Remember That Earthquake in Haiti? Douglas Brinkley Does.

Just back from Haiti, historian Douglas Brinkley told Imus, “It’s true hell down there.”

He spent time with Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) like Doctors Without Borders and Habitat for Humanity, and witnessed a once prominent country club transformed into a homeless camp.

“Just below where people used to dine at the golf club, on the fairway itself, were just 60,000 people in a makeshift village with awful sanitation,” said Brinkley, a professor at Rice University and author of, most recently, The Wilderness Warrior. “The stench…you had to almost cover your mouth as you walked.”

With Haiti’s rainy season on the way, many of the makeshift homeless villages that have been established in valleys face the possibility of huge mudslides.

“Nobody knows what to do,” said Brinkley. “They’re trying to move like 50,000-people camps to different locations, but everybody’s afraid to go back to their home—either because it was destroyed or partially damaged, or the fear of being inside when another earthquake hits.”

One of the Haiti’s biggest and least recognized problems, according to Brinkley, is its deforestation. “There’s just no trees,” he said. “They cut everything down, and it creates all sorts of health problems.”

The reason for the massive tree loss is directly linked to Haiti’s pervasive poverty, with people chopping down trees to use for firewood and other reasons. “They never had conservation or resource management, so the land is scarred and it’s like a dustbowl condition there,” said Brinkley.

Go to the five “worst places” in the world, he posed, and “You would find them tree-less. Society minus trees creates just a network of problems.”

The landscape is “sparse,” “skinned,” and “denuded,” Brinkley added, predicting that in the long term, “It’s going to take a lot of agricultural training of how to replant and kind of create sustainable living there. It’s probably the most hellish and maybe impossible project of any in our hemisphere.”

He doesn’t see how Haiti ever rebounds. While nobody appears to be starving to death, the food they’re eating is mainly American junk food, the remnants of which are tossed into omnipresent, heaping piles of garbage.

On a somewhat lighter note, Brinkley is also working on two books right now, one about Alaska, and the other a biography of Walter Cronkite, in which Brinkley describes the acrimonious relationship between Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow.

“Oh great!” said Imus, excited at the idea of any sort of rift whatsoever within the news media, past or present. “I love those kinds of stories.”

-Julie Kanfer