East and West. Environmental Awareness and Perceptions

In the West, people perceive their environment as it pertains to their own lives but also in terms of the big picture, ie, an oil spill off the Atlantic shore, forest fires in Southern California or the mother of all environmental issues: global warming; ozone depletion, or greenhouse gases; we can all feel unified under their threat: it affects all of us equally.

Our planet’s livelihood has found a voice among prominent spokespersons and high-profile environment lobbies, and their vehemence for the health of the globe is contagious: youth movements are born after them; people take notice of them.And after them, governments.

Environmental activism in Egypt for a while had been a low-profile operation. Concerns for the environment was the domain of a few well-informed individuals; Laila Kamal has mobilized her organization, the Association for the Protection of the Environment, to deal with the problem of burning garbage (some streets of Cairo are piled with garbage, and the zabaleen—trash collectors—are often overwhelmed, so people burn their trash to get rid of it). “We’re not working for USAID, she said. We’re already working on garbage solutions,” probably implying that the process by which funds are transferred in the country and eventually translated into new initiatives by the government is lengthy and marred by bureaucratic slowness—Egypt, and much of the developing world, suffers from that. Burning garbage usually includes the incineration of plastic, which releases toxic fumes into the air. Kamala is working at a grassroots level on improving the process of garbage collection and disposal.

The last few years have seen the emergence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as the Center for Environment and Development for the Arab, the Arab Office for Youth and Environment (they organize in groups and clean up Cairo’s neighborhoods), etc. In a way, these NGOs will have to work twice as heard as their counterparts in the West, because they will have to overcome people’s warped perceptions of pollution and the environment, ie, overcome the semantic dichotomy of bi’a and tallawuth (the environment as “one’s health,” or “social environment,” versus “pollution” as it relates to cleanliness).

In this group’s opinion, results are also achieved when individual behavior changes. In Egypt, as in the West, the individual must be made to understand that greehouse gas concentrations could leave future generations worse off. One example of an indirect way to reach out to people is through their purse: Cairo’s air is charged with sooty matter, suspended particulate matter; over time,these have deposited on famous monuments, like the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx, gradually turning the stones black; because tourism is very valuable to Egypt, NGOs have some leverage for raising issue with remaining smelter operations in the area and generally keep atmospheric pollution to a minimum.

Some progress has been made in recent history, like the passing of Law 4/1994 and the creation of the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency, but one could speculate that a sustained improvement of air pollution will not be reached until the establishment of core grassroots environmentalism in Egypt, ie, environmental activism as political actor. Egypt, one of the oldest civilizations in the world which has prevailed for thousands of years and Cairo, as a mega-city whose population is expected to expand significantly the next two decades should lead by example the rest of Africa in solving in pollution problem.