Landscape, people and parks: environmental change in the Lower Omo Valley, South-western Ethiopia
Professor David Anderson has been successful in obtaining a major research award from the AHRC’s programme on ‘Environment and Landscape’, to be conducted in collaboration with Dr David Turton. The project commenced in June 2007, and will run for three years.
The Lower Omo Valley is one of the biologically and culturally most diverse regions of East Africa. It is home to nine different peoples, practising a wide range of subsistence activities (pastoralism, flood-retreat and shifting cultivation, hunting and fishing) and speaking seven different languages belonging to two of the four major African language families. Over the last 100 years it has undergone large-scale physical changes due to reduced rainfall over the Omo catchment. Since the 1960s, two national parks have been established and there is a growing tourist industry centrered, however, more on the local cultures than on wildlife. Over the next few years, two of the largest hydro-electric dams in Africa will be completed in the Upper Valley of the Omo. By reducing and regulating the annual flood, these dams will bring significant changes to the downstream landscape and environment.
The Lower Omo, therefore, is a good location for an interdisciplinary study of the interaction between people and the environment and of the culturally specific ways in which landscape is described, imagined and ‘constructed’. The aim will be to reach a detailed understanding of the sequence of environmental changes and vegetation history over the past 200 years; the way these changes have influenced, and been influenced by, the land-use practices, migratory and seasonal movements, social institutions and cultural values of the human population; and the impact of incorporation into wider political and economic processes on local understandings of landscape, locality and belonging. The results and findings will be targeted at historians, anthropologists and geographers working on African environmental history; at conservation scientists, environmentalists and policy-makers concerned with the role of human activity in environmental degradation and biodiversity loss; and at academics from a range of disciplines interested in the social construction of landscape, locality and belonging.
For more information about the Lower Omo and its peoples, go to www.mursi.org, a website dealing with one of the better known peoples of the area.