Haiti Can't Gain Ground on Erosion

Scientists working with the organization have developed briquettes made from compressed recycled paper that burn more efficiently and cleanly than charcoal, said Wynne, who operates a model farm here and works with international conservation and relief efforts. Bakeries are among the largest consumers of wood in Haiti, Wynne said, so the foundation is subsidizing conversion of their ovens to run on propane.

The U.S. Agency for International Development estimates that 71% of Haitian fuel consumption is of wood and charcoal. Last year the agency replaced 47,000 wood stoves with oil-fired burners and planted 600,000 trees in the most denuded and endangered regions.

But the baby steps toward education and recovery are drastically outpaced by behavior that few expect to change. As long as grinding poverty afflicts all but a tiny segment of this country, the majority of Haitians will be compelled to give priority to the daily demands of buying food and putting a roof over their families.

Although the government has 1,000 forest rangers to guard against wood poachers, men and women carrying bundles of slender tree trunks and logs brazenly tread the roadsides with their purloined burdens.

Fewer than 100,000 acres of forest are left in a country that was three-quarters woods when European explorers arrived five centuries ago -- Haitians have cut down all but about 1.5% of the original tree cover. The remaining woodlands are concentrated south of here in the La Visite and Foret des Pins national parks, unapproachable by vehicle in the rainy season because the surrounding roads have been washed out.

The consequences, seen in the low-lying slums of Port-au-Prince, are stunning. Knee-high muck -- mud, sewage, blown-off tin roofs, the occasional car -- covers the roads through Carrefour and Cite Soleil each morning until jobless men and boys can be induced by drivers' gratuities to shovel it to the side. At a car dealership on a sea-level plain near the airport, a lake of muck last month rose as high as the door handles, forcing much of the inventory off the sales lot.

Lerisson Beauvoir, a tailor who recently moved to Petionville from Les Cayes, rents a one-room shack perched precariously above a ravine -- into which dozens of similar structures have tumbled in recent rainstorms. He has rigged up troughs and drainpipes to divert water from the home's foundation but fears that the effort is only postponing the inevitable.

"There's no such thing as building codes. People just build wherever they want," he complained, gesturing at a new pink villa a mere dozen feet uphill from his house.

Norris, the horticulturist, acknowledged that rampant corruption in municipal governments allows reckless construction to persist. "There's a lot of advantage for officials to let people squat on state land. It's a very profitable business."