For Cairo's Environment, The Apocalypse Is Now - Daily Star (Lebanon)

[hatrack]

As summer tightens its grip on Cairo, Cairenes are flocking to cinemas to see the film "The Day After Tomorrow." That's because there is nothing like watching an incipient Ice Age bring America to its knees to ward off the summertime blues. In the film, ersatz satellite imagery shows Europe shrouded in frost, while Egypt wears its familiar shades of desert beige. This prompted cheers from the audience. "Not a brick on the pyramids was touched!" someone cried out. Having escaped a fictional disaster, audiences cheerily filed out into the steaming streets to greet the catastrophe at hand: at least four months of hellish heat while breathing some of the most lead-laden air on the planet.

Indeed, an air-conditioned movie theater is the closest most Cairenes will get to a summer holiday. The city will acquire its distinctive warm-weather parfum, something between sock and tuna casserole. People will grow wearier and more irritable as the weeks wear on and many of the old and very young will simply not survive. According to the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency, 15,000 to 20,000 deaths per year in Cairo are attributable to pollution-related causes. It's a safe guess that the figure is higher, and that many lives end in the summer, when poor ventilation in overcrowded housing, water shortages, poor or absent sewage, and heat waves conspire to cull the weak.

EDIT

Driving along Cairo's ring road past windowless warrens of unlicensed brick housing, one is met with the eye-watering reek of composting trash. In 2002, the Cairo and Giza governorates contracted foreign waste management companies (one Spanish, one Italian) to help get rid of approximately 6,000 tons of daily refuse. Trash still ends up in unsanitary landfills while officials squabble over land allotments for sanitary ones (decisions that might have formed the first, rather than the last considerations in the handling of the contract). The Italian company complains that it hasn't been properly paid and, therefore, cannot do its job or pay its 3,000 employees. Local authorities deny this and insist they are justified in imposing fines (deducted from the company's fee) for substandard performance. Meanwhile, the zabbalin - the community of more than 20,000 door-to-door trash collectors - were marginalized at the outset of the new waste management schemes, despite the fact that they had achieved one of the world's highest and most efficient trash-recovery rates (80 percent) using little more than their bare hands. Instead of developing the ways and means to expand a resourceful local enterprise, the government chose to deal with foreign companies possessing little understanding of the facts on the ground. The number of garbage fires smoldering across Cairo shows the wisdom of their decisions.

EDIT

Cairenes are in fact excluded from responsible participation in remedial actions by a government whose authoritarian strategies imply that people are only good for creating problems, not solving them. But there is also the tendency on behalf of Cairenes to embrace such exclusion and the irresponsibility that comes with it in a defiant, albeit self-injurious way. Nevertheless, many people wish heartily for rules to obey, so long as they are workable and applied consistently to rich and poor alike. Corruption may not appear on the list of pollutants, but it ranks right up there with lead and airborne fecal matter. Pollution is related to urban development, meaning the growth of certain kinds of industry and vehicular traffic, without proper planning and environmental controls. Yet while most of the world's population lives in developing cities like Cairo, their problems are addressed in the most piecemeal of fashions. The ozone depletion and North Atlantic current receive more attention than the causes behind the decay of world cities, as if the atmosphere were easier to fix than the Augean Stables on the ground."

EDIT