Cairo Chronicles II: Egypt’s Environmentalism
Photo: Daisy Wright with permission for the CLC.
In the second instalment of her column, written on her Year Abroad, Daisy Wright gives her take on the debate about environmentalism in the Egyptian context.
Anyone who has visited Cairo will be well acquainted with the city’s pollution. Some mornings we wake up and much of the Nile and many of the skyscrapers that lie along it have disappeared. The first time we woke up to the polluted skyline we thought it was fog, it had such a strength that it was unthinkable that it could be solely pollution. But it was.
Environmental topics have become a kind of taboo in Egypt: in the run up to COP27 many of the environmental debates we are used to in the UK were off limits for academics and environmentalists hoping to change the conversation on climate change. Environmental damage, even pollution, became an issue that could see activists thrown into jail or exiled in order to silence their efforts that were seen as contrary to the regime. Yet this is the country that hosted COP27 last year in Sharm El Sheikh, being the backdrop for the world’s climate change agenda and solutions.
Environmentalism in Egypt doesn’t manifest itself in the same ways as it does in the West. The majority religion in Egypt is Islam, and so there is the theological argument that cleanliness is godliness. This means the word ‘environmentalism’ is actually linked to health and cleanliness, rather than climate change, making it a concern more immediately related to the demographic of the country and its residents rather than as the global struggle to combat climate change. Jamie Furniss highlights this divergence in the concept of ‘environmentalism’, calling the western concept of ‘environmentalism’ in Egypt a ‘marginal form of bourgeois elitism’ rather than a common concern of the masses. This is why Egyptian ‘environmentalism’ can actually translate into using single-use plastic because it maintains this cleanliness.
There is also the view that climate change is a problem created by the West and so it is in the remit of Western countries to deal with and remedy this problem. Taking these concepts in mind it becomes much easier to understand how concern for the environment does and doesn’t manifest in Egyptian daily life.
That Egypt is the biggest producer of plastic in the Arab World does not even surprise me: whenever you order anything on Talabat (Egypt’s Deliveroo), it comes wrapped like a christmas present in layers and layers of plastic; in the supermarkets they pack your shopping for you in an obscene number of plastic bags - sometimes with only one thing in each. Moreover, part of Egypt’s modernising project has been the creation of satellite cities. Picture an American suburb and that will give you a clearer idea of what these new settlements are like: green spaces, sprawling malls and organised housing blocks, except that they’re being built in the desert. This requires the use of vast water supplies, particularly to maintain these green spaces and gardens, in an arid landscape where such plants shouldn’t really be found.
However, there is hope for Egypt in the face of its plastic waste problem. Many governorates have started taking the initiative to ban the use of single-use plastic bags, with the Red Sea governorate getting the ball rolling in June 2019, although only Dahab and Alexandria followed suit in these post-pandemic years.
Elsewhere, Egypt’s garbage people, the zabbaleen, form a crucial part of Egyptian society. The largest settlement of these people is in ‘Garbage City’ (Mokattam village), and in many ways this seems to suggest rather negative connotations. But, the zabbaleen actually play a surprising role in the management of Egypt’s waste. Rather than dumping it all into landfills, the zabbaleen manage to recycle up to 80% of the waste they collect. An astounding amount when we take into consideration that Western garbage collectors can only manage to recycle up to 25% of the waste that they collect.
Egypt’s hosting of COP27 is vital for bringing the heavy costs of global warming that Africa bears into the consciousness of the West. Africa contributes a miniscule amount to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions yet it is the continent that is most affected by global warming.
Egypt’s hosting of COP27 is important too on a national level. It has brought the environment more into the forefront of the Egyptian consciousness, with environmental initiatives gearing up in the shadow of the conference. The Ministry of Awqaf, which is in charge of religious endowments, issued a book detailing the relationship between Islam and the environment. It emphasised the inclusion of environmentalism within islamic texts, suggesting that maintaining ecological stability and not harming the environment was a key message that its believers should implement. They also implemented a ‘Be Prepared for Green’ initiative to spread awareness of environmental damage and what the Egyptian population can do to help to reduce our effect on the planet.
So, environmentalism in Egypt is a mixed bag. The country doesn’t have a history of making the environment a priority when it comes to the construction of its infrastructure. Take for instance the Aswan High Dam: its construction was hailed as a symbol of Egyptian nationalism, resistance and independence in the face of the old colonial powers. But this came at a high cost, flooding much of the Nubian homelands and robbing the traditional farming communities of their livelihoods. The high volume water lost in the creation of Lake Nasser was hugely damaging, too. And yet the Aswan Dam has been a symbol of renewable power, contributing to almost 10% of Egypt’s electricity generation.
Egypt undoubtedly has a long way to go to resolve any of its environmental problems, particularly major city-wide problems such as the pollution in Cairo, but as Egypt continues to urbanise there are effective ideas and solutions being presented. We can’t be sure what the future holds for Egypt but it seems to be on the right path.