Initially a land is colonised when people can find food, clothing, shelter and peace.
Peace is actually the governing factor although “getting away from it all” for big city dwellers “all” included avoiding crime and military activity in most people’s minds.
Earth is so verdant that you can live anywhere; even in the tropics.
But in the tropics you are prone to diseases if the environment is rotten.
Lake Valencia for example, or Lake chad in the subtropics. And if you want bilharzia go to Lake Victoria and swim there or drink the water.
Lake Valencia would once have been a breeding ground for mosquitoes and subsequent malarial illnesses.But now it is too polluted even for mosquitoes; except that they probably love the pollution.
The answer would have been for the locals to farm ponds around the lake and keep them full of fish, especially wells with eels in. Carp ponds would have formed a barrier to most of the pests in a stagnant pool and provided the farmer with food for his family every few years.
But we overfish and exhaust everything we toutch and the planet reacts badly to our behaviour. Governments tend not to care if the incumbent has been in place too long and become complacent and rich. And too powerful for the population to get rid of. And these days mining and oil interests like to have very little interference from “greenies”.
They used to regularly kill the population of Venezuela if the locals got to vociferous about pollution and land grabbing. But Hugo Chavez out an end to that. Sadly he died recently and things will get back to normal soon as the rich and the foreign oil interests find out how to corrupt the present situation.
It’s been the same in Chad with politicians using religious persecution the way the Serbians did, as an excuse for mass genocide. Where were the oil interests then?
And why is lake Chad so digusting?
Malawi and the surrounding countries that used to be what the British called “Lakeland” or Tanganyika has had a history of misrule. This sort of thing tends to come about when the ruling family is supported by the most powerful tribe. Africans are easily led. Lots of effort has been put into keeping them ignorant.
And superstions abound in that region, where governments have been systematically robbing them for centuries.
Or did you think we British stopped such behaviour with the laws William Wilberforce struggled to get through Parliament?
So why did tropical countries get colonised?
I can’t imagine that the original inhabitants moved in with the sole idea of destroying the environment. This was not the case when whites entered the scene. The first things they did were to destroy the land’s balance to grow beef, then sugar and now soya. The soya is sold to Europe to feed pigs and chickens in inhumane cages.
So we have come full circle here in Britian with our abuse of out technology. While keeping slaves is overt these days (It’s all done in private in places like China and India.) We are still arrogant and ignorant abou what is done in our name.
This post was based on a chat I copied from Google. It looks like the code has carried over with it. What a shame this forum is so dead-loss.