There is a satellite image that has been travelling through slide decks and textbooks for decades. It shows the island of Hispaniola with a sharp line running through the middle: dark green on the right, brown on the left. The Dominican Republic is on the right, Haiti on the left. The border is visible from orbit.
The image is not doctored. The contrast is real. It simply does not carry the explanation that usually comes with it.
What the numbers say
In Haiti the share of primary forest in the national territory has fallen from 0.75 to 0.44 per cent, a loss of some 324 hectares a year, spread across small and heavily fragmented remnants. In the Dominican Republic the share dropped from 7.14 to 5.67 per cent, with a loss of around 2,704 hectares a year, mostly out of larger continuous stands.
At a glance
0.44 %
primary forest in Haiti
5.67 %
primary forest in the Dominican Republic
2,704
hectares lost per year on the Dominican side
The difference is real and it is large. But the numbers also show something the usual story leaves out: both sides are losing primary forest, and in absolute terms the Dominican Republic loses more hectares per year than Haiti. It simply has more left to lose.
The often quoted claim that Haiti has only two per cent forest cover does not hold up either. It comes from older surveys and is disputed in the research literature. Depending on what counts as forest, newer satellite analyses reach very different results. Tree cover outside closed forest, in fields and gardens for instance, is not counted at all in some methods.
What actually explains the contrast has nothing to do with national character.
Energy policy. The Dominican Republic restricted charcoal production and subsidised liquefied gas as a cooking fuel. In Haiti charcoal remained the only affordable fuel for many households. People without an alternative use what is there.
A political decision. Under François Duvalier, forests along the border were cleared deliberately, to make the area easier to control. In places the sharp edge in the satellite image is literally a security measure.
Terrain and rainfall. The island is not symmetrical. The Dominican east gets more rain, while the Haitian side lies deeper in the rain shadow of the mountains. Part of the difference was there before anyone took an axe to a tree.
The image shows a border. It does not explain it.
— TerraTally · Borders desk
The common reading goes like this: one country wrecked its environment, the other did not. It is convenient, because it lets an image stand in for an explanation. And it spares the reader the question of why people make charcoal when things are done differently on the other side of the line.
The answer is unspectacular: because most of them cannot do otherwise. Access to affordable fuel is a question of infrastructure and income, not of insight. For a household cooking on charcoal, the price per sack decides, not an attitude towards forests. Households on the Dominican side did the same arithmetic until they were given another option.
None of this makes the contrast smaller. It makes it explicable, and therefore something that could change.