Harry Barton Foreword (1 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. Scarce oversized hardcover, vii + 165 pages, b&w illustrations and maps in text, NOT ex-library. Outer page edges affected by age-spotting. Interior is clean, bright, untanned, with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Untorn dust jack shows moderate creasing along the edges. -- From the foreword: "[The Author] is the kind of traveller who moves slowly along the ground, on foot or bicycle, and who does not bother where he'll be at nightfall. In this book, he meets people, notices things and draws deductions. He is a pacifist, that brave stance. He feels strongly about the important things: the starvation, the cruelty, the disease, the slums and shanty towns, the destruction of trees and topsoil, the pollution of air and water, the arms race and the nation state. Like all the best travellers, he is very funny about travel." -- "Not every fact finding tour lasts upwards of a year, and few indeed are carried out on a bicycle. But this particular tale is even more unique, and not least because the author was probably one of the first to break through the Egyptian / Libyan border, closed by Gaddafi some years ago. So there is an adventurous and amusing side to this story, describing as it does extraordinary encounters with bugs, beasts and bureaucracies. But there is, there must be, a more serious side too. Because it's about Africa. In a recent media interview on the question of famine, a member of the Sudanese government compared the world to a human body, suggesting that we Europeans in the "healthy" torso would be unwise to think we could survive without treating the arm diseased or the stomach infected. The world, he went on to say, has got something very seriously wrong with one part of it; the rest of us ignore it at our peril. The causes of famine are slowly becoming clear: much of this tragedy is man-made. Firstly, the Ethiopians themselves have cut down too many trees, they've failed to control soil erosion, and they've wasted vast numbers of human and other resources on pursuing a pointless war. Secondly, we in Europe have also directly affected that famine; we too have been cutting down trees at an alarming rate, and what's more we are continuing to do so, in order to import those tropical hardwoods from Africa and South America; we are over-producing food at home and spending thousands maintaining it all in stores; we're consuming more than our fair share of the world's finite resources, like oil - and in so doing, we are continually adding to the already high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and acid rain; and we're also exporting weapons of war. If we do not stop what we're doing, then the starvation and poverty of Africa will grow, because the Sahel Belt will continue to march southwards, because the greenhouse effect of the increasing pollution will continue to make Africa even hotter. And if we don't solve this problem, then eventually the consequences upon climate and vegetation will be felt in Europe as well. Just like a gangrene in the arm or a cancer in the stomach, the disease which today is killing Africa will one day kill us too. Unless we change.".…