Ghana Week 2: Natural Beauty

I am sure you have heard this before, but the natural beauty of Africa is astonishing. Ghana is filled with luscious green covering the very shapely terrain consisting of rolling hills and large valleys. The red clay acts as the bond that holds all of it together.The landscape is exactly what I would imagine the Garden of Eden would have looked like. Unfortunately, this beauty is a stark contrast to the man made cities here which have scared the natural landscape.

When a city is build, the first thing that happens is all the greenery is cut away, leaving just the brown dirt that no longer sticks to the earth, instead swirling around the air in a constant dust-storm. Then, buildings are built, some look handsome but most are just little cubes dotting the new landscape. Then, infrastructure is created, dirt is compacted to make roads, asphalt is laid for the major ones. Open sewers are created, they flow down hills to their exit point, a pipe pointing at the ocean. Power lines are strung overhead with the occasional pole holding them up, with a bright yellow light shining down. Now that nature has been thoroughly hidden under a blanket of human creation, people begin to populate this new town. Now these people domesticate animals, buy cars, and produce trash. The trash begins to fill the sewers, it flows down into the ocean to wash right back up on the once pristine beach. The trash that makes it into a dumpster just gets lit on fire and enters the atmosphere as a toxic black smoke. The cars shoot thick black soot into the air every time someone depressed the gas peddle, the cars’ fluids create a new stream running down the roads into the same sewers as the trash. The animals eat any remaining greenery, they litter the streets in a land that is foreign to them. The city is now well-established. It is no longer a blanket covering nature’s beauty, it is a permanent scar on mother earth.

Which really brings me to my point, this isn’t unique to Ghana, nor is it unique to the developing world, this is human nature. While the damage caused to the environment is very obvious here, that’s because it’s just beginning to happen. This process has been happening so long in the United States and the rest of the Western World that we don’t even notice it anymore. I can see the clues as to what Cape Coast looked like before it started being developed. On the other hand, can you tell me what New York City looked like in it’s natural form? I mentioned that they just burn trash in dumpsters here, yet Ghana was the 142nd country in a ranking of countries by greenhouse gas emissions per capita; The United States was 14th. I have always been aware that we harm the environment as a byproduct of modern society. In fact, as a Computer Scientist I have always looked to solve problems in a logical systematic way. I have considered our damage to the environment an important problem we must solve, one that we could easily solve by taking a systematic approach. Yet, I never really realized the huge scale of this problem. It wasn’t until I visited here, where me and my colleagues were appalled the clear disrespect for the environment , that I was able to take a look back at my lifestyle and our culture to see how unsustainable our current lifestyle really is. The environment really is one of our greatest challenges, and one that we are directly responsible for. Let’s do something about it.