S
een from 36,000 kilometres above
the earth, Madagascar looks as if it
is bleeding. At the mouths of the
country’s biggest rivers is a smear
of rust-red, moving with the
currents, which turns out to be the
country’s distinctive laterite soil
leeching into the blue Indian Ocean.
Extreme deforestation, and thereby soil erosion, is impacting
the country so heavily that the damage is visible from space.
On the ground, driving through the night, I watched the
glow of bushres crackling through the undergrowth, the air
acrid with smoke. Deliberately ignited by subsistent farmers,
this behaviour is not easy to extinguish; communities clear
the land to cultivate smallholdings of rice and manioc or to
allow the growth of new green shoots to feed their cattle, or
perhaps because of superstition. All of this is hard to say no to.
But Madagascar’s natural landscape is vanishing; the country
has lost more than 90 per cent of its original forest. Travel
companies in the capital now refer to the patches of primary
forest as “pockets”; they told me they were “seriously worried”
about the future of their business and their homeland. I heard
tourists call the parks “disappointingly small”.
A few hours east of the capital I stood in one of these pockets
of forest. The compressed Andasibe National Park is the only
place in Madagascar—and therefore the world—where visitors
can see the largest species of lemur, the critically endangered
indri. Our guide had located a family and we veered o the
path, weaving down a steep hill in light drizzle, while craning
to look up into the canopy to spot a movement. There was one,
then another, instantly recognisable by their fuzzy coats and
graphic black and white markings; then through binoculars,
seeing their piercing pearly eyes, their delicate ingers
curled around branches. One lay stretched out, legs akimbo;
another balanced between two trees, its body drooping like a
hammock. The pair pulled at leaves and twitchily stole glances
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