Tootfinder

"Fifty billion trees by 2030: how Ethiopia is recruiting citizens across the country to plant, plant, plant"
#Ethiopia #Trees #Environment

Fifty billion trees by 2030: how Ethiopia is recruiting citizens across the country to plant, plant, plant
After losing much of its forests in recent decades, the country’s people have led the way in planting saplings across the country as part of the government’s Green Legacy Initiative

RE: https://dair-community.social/@ZekuZelalem/117320888712641893
There's a bit of context behind this that's worth being aware of, and I'll do my best to explain it second (or third) hand. Abiy Ahmed has been the prime minister of Ethiopia since 2019. He was quite popular initially, but has held on to power for quite a while and has been called out for authoritarian tendencies.
His party, the Prosperity Party, is a liberal party that has privatized parts of the economy and is trying to dismantle ethnic federalism. This type of "modernization" is obviously supported by neoliberal forces around the world, especially since he took over from the ethno nationalist ML TPLF.
The TPLF was also authoritarian, brutal, and anti-democratic, as one would expect from an ML organization. Part of Abiy's popularity came from opposition to the TPLF. But more recently, but his forces also carried out genocide in Tigray during that war in 2022 (after his Nobel Peace Prize).
Part of the opposition to his modernization is that ending ethnic federalism would weaken the power of older ethnic structures. This could be seen as similar in some ways to conflicts across Europe in from 1848 through to the early 1900's and in the Balkans after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The connection between ethnicity and nationality has never really stopped causing problems. Liberalism is usually connected to the domination of one ethnic group into a singular national identity. This flows from the French Revolution, through the Russian revolution, and into both the Ethnic ML exported by Communist Russia as part of their attempts to weaken European capitalism and (via both American Colonial Nationalism and the French Revolution) into the Neoliberalism promoted by the US and European powers as a counter.
Ethiopia is a multiethnic country. Unfortunately the logic of the state (liberal or communist) tends to destroy these ethnic identities through a combination of ethnic cleansing, appropriation, and (often forced) integration.
Some of the conflict here is coming out of the tension between a national identity and ethnic identity, especially in relation to Tigray and Amhara, as well as the continued pressure of economic liberalization, and centralization vs federalization.
The point is that it's actually quite a bit more complicated than it may be presented as, especially outside of the religion. European interests may align with Abiy, and present him as a "modernizing force." Addis is one of the centers of the African Union. Meanwhile, other countries have their own interests in stoking this conflict. China, Turkey, the UAE, and Iran all sell drones to the Federal government. Eretria has an interest in creating a buffer zone to keep Ethiopia from seizing a port city from them. Sudan is involved, and I don't have the local political depth to know why.
Various groups will try to point to one group or another as the "good guy/bad guy" but it's definitely not that simple. It's just kind of tragic for everyone. I hope Ethiopian people find peace and freedom.
My hope is that Ethiopia will develop something like Democratic Confederalism that resolves these conflicts and tensions without wiping out the unique identities of the peoples who make up Ethiopia.

And, yeah, there are both anarchists in Ethiopia and anarchist adjacent ideas. This was a good interview. I'd love to read or listen to more (if anyone knows any):
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anner-an-ethiopian-anarchist-perspective-on-the-war-in-tigray

In the Irish potato famine, Ireland exported record quantities of wheat; in the 1943 famine in Bengal, Bengal was exporting masses of rice; in the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980s, Ethiopia bought helicopter gunships with the profit from exporting water melons.
People don't die in famine because there is no food: they die because they can't afford the food there is.
As @…

The fruits we see
We see pictures of fruit on our phones — apples, oranges, strawberries, bananas. Bright colors, ordinary things that most people rarely think twice about. We look at them for a long time, almost as if our eyes are trying to taste what our mouths cannot. The painful truth is that we are not kept from these foods because they are forbidden or unavailable by choice. Sometimes, we simply cannot afford them

Popular Front recently did a piece on the current conflicts in Ethiopia:
https://popularfront.substack.com/p/everything-you-didnt-know-about-the
It's a good primer for anyone who's unfamiliar, but is definitely lacking if you know any Ethiopian folks or pay attention to much news out of the Horn of Africa.
The interplay between authoritarian liberal nationalism, as represented by Abiy Ahmed and his government, and tribal federalism , represented by various tribal factions, reads to me very similarly to the liberalization of Europe (enclosure of the commons, a push to sacrifice ethnic identities for nationalist ones, etc). Like the liberalization of, say, France, it's a lot more complicated than "old thing bad, new thing good."
Liberalism was violent and authoritarian. It often sacrificed leftists. Liberalism's focus on borders and national identity led directly to pogroms and Nazism. Similarly, liberalization of Ethiopia has led to genocide and ethnic cleansing.
People think of "the terror" in France as a leftist thing, but it wasn't. It was a Liberal thing, centrist extremism, carried out against right and left.
I understand that tribal federalism is also not a good system, but I don't have a ton of depth so I'm not going to try to explain it. During the European Liberal revolutionary period of 1848, ethnic minorities would often side with some monarch or emperor against liberalism out of fear of liberal nationalism. It makes sense to support a system that's bad if your other option is a nationalism that erases your identity.
But even in Europe at that time, anarchism offered an alternative but that alternative often also drew from simply a different branch of liberalism that also suppressed culture and identity. Today the world is different. Democratic Confederalism offers a solution to *exactly* this problem, tested for more than a decade in Syria and developing now in Myanmar.
But the cross pollination between Syria and Myanmar in terms of fighters really made the ideological cross pollination possible. I don't think anything like that is happening now in Ethiopia.
Eurocentrism makes it easy to ignore what's happening now, but Addis Ababa is the seat of the African Union Commission. Ethiopia is a major military power in the region, so these developments carry a lot of weight. Especially as the US collapses and the world becomes more multipolar, the development of regional powers like Ethiopia will have a big impact on how that part of the continent develops.
If any folks are more familiar with Ethiopia than I am (which shouldn't be hard since I'm basically not), please correct me or add context if anything is missing or wrong.

Borders are the worst idea humanity has ever come up with. People fucking move all the time. That's *normal* and has been throughout human history. Borders don't just promote genocide, as in the case of Syria/Turkey or Ethiopia. They *are* genocide. There are and have been migratory people. That's just one of the (absolutely fucking legitimate) strategies of human survival. Borders destroy migratory cultures.
From the US and ICE, to AfD and all the rest of the European far right bullshit, to Turkey's incursions into Syria, to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it's all the same shit over and over again because of these fucking imaginary lines that kill so many people.

Ethiopian Farmers Save Thousands by Switching to Solar Irrigation–While Cutting Emissions https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ethiopian-farmers-save-thousands-by-switching-to-solar-irrigation/

Ethiopian Farmers Save Thousands by Switching to Solar Irrigation–While Cutting Emissions
Farmers in Ethiopia are slashing growing costs while increasing the yields, and protecting the environment with solar-powered irrigation.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #LateJunction
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou:
🎵 Ethiopia My Motherland
#EmahoyTseguéMaryamGuèbrou
https://open.spotify.com/track/1mcfwUyNM2qcZg5WtKqZY8

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #TheFirstTimeWith
Alewya:
🎵 Ethiopia
#Alewya
https://alewya.bandcamp.com/track/ethiopia
https://open.spotify.com/track/4WETP6SQJlAs3yXPLR4LPS