  immediately. The other school, drawing on  recent studies of climate data, attributes desertification primarily to “the remote influence”— a cyclical shift in the world’s climate,  exacerbated by the accumulation of greenhouse gases warming the earth’s atmosphere. In fact both factors are involved.  The remote influence is the main cause, but it is enhanced by deforestation. 

     One morning, I went to the Institute of the Sahel, which was founded in l973, after the first famine took a quarter of a million lives.  Its members consist of the eight Sahel countries (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad, Gambia, Mauritania, and Senegel) and Cabo Verde, the island out in the Atlantic, which is desertifying because the Sahara’s dust clouds are suppressing the winds that bring it rain. I was taken down a dark, empty corridor the length of a football field to the office of Dr. Bouboucar Diallo, the institute’s economist and coordinator of food security, who laid out the degradation narrative.

 “Malians have always had droughts to contend with,” he explained in such calm, measured tones that a listener could be forgiven for not grasping the gravity of the situation. “There were droughts 10,000 years ago and in the 13th century that made the Sahel uninhabitable. But now there is also the problem of overpopulation.

 The Sahel’s population is currently 50 million and is growing by 2.7 percent a year.  By 2050 it will conservatively hit 100 million. This is because the  women continue to have seven children. Before there was  equilibrium because of infant mortality and sickness, but now, with the availability of modern medicine, demographic growth is unchecked.

   “For the people in the villages,” he went on, “wood is the only fuel and the only source of income, and the forest also provides traditional plant medicines, the first line of defense against disease.

 So there is a lot of harvesting. And in Bamako almost everybody cooks with charcoal, which produces only one third of the energy that raw wood does [though it is lighter and more portable, and easier to ignite]. So abandoning the countryside doesn’t alleviate the deforestation. It actually accelerates it.”

  The institute tried to “politicize” the villagers: “We showed them pictures of what it was like 30 years ago and now, so they could see the degradation,” Dr. Diallo explained. “But it hasn’t worked. They keep cutting and having lots of children.  The same piece of land that used to feed five people now has to feed 20, and it has deteriorated, so the farmers”—pretty much every
 village grows its own food—“are venturing into more and more marginal, waterless land.” The institute was now concentrating on raising the productivity of the land already under cultivation,
 by introducing new, improved strains of millet and other crops, fertilizers, and anti-erosion and water-retention techniques.  This slowed down the clearing for farming, but it didn’t stop
 the clearing for firewood. 

“Stopping the desertification is impossible,” Dr. Diallo concluded. “All we can do is try to slow it down. 

It isn’t caused only by local deforestation. Global climate patterns are implicated. The whole world is slowly becoming a desert. That is why everyone should be concerned about what
 is happening here. This is the future.”

According to the United Nations Environment Program,  half of the world’s land surface—28  million of its 57 million square miles—is “dryland”:  plains, grasslands, savannas,steppes, or pampas with a modest water supply compared to the world’s forests.

 Four million square miles are hyperarid desert, and another 19 million are becoming desert or are threatened with desertification.  Desertification is proceeding  worldwide at a faster rate than any other time in recorded  history, with disastrous effects for vegetative cover, biodiversity,  and the existence  of 1.5 billion people in more than 100 countries.  Twenty-seven percent of China is desert, and the country’s  Gobi and Taklimakan deserts are expanding at a rate of 2,800  square miles a year, despite the most massive tree-planting campaign ever undertaken (42 billion trees have been planted by 560 million people since l982). And so what is happening
 in the Sahel is a frightening model, an advanced case of what much of the earth’s surface is going to turn into. 
 

        I have hired a Land Cruiser with a driver named Shek Koulibali, and we are heading upcountry with two young Peace Corps volunteers, Alison Trafton and Thomas Betjeman. The niece of an old friend, Alison has been living in a Bamana village for 14 months. The Bamana are the largest ethnic group, almost half Mali’s population. Thomas has been doing the same in a Dogon village. The Dogon have one of the most idiosyncratic traditional societies left. Many of them live under a 125-mile-long escarpment, like the Anasazi cliff dwellers in the American Southwest a thousand years ago.

  Our plan is to make a five-day tour of the Sahel, up as far north as Douenza, where the escarpment ends, talking along the way with villagers and foreign aid workers who are combating the desertification. Above Douenza, the Sahel begins to give way to the desert, and there is danger of being set upon by Islamist rebels or bandits. On the way back to the capital, Shek and I will drop off Alison and Thomas at their villages.    We soon leave the smog of Bamako, but the visibility  is  still only a few hundred yards. The sun, when it appears, is a pale disc, more like a full moon behind the dirty reddish-grey cloud of dust, which Shek says is called
 the kungoforoko, the fog of the bush. One unobtrusive, flat-roofed Bamana mud town passes after another, each with its multi-spired mud mosque. Processions of women are balancing large clay jars of water or huge loads of firewood on their heads. Stacks of firewood line the road. Some villages are entirely devoted to the production of firewood and charcoal. We pass pick-up trucks, long caravans of donkey-drawn carts, all manner of conveyances piled with towering, teetering stacks of firewood, minivans bulging with faggots—all headed for Bamako.