Heart of Dryness: Climate Change Coping Strategies
By James G. Workman
Special to Circle of Blue
Copyright 2009 Walker & Company, Excerpt from Heart of Dryness
Circle of Blue’s “Water + Climate: Words” highlights literary investigations of water and climate intersections. As politicians debate the line-by-line contents of a global climate change treaty, the human and environmental drama is playing out around the world, from the deserts of Africa to the shores of Greenland. In Heart of Dryness journalist and author James Workman shares the lives of Botswana’s Bushmen, an indigenous hunter-gatherer population that has been forced to relocate by the national government since the 1990s. As he follows this population’s struggle for land, he comes face-first with the multi-layered reality of a world increasingly struggling for water while battling the effects of a warming planet.
“The main thing was to have a story that would illustrate to the lay person so that they understand these water issues,” Workman tells Circle of Blue. “If your bring these issues down to the people who laugh, dance and have babies like you, you care about them and see the parallels and connections between their life in the Kalahari and yours – you see their humanity.
“When we hear the statistic that 2.2 billion people live without sanitation, it’s shocking, but at the same time it’s meaningless.”
For two years Workman lived and traveled with the Bushmen as they battled the national government in court over access to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR). At the end of 2006, the Bushmen won the right to return to the CKGR while Workman was blacklisted from the country for his stories.
Now he shares these intimate stories with Circle of Blue, weaving each installment into the themes of our Water+Climate series. The first excerpt examines their struggle for food in the face of political and environmental obstacles. [Click here to read the full article.]
