Darwin's Nightmare and Environmental Injustice and Racism

 

Deemed a “fully realized poetic vision” by David Denby of The New Yorker, Darwin’s Nightmare highlights the need for interdependence not only between human and nonhuman nature, but also among human and nonhuman species. The film chronicles the consequences of a little evolutionary experiment: introducing Nile Perch into Lake Victoria. Fifty years after their introduction, the perch have destroyed 210 species of African Cichlids that once thrived in the lake and controlled the lake’s oxygen levels, and now, according to the IUCN International Climate Congress in Kenya, falling oxygen levels coupled with the perch’s cannibalism may destroy the fishing industry, turning the lake into a “barren sinkhole.” 

The perch have destroyed the biotic community of the lake, with one species overwhelming all others, but the perch have also negatively affected the human community. As David Rooney asserts, the film’s director Hubert Sauper “focuses on the ripple effect of a globalized economy in a specific microcosm to weigh the casualties of the New World Order.” 

Their destructive behaviors may ultimately destroy the fishing industry, but their introduction into the lake has already changed the industry and the market that sustains it. With huge perch available for export, countries bordering on the lake, especially Tanzania, can no longer rely on the lake for sustenance. Fishermen no longer catch fish for themselves and their families. They catch perch for a factory where they are prepared for shipment to Europe where, according to the film, two million white people eat Victoria fish each day. 

Tanzanians are starving, then, because their lake has become a Darwinian nightmare marketplace for Eastern European businessmen and their pilots, who fly cargo planes into Tanzania for their load of perch. They provide nothing for the people living near the lake, but they do contribute even further to their impoverished state, since they bring arms to warring African countries, including Liberia, Zaire, the Congo, and Sudan, leaving more than a million dead. 

In return, pilots from Ukraine bring perch back to Europe, while hungry and orphaned Tanzanian children sleep on the streets. The human biotic community has disintegrated here. Tanzanians who once lived interdependently on the lake can no longer feed themselves. Their lake has been decimated, first by the Nile perch, and then by the European colonizers who further disrupt their community.