Haiti on the brink of ecocide.

As I rush down the street to avoid the beggars, a woman steps directly in front of me. She pushes her child into my arms. I grasp reflexively, and find myself holding a small naked boy. We look at each other. Dark, tired eyes. He begins to cry silently. He has skinny arms and legs, a distended stomach, blotchy skin, and patchy hair. He has kwashiokor, a disease of malnutrition--literally "the disease the first baby gets when the second one comes." Then the woman shouts and aggressively pushes her upheld hand into my stomach. Is she saying that I am fat? My friends wouldn't think so. Yet, compared to her, I am fat.

I have promised myself 10 times not to give more money to beggars. It doesn't do any good. Once you give to one, 50 more beggars will hound you in the streets. I hand the child back to the woman with a few "gourds," maybe 25 cents in the local currency. Then I walk away fast, before any other beggars can surround me. No, I am not in Africa.

If you want an "ecotour" to see an environmental disaster, you need not go to Africa or India. Save your money and look in our back yard at Haiti. It is our local "worst-possible-case" of eco-cata-strophy.

I first came to Haiti in 1970, when "Papa Doc" Francois Duvalier had his "PRESIDENT FOR LIFE" sign over his White House. I arrived as the proverbially naive, optimistic college graduate, and I was staggered by the poverty and political oppression. The poverty was obvious--hungry children, beggars and the diseases of malnutrition. The oppression was more subtle, seen in the cautious looks on people's faces. At dinner, if you wanted to clear the table of Haitians, all you had to do was ask them for an opinion of Papa Doc Duvalier. In the streets, people were constantly pleading with me to take them "away from here" before they were killed by his private guards, the "Tonton Maucaute."

My ultimate trauma came at the post office in Port-au-Prince. I wanted to send some beautiful Haitian wood carvings to my parents. In front of the post, I was so besieged by a crowd of screaming desperate beggars that I literally could not move. Most of their bodies had gross physical injuries. Missing fingers, hands, arms and legs. Some had letters and even words scarred onto their faces. Moist pink flesh protruded where eyes used to be. Then I felt something grip my ankle. One man with stumps for limbs had scooted up to me on a rolling cart and hooked his chin and shoulder around my ankle. He began pleading in Creole for anything. He didn't even have a hand for me to give to. I broke loose of them and, without mailing my package, ran back to my hotel, where I breathlessly told a German resident of my experience. "Oh, you have seen the 'mutilates,'" he said. "Mutilates?" "Yes. The ones Duvalier has disfigured so badly that they can no longer live normal lives. But Duvalier lets them live so that others can see what will happen if they too try to resist."

When I return to Haiti in 1993 I decide to go to the post office in Port-au-Prince. A Haitian friend has come with me this time "just in case." My camera is ready. But when we get there, I find no mob scene. Just some street vendors. I ask my friend where all the vendors are who used to sell the incredible wood carvings. "Not much of that anymore. No more good wood here for carving, and we cannot afford to import wood." "And where," I ask, "are all of the--mutilates--the victims of political oppression?" He shakes his head. "Oh, the army just kills us now. They don't bother with those details anymore. You see, we too have progress."

I have hired a driver to take me in his 4-wheel drive to Jean Rabel in Haiti's Northwest--the most deforested part of a deforested country. Our jeep creaks along the road at a walking pace as my driver dodges erosion gullies. He tells me that Haiti is celebrating its 150-year anniversary of non-stop kleptocracy--"government by the thieves." He says that there is no money for road repairs--or anything else. "The military has stolen all of it," he confides. "This road is returning to dirt. If the rains do come this year, they will close the road down indefinitely. Every year, everything gets worse. I know this is a fact. That is our history."

Columbus arrived on the Santa Maria on the north coast of the island of Hispanola (now shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti) in 1492. An estimated 250,000 Arawak Indians lived here. Perhaps 100,000 lived in what is now Haiti. Deep forests covered over 75 percent of the land. Columbus called it "La Navidad." Because the Spaniards did not find much gold, they did not colonize Haiti. French buccaneers began preying upon the island in the 1600's. Settlers quickly followed, and they killed off almost all of the Arawak Indians with a combination of disease, massacre and overwork.

France gained complete control with the Treaty of Ryswick at the end of the 17th century, and Haiti soon became its richest colony. Their treatment of slaves was among the most brutal in the western hemisphere. Most slaves died within five years of importation, and over one million would die from work conditions and disease in the next century. In 1804, the slaves revolted, declared the country independent and renamed it "Haiti," the old Arawak name. But the new leaders quickly tried to restore the plantation system and recreate a "black-on-black" serfdom as brutal as the French system. The freed slaves deserted the plantations and fled into the mountains. The plantation system eventually failed, and since then the peasants have been dividing and subdividing their plots of farmland.

Today, land ownership in rural Haiti is among the most egalitarian in the Americas, unlike many other Latin American countries, where a tiny oligarchy controls much of the land. Yet Haiti faces ecological disaster. The numbers are grim: Experts estimate Haiti to be from 90 to 97 percent deforested. (Wood exports from Haiti ended by 1900, so this deforestation can't be blamed on international exploitation, as it can be in many other parts of the world.) Haiti's population is now about seven million, growing at around two percent annually. Over half of the original good cropland of Haiti has been destroyed by erosion, and the farmers are destroying the remainder at about five percent a year. From 1950 to 1990, the per capita arable land dropped from about one acre to one-third of an acre per person.

The per capita income of the average Haitian in 1987 was $360 and declining. Rural illiteracy is close to 90 percent, among the highest in the world. And the average Haitian only gets 80 percent of their required calorie intake.

My driver pulls up to a river outside of the city of Port-au-Paix, on the north coast. This will be the only surface water that we will see for the next 50 miles. We descend a steep path to its edge. Hundreds of people in the river wash clothes, themselves and food. Children play and swim while mothers load their heads and backs with large containers of river water for drinking and cooking. My guide says that, during the drought, some of them must walk over 15 kilometers to get water here. In the rural villages, he adds, there used to be running water, some electricity, even phones. But no more. The wells are going dry, and the electricity and phones stopped working years ago. I look at everyone in the river and wonder if amoebic dysentery, intestinal parasites, cholera don't lie just around this river's bend...

We splash through the river and begin the climb up the mountains. More bone-jarring jolts as we wind through the passes. The countryside is arid, covered with cactus and parched bushes, with deeply eroded gorges exposing subsoil and rocks. In some places, the erosion gullies are 50 feet deep. The wind blows dust constantly.

I see several traces of smoke in the distance, so I ask the driver to stop. We hike through the erosion gorges until we come upon a man and his wife tending a charcoal pyre. His name is Jean Baptiste. He tells me he used to be a farmer, but no longer. It has not rained in five years and all of his fruit trees have died. He used to grow produce to sell in the city, but now he has cut up his dead fruit trees for charcoal, which he sells for money to buy food. If he didn't do it, he says, someone else would have come in the night and stolen his trees for wood. It never used to be like this, he says.

I offer Jean a few gourds of currency to photograph them making charcoal. He accepts gratefully. They take me to a pit that they have dug and lined with straw. There they stack wood until they have a pile shaped, ironically, like a large coffin. None of the wood is over three inches thick, so I ask them if the wood must be so small. "No. But there is nothing larger left." After the pile is about four feet high, they cover it with a thick coat of dirt. They punch a few holes in the dirt to allow the smoke to escape. Then they ignite the wood from below and let it smolder for a day. The heat drives off the volatile gases and leaves charcoal.

I look around and see no trees, not a one. I ask him where he got the wood for the pyre. He waves for me to follow. We cross a ravine and walk over a sunparched field and stop at a hole with the remains of a tree stump and a machete. They are digging out tree stumps with a machete to make charcoal. He explains that they must search for tree stumps. But often, someone has already removed them. So they search for any roots that may be left.

The landscape is cratered with pits. There are almost no green plants remaining. Wherever a tree once stood, there is now a deep hole where someone took the stump and the roots. Roots that once held topsoil and moisture. It looks like something is deliberately removing all traces of life. And something is. I am looking at the ultimate environmental "scorched-Earth" policy. Except for strip mining, I can't think of a way to remove the topsoil more quickly.

I ask Jean Baptiste if he thinks this is bad. "Terrible," he shakes his head. "But I have no choice. We have four children, and we must feed them today. It no longer rains here, so I cannot farm. What else is there to do?" Jean says that every three days he piles his bags of charcoal onto his three burros and takes them 10 miles to the nearest pickup point. There, a charcoal wholesaler buys it. With this money, he can buy enough beans and rice to feed his family for a few days. He used to take his burros all the way to Port-au-Paix and sell his charcoal retail for more money. But now, there is no water on the trail and so little grass that he would have to buy food for the burros for the trip. And he cannot afford that. The people who live along the trail now defend the meager brush and cactus on their land against anyone else's animals. As we prepare to leave, he points to the denuded hillside and says, "Yes, this is very bad. But when we are standing next to starvation, we have no choice."

We stop in the town of Jean Rabel for a few days. The market is full of loud women hawking food. The people appear well-fed. I do not see any hungry children or beggars. I ask my driver about the prosperity of Jean Rabel. "Yes," he agrees. "The stream still flows here, so the people can grow food. But downstream, it is dry. We pray that does not happen here."

My driver takes me to visit his uncle Michel. He is a neat, educated man, the principal at the local school. He graciously insists that I stay with him. He wants to see my camera. He tells me he is a photographer himself and invites me to visit his photo studio. As we walk, we are surrounded by enthusiastic children. I rub the boys' heads and they smile.

Michel shows me photographs at his studio, including some from when his grandfather was a boy that show Jean Rabel almost a century ago. The original marketplace, the first church, the river. I look at the river. It is wide and deep, big enough to hold 10 times the flow of the small stream that now flows through Jean Rabel. And on all the hillsides in these photos, I see trees. Trees and trees and trees. the hillsides are lush and forested.

I ask Michel where these hills are. "Right here," he answers. We step outside. He points to the hills on the other side of the stream. "There." I look at the brown rocky hills, then at the photos of the forested slopes. I must take his word that these are the same hills, for I can see no similarities whatsoever. In the old photos, I cannot see any rocks on the hillsides. And with my eyes right now, I cannot see one full tree on these hills.

I want to photograph some boat people preparing to leave Haiti. My driver suggests that we go west from Jean Rabel along the Atlantic coast. We find some men in a small boat along the shoreline. Their boat is filled with small branches of wood. My guide asks them where we can photograph some boat people getting ready to leave. Stony silence. I offer them money for information. One of them volunteers that no one who was planning on sailing to the U.S. would tell any stranger about it. Then they go back to their boat. We watch them sail up to some small mangroves growing in the shallow bay. They hack away at the inch-thick stalks and toss them into their boat. They are cutting the mangroves beneath the water level to make charcoal. There go the coastal estuaries.

For the next five days, wherever we travel, we see more of the same: completely barren hills, stripped of all topsoil, with smoke around us from the ubiquitous charcoal pits. Along the coastline, we find men in small boats hacking away at the mangroves. I feel that I am making two journeys here. The physical one is obvious: a journey into northwest Haiti, the most deforested and poorest area in the western hemisphere.

But my second journey is back in time. I am seeing the complete collapse of what the West calls "infrastructure." The roads, electricity, running water, phone service, even mail. I am journeying back into a vast, unplanned "demodernization" of a region. No one ever decided to do it. But it's happening with incredible rapidity. I wonder if this is to be the future of much of the world. Of the Somalias, Angolas, Bangladeshes, Indias, and yes, the Bosnias and El Salvadors too. Is this getting ever closer to home?

On my return, I stop at a CARE office in Gonaives. I meet an assistant director, whom I shall call Jacque. I comment that this office appears to spend a lot of its budget on new vehicles. He agrees and says that nowadays, they are mostly in the food delivery business. The roads are so bad and there is so much looting along the way that they must deliver it themselves. Sometimes they must give food to the military. They used to spend more time training people to farm, but now with the continuous drought and all the erosion, it is becoming futile to teach agriculture in a desert.

Jacque says that, in the northwest, people get over half their calories from imported food from the U.S. "Miami rice," he calls it. "How do they pay for it?" I ask. "They don't. It is aid. If it ever stops, hundreds of thousands will starve--maybe millions. And my family lives there, so I worry for them daily." Then he asks me, "Do you think the U.S. will stop sending food aid?" I tell him that I have no idea. "But what do you personally think U.S. policy to Haiti will be?" he probes.

I remain silent for a moment. I think the U.S. policy planners wish that the "Haiti problem" would just go away. The U.S. has no pressing economic needs in Haiti, not even its dirt-cheap labor pool. Clinton has broken his campaign promises to offer Haitian boat people asylum and better treatment, but African-Americans and others won't oppose him because of it. The "Haiti problem" may be embarrassing and awkward for the U.S., but is it strategic in the postcold war era? Not at all.

Fidel Castro said recently that if the U.S. truly opened its borders, one billion people would immediately come running, sailing, flying, crawling, and swimming into the U.S. He's probably right. With open borders, perhaps half of all Haitians would opt to come here. But we don't want them. The U.S. wants to contain the problem in Haiti. And since Haiti is an island with easy-to-patrol coastal borders, we can expect continued interception and "repatriation" of the Haitian boat people. Emigration is not going to solve Haiti's crisis.

So what about the embargo that the United States has imposed to force the Haitian military to return the reigns of power to President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, now in exile in Washington, DC? The Haitian military says that it hurts the poor more than anyone else. Everything I have seen in Haiti supports that contention. You can be assured that when Haiti is down to its last barrel of oil or bag of rice, the Haitian military will have it.

If Aristide returns to Haiti without armed escort, the Haitian military will execute him. For Aristide to remain in power, he must have the support of an international military force, i.e. French, U.S. or U.N. troops to protect him. He will then need his own elite guard to protect him from the next coup. The small but influential middle class does fear Aristide, and the military surely has plans right now on how to dispose of him. The Haitians by themselves will not "restore" the democracy that they have never had.

Jacque brings me a cup of good coffee. "You have just been in the countryside. You have seen it. Tell me, what do you personally think should be done? What do you really think?"

What do I really think? I think that it could literally take centuries to heal the land and rebuild the topsoil. Geologic time. I think that we are doing everything wrong in Haiti that we can possibly do wrong. I think that without continuous food assistance programs, Haiti could experience a massive human die-off. But as I think of Jacque's family in the northwest, I dare not tell him what I really think. It's too cold-blooded.

So what would we have to do to make me feel that Haitians have any long-term chance? First, the Haitians would have to understand that their most serious problems are not just political, but environmental. Yes, the brutal kleptrocracy must end. But it will not help in the longterm if Aristide (a pro-natalist Catholic priest, no less) or any other "democrat" is restored to power, unless they recognize the gravity of Haiti's eco-catastrophe.

After a political change in Haiti, the Haitians would have to end most illiteracy within the next 15 years. The World Bank Development Report on Haiti has called for universal access to primary education for all six-year-olds by the year 2000. They would also have to incorporate a national health system with family planning as an integral part of services. Paul Ehrlich, author of such books as The Population Explosion, points out that population control can work in poor countries. Take Sri Lanka and China, for example, which have lowered birth rates by improving women's rights, focusing on maternal health and infant survival and using peer pressure as a motivator. The International Planned Parenthood Federation has stressed that women's literacy and empowerment are essential to stabilizing populations.

Teaching and implementing sustainable agricultural techniques are essential as well. CARE and other groups in Haiti are training local field agents to teach others proper terracing, soil-retention and irrigation techniques. These programs need to continue and grow.

Haiti needs to develop and rigidly enforce a national program to restore the topsoil and reforest the mountains. US AID, our foreign aid program, has funded the Agroforestry Outreach Project in Haiti to replant the hillsides with new species of fast-growing trees. They are teaching the farmers and charcoal makers to take an economic interest in allowing trees to grow for several years.

All goats and sheep must be banned. This may not be popular in Haitian culture, but it must be tried. Plant life won't reappear and replenish itself on areas already overgrazed by the "horned locusts."

Finally, Haiti must develop a longterm bridge with international agencies and private aid groups to finance these programs, and run them honestly--for once.

Will it happen? Not without international support. Already, according to the World Bank, two-thirds of all agricultural programs and three-fourths of all education are financed by international donor programs. The World Bank states that many of these programs are administered inefficiently, if not corruptly. But even so, these donor programs are the difference between life and death for many Haitians. Any reductions in them would be devastating.

Should the U.S. intervene? Given the level of environmental devastation in Haiti, there are no short-term solutions. True land restoration in Haiti could take centuries. Can the U.S. demonstrate this kind of commitment? Just look at the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia. Then keep in mind that Haiti is an international tar baby. Intervention will be costly, unrewarding and politically unpopular within the U.S.

But what is the alternative to intervention? The alternative is right in front of me, wherever I look. The bare mountains, the eroded fields, the hungry beggars waiting for me at the gate. Haiti is what happens when we have no long-term sustainable policies, and when we believe that problems are basically just political in nature, not environmental. The Haitians risk exposure, drowning and interdiction on the high seas because they feel that the risk of death by remaining in Haiti is even greater. They are truly environmental refugees. Without intervention, we can expect continued military brutality and increased prospects of mass starvation.

I gather up my things at the table and put my hand on Jacque's. "I cannot imagine the United States not sending food to the Haitians," I tell him. "I think the U.S. will not permit massive starvation so near to its borders. I think the U.S. will continue sending food to Haiti--for as long as it can."

As I get up to leave, he squeezes my hand. Then I walk quickly out the gate--before any beggars can intercept me.