Just two weeks after France said it will no longer allow the sale of gas- and diesel-powered autos after 2040, the United Kingdom has followed suit. In addition, the UK announced it is also exploring ways to tax the dirtiest vehicles on the road as a way to lower current air pollution levels in the most-affected local areas. About half of all cars registered in the UK each year are diesel-powered; electric and hybrid vehicles, although a growing market, still represent a tiny fraction of all new cars sold there. Experts predict that should start to shift in the mid-2020s as prices become more competitive.
How Changing Our Diet Could Save Animals from Extinction
It's not just your personal choices. Global policy also matters, according to new research.
Transforming large swaths of the tropics into farmland could render almost one-third of wildlife there extinct, new research suggests.
From the Amazon rain forests to the Zambezi floodplains, intensive monoculture farming could have a severe adverse impact on wildlife around the world.
Wildlife would disappear most dramatically in the remaining forests and grasslands of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. The greatest species loss would occur in the Peruvian Amazon basin where as many as 317 species could vanish as a result of agricultural development.
As a doctoral researcher at Humboldt University Berlin, I studied human food consumption, land use and how they affect wildlife. Our research was published July 17 in Nature Ecology and Evolution.
While human population has doubled since 1970, the number of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians have dropped by more than half. At its root, this widespread environmental destruction is a result of our growth as a species and increasing food consumption to sustain ourselves.
Although climate change casts a shadow over future conservation efforts, farming is the number-one threat to wildlife. We have already altered some 75 percent of the ice-free land on this planet. If we continue along our current course, we will need to double our crop production to feed a growing world population that demands more resource-intensive foods such as meat and dairy.
Africa at risk
Our research shows that Sub-Saharan Africa is particularly at risk of harmful agricultural development. This region is at the crossroads of economic, demographic and agricultural growth, and minimizing potential effects of agricultural change there is an urgent challenge.
This becomes more worrying when considering the percentage of land that is currently at risk (i.e. natural but arable) and not protected against future development. Four-fifths of the regions we identify at risk of farmland expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa are unprotected. This is less than half of the 43 percent protected in Latin America.
Some may mistakenly believe that protecting land from farming is about preserving wildlife habitat while local people go hungry. But it’s not a binary choice. Instead, the goal is to ensure an ample supply of nutritious food while at the same time conserving the most biodiverse and unique places on Earth. This is possible if we try. Knowing in advance what areas are most at risk allows us to better plan for a more sustainable future.
Aside from protecting land, food can be grown at little to no cost to biodiversity. For example, small-holder agro-ecological farming, which uses diverse cropping techniques along with fewer chemical fertilizers and pesticides, can produce large quantities of nutritious food at little to no cost to wildlife.
We need to increase awareness of agro-ecological farming methods and secure local people’s land-holder rights — a crucial step to preventing large foreign corporations from buying up land for monoculture farming.
Communities adopting agro-ecological techniques is a win-win solution that goes a long way towards sustainably feeding the world without pushing wildlife towards extinction.
What can policy makers do?
Current large-scale conservation schemes are based on factors that include past habitat loss and the threatened status of species, but none include the potential for future land-use change. We need to do a better job of predicting future pressures on wildlife habitat, especially because timely conservation action is cheaper and more effective than trying to fix the damage caused by farming. Our research takes a step in this direction.
We also show which countries could do with more support for conservation initiatives to protect land and find ways to sustainably grow food. Suriname, Guyana and the Republic of the Congo are just a few examples, as well as a number of countries in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa that are at the center of high agricultural growth, low conservation investment and very high numbers of species that could be lost due to agricultural development.
Since most agricultural demand comes from richer nations, those countries should provide education and support for sustainable farming methods and locally led conservation efforts.
What can you do?
All of this raises the question: How can we eat well without harming wildlife? One simple step we can all take right now that would have a far greater impact than any other (aside from having fewer children): Cut out the grain-fed beef.
The inefficiency of feeding livestock grain to turn them into meals for humans makes a diet heavy in animals particularly harsh on the Earth’s resources. For example, in the United States, it takes 25 kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef. Pigs have a grain-to-meat-ratio of 9:1, and chickens are 3:1.
Imagine throwing away 25 plates of perfectly good food to get one plate of beef — the idea is absurd and would likely be news if done en masse. But that is precisely what we are all unknowingly doing by eating resource-intensive meat. Articles on food waste seem half-baked when keeping in mind the bizarre grain-to-meat ratio of many of our most popular meats.
There are ways in which farmers can raise livestock with little to no environmental damage, particularly when land is not overgrazed and trees remain on the landscape. Indeed, in some remote areas grazing cattle are a crucial source of food and nourishment. Unfortunately, the industrialized feedlot model that relies heavily on grain makes up the overwhelming majority of the meat in your supermarket. That is the kind of farming that our research investigates.
Livestock and deforestation
To make matters worse, the grain we feed animals is the leading driver of deforestation in the tropics. And it’s a hungry beast: our cows, pigs, and poultry devour over one-third of all crops we grow. Indeed, the grain we feed to animals in the U.S. alone could feed an additional 800 million people if it were eaten by us directly — more than the number of people currently living in hunger.
Livestock quietly causes 10 times more deforestation than the palm oil industry but seems to get about 10 times less media attention. While it’s certainly true that avoiding unsustainable palm oil is a good idea, avoiding eating animals that were raised on grain is an even more effective conservation tactic.
Feeding the world without damaging nature is one of the greatest challenges humanity faces. But with a little foresight, better land governance and some simple meal changes, many of the solutions are at arm’s length.
For wildlife’s sake, go forth and enjoy your veggie burgers.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
On the Fence
Conservation fences protect nearby forests, but do they leave some people unexpectedly vulnerable?
On one side of the fence is a Kenyan forest, cool and misty due to the high elevation of the peaks and valleys. As you move away from the fence and deeper into the forest, the vegetation becomes denser and lush green light envelops you. Under the forest canopy an ecosystem teems with wildlife, including large mammals such as elephants, cape buffalos, rhinos, and the critically endangered eastern mountain bongo, of which there are thought to be fewer than 100 left in the wild.
On the other side of the fence is a community of families who have historically depended on the forest for their livelihoods. For them the forest contains fuelwood, water, building materials, medicinal herbs, grazing land, honey and game meat. There are even sacred spaces, trees that hold cultural significance, and caves where elders go to slaughter a goat and stay for weeks to pray.
The fence that stands between the forest and the community was put in place by conservation organizations in conjunction with the Kenyan government, in the hope of decreasing forest loss. In recent years human activity such as logging, charcoal burning, and clearing for farming has caused large areas of forests in Kenya to disappear. By surrounding the forest, the fence is meant to conserve the country’s main sources of water and the tourist-attracting wildlife that live in the forest habitat. The fence also keeps wildlife inside the forest instead of in the community, where animals like elephants have been known to destroy entire crops in a single night, leaving families without the food they depend on for survival.
On paper, fencing is a very convincing tool to reach conservation goals. It serves as a physical barrier between humans and forest, of course, but also provides a visual reminder and warning to potential trespassers. With a clear boundary created, the hope is that the forests will remain and recover.
And indeed, in areas where there was once heavy forest destruction there are signs of reduced human disturbances. For example, in some parts of Kenya’s Aberdare Range, where a fence project was completed in 2009, instances of cutting down indigenous trees within the forest to produce charcoal have decreased.
I’ve seen all of this firsthand. For my Ph.D. dissertation I spent the past year conducting research concerning the social impacts of conservation initiatives on forest-adjacent communities in Kenya. Hundreds of household surveys across four forest communities have shed light on the positive and negative effects that fencing of forests has on nearby families.
Local people living near forests in Kenya tell me they are overwhelmingly supportive of the conservation of their forests. Beyond the daily uses for their households, they understand the importance of their forests and the role they play in bringing rain and fresh air.
However, placing a barrier where there once was none has the potential to create unintended negative consequences. In some locations a newly placed fence cuts off a source of water previously used by community members, and households must find water elsewhere. As a result, some of the households end up relying on manmade dams, with stagnant water that’s shared by cattle. In other instances, the placement of a fence has cut off key access routes used to collect firewood for cooking. Women and children who once walked freely only a few meters to reach the forest edge now must walk several kilometers to access the main gate and present a permit to enter. Valuable time is lost that could otherwise be used for earning money or studying for school.
There is an even darker side. In some rare cases, recounted to me at one site during my interviews, the placement of a fence has brought cases of sexual assault to women and girls in the community. With a fence comes new employment for guards, who are hired by the national government and travel rotate to posts around the country. Women who enter the forest, they told me, are vulnerable to sexual assault. Because many of them rely on the forest to provide for their families, they fear reporting in case of backlash from the forest guards. It’s hard to quantify these cases due to the lack of official investigation, but they remain an important issue that needs to be discussed.
As is true in many fields, success stories and positive impacts of conservation plans are eagerly reported, while negative results are less publicized. That lack of publicity doesn’t mean that they have no effect, however. Although these adverse consequences are unintended, the question remains concerning who is responsible for helping to resolve them. Should conservationists and their organizations be involved in following up on the negative effects that occur as a result of their conservation initiatives? When protecting the forest is the main goal, what level of responsibility do these organizations have in preventing and then treating the negative symptoms?
My year of data collection is drawing to a close, and as I prepare to write my dissertation and defend my work, I find myself asking these questions and wrestling with the answers. Conservation is often a field of more questions than answers, more setbacks than successes, and sometimes more challenges than rewards. It is difficult and exhausting to celebrate the new growth of trees that might not otherwise exist if it were not for your effort, while at the same time face the challenge of a family that depends on those trees for their very existence. As conservationists, researchers and nature enthusiasts, we may find that fencing and other tools are useful to protect and restore wildlife and habitats. If we look, we may also find that our conservation tools have unintended negative impacts on vulnerable populations. This is not something to hide from, but rather an opportunity to be transparent and a chance to work toward solutions that demonstrate the value and importance of all forms of life.
© 2017 Margit Bertalan. All rights reserved.
The opinions expressed above are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity, or their employees.
Previously in The Revelator:
Elephant Seals: Diving Through Garbage
Oceanic plastic poses an increasing threat for these top predators.
Northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) spend most of their lives 1,000 feet and deeper below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, foraging for food in the cold dark — but even that’s not far enough down to escape the impact that humans have on the oceans.
In one well-known case in November 2011, an imperiled young elephant seal dragged himself out of the surf and flopped on the beach at Central California’s Piedras Blancas beach, about three hours’ drive south of Monterey. A green plastic packing strip dug into the flesh around his neck, slowly strangling him.
He was lucky. A group of tourists observed his plight from the scenic overlook on Highway 1 and reported him to rescuers at the Marine Mammal Center San Luis Obispo Operations Center, 35 miles south. Elephant seal encounters are restricted by the Marine Mammals Protection Act, so the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had to sign off on rescue efforts. Once that was done, a team came to the beach to sedate him, cut the plastic strap off, treat his wound and set him free.
After he returned to his ocean home, he was identified in rescue-center records as “Green Tie,” for obvious reasons. I was delighted when he showed up in 2013, easily identified by his distinctive scar. I’ve spent one morning a week on the bluff as a docent, watching the seals and talking to visitors, since 2007. That day I took this picture of him from that vantage point.
He’d become a regular to the rescue team by then. They’d responded to another call reporting him entangled in 2012, but it turned out it was only the scar from the 2011 entanglement — so deep observers thought he was still wrapped in plastic. They couldn’t see the orange tag on his left rear flipper that indicated he’d previously been treated. After he was sedated, the veterinarian found that the scar, so deep that skin folded over on itself, was irritated — a simple skin dermatitis, rather than a plastic noose.
Since then, Green Tie comes back to the beach at least once a year. Now an adult, he’s become a successful alpha male beachmaster, reigning over a harem of 30 or so females and defending breeding rights against less dominant males.
A Colorful Opportunity
Compared to the well-studied site at Ano Nuevo, the elephant seal colony at Piedras Blancas isn’t well documented — yet. Dr. Heather Liwanag, professor of marine science at nearby California Polytechnic University, is organizing her students to start tagging seals to collect baseline data.
“So many things about these seals are unanswered,” Dr. Liwanag says. Identifying individual seals of known age allows her and her students to follow behavior, such as when (or if) a female pups and how long she stays on the beach. “If it’s a tagged animal, we can follow its progress. Establishing a baseline of known-age animals will help us understand the age structure of population, when they come to sexual maturity, and develop hypotheses about them.”
Green Tie’s unique double scar makes him easy to spot. Otherwise, it’s tricky to tell one seal from another. They’re migratory, so the population on the beach is constantly changing, with seals coming and going. The small colored plastic ID tags currently attached to their back flippers are difficult for observers to read. The tags are only an inch and a half long, and the tiny numbers are often rubbed down by contact with sand, even if you get close enough to read them.
Liwanag is reviving a technique that’s been used before: dyeing identifying numbers eight inches tall on each seal’s fur that can be read from a distance. She and her students will use Clairol’s Nice ’n Easy hair color on a wooden template to stamp the seals from broom-handle-length. They’ll mark adult females as well as young seals that already have flipper tags. Dyed numbers will need at least annual replacement as the seals molt.
“We will mark any adult that has a flipper tag, so we can keep track of animals that are already tagged,” she says. “In future years, when we have a lot of tagged animals, both tagged moms and tagged pups, we’ll be able to get a feel for everybody. We intend to mark a good chunk of the population.”
The data will provide insight into how the Piedras Blanca population compares with the population at Ano Nuevo in behavior and physiology. Are the seals at Ano Nuevo, where guides lead visitors onto the beach among the seals, more acclimated to the presence of humans than seals at Piedras Blancas, where the public must stay on the bluffs above the beach? Does it influence their reproductive success or their weight?
The larger ID numbers make it easier for visitors, docents and other citizen scientists to report sightings. Liwanag and her students will be able to track individual seals and establish facts about their lives, such as when they pupped and where, and when they move from one rookery to another. Having factual data will help relate the seals’ body condition and movements to climatic conditions, population changes and other events.
Liwanag works closely with Marine Mammal Center. Her research permit allows her to be on the beach more often than the center’s restricted permit for rescue. When Liwanag and her students encounter entangled seals, the rescue team can join them on the beach instead of having to wait for permission. If they wait too long, an injured seal may leave the beach or move to another location.
The plastic problem is likely to get worse as more garbage is dumped into the ocean.
The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis reported that between 4.8 million and 12.7 million metric tons of plastic waste entered the oceans in 2010, a figure that could increase by an order of magnitude by 2025.
The NOAA Marine Debris Program’s Marine Debris Monitoring and Assessment Project invites citizen scientists to report the amount and type of marine debris they find on their beaches. Similarly, California’s Coastal Cleanup Day, held annually in September since 1985, collects millions of pieces of plastic trash. It helps, but it’s not keeping up with the volume being discarded. California has banned single-use plastic bags, but plastic water bottles, cups, plates and utensils, straws, foam takeout containers and construction material continue to pour into the oceans. A gray whale with its head stuck in a crab trap was monitored as it swam north along the California coast earlier this year.
The increasing threats make the work Liwanag and her students, the Marine Mammal Center’s volunteers and staff, and other watchdog groups are doing more urgent. Making identification more visible will help protect these top predators and their role in the ecosystem.
“I hope to increase the conversation,” Liwanag says. “Part of the study will be to increase awareness that we are researching the seals. It’s important that we do what we do. Part of the process is how to communicate properly.” It’s not an easy job, but the Nice ’n Easy will make it a little bit less difficult.
Utilities Knew About Climate Change in 1968
A stunning new report reveals that utilities knew about the potential dangers of climate change nearly 50 years ago. Scientists first warned the electric utility industry about CO2 emissions back in 1968, according to a report from the watchdog Energy & Policy Institute. Then, during the 1970s and 1980s, utilities actually sponsored what the watchdog agency calls “cutting edge” climate-change research. Knowing that this could cause a shift away from fossil fuels, some utilities started a disinformation campaign against climate change, something that some industry players continue to do today.
Film Fakery: Does Shark Week Harm Conservation Efforts?
Critics say the blood-soaked quest for ratings presents an image far from reality.
Tiger Shark Terror. Great White Shark Serial Killer Lives. Great Hammerhead Invasion. Australia’s Deadliest Shark Attacks. These are just a few of the programs airing this week during Discovery Channel’s annual Shark Week and NatGeo Wild’s copycat, Sharkfest. Undoubtedly these programs will attract their usual massive ratings, but they may be guilty of the same kinds of film fakery that plagues many wildlife films, where the images on your screen don’t tell a full or even truthful story. In the process, experts warn the films may actually send the wrong conservation message and harm endangered species.
“The term ‘fakery’ has many nuances to it,” says Chris Palmer, founder of the Center for Environmental Filmmaking at American University in Washington, D.C. Palmer shined a light on some of the worst aspects of wildlife filmmaking in his 2010 book and 2013 documentary Shooting in the Wild. Shark Week, he says, typifies one of the most common aspects of film fakery, where producers create a mistaken impression in the audience’s minds about what goes on in the wild. “With Shark Week, people get to see sharks as being dangerous and man-eating because that’s what gets ratings. The networks are looking for that male demographic, age 21 to 35, so they push sensational shots of sharks chomping down on people.”
Palmer, who has won two Emmy Awards for his own wildlife films, believes that pushing this misinformation — that sharks are nothing but dangerous killing machines — can hurt conservation efforts. “The wrong perception can lead to misperceptions and in the end, I think, hurt public policy toward these animals,” he observes. “One has to wonder how that affects work that goes on at CITES [the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species] and places like that where we try to get international protection for sharks. If the populace is thinking of sharks as dangerous, why would anyone save them? That makes it harder, I think, to do the right thing.”
Real or fake?
Demonizing animals is just one of the many kinds of fakery tainting the wildlife filmmaking industry. Another kind of deception involves manipulating events to get the “right” shots on film. That might include leaving food out for animals, dosing a carcass with candy, drugging animals so they don’t move or pushing them toward the camera. “The worst case is when you put predator and prey together to get photographs,” Palmer says. Although this technique has been employed extensively in the past, he calls it immoral: “You get these dramatic shots, but people don’t see animals as they really are.”
In other cases, what appears to be on camera isn’t completely true even if it may seem to be that way on the surface. Some films claim to follow the story of specific animals, although the footage is of multiple individuals edited together to tell a “real” story. In other films, discordant shots are edited together to depict something that could not be filmed in the wild. Sir David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet series infamously mixed footage of polar bears in the wild with sequences shot in a zoo. This created a scandal a few years ago when viewers found out, and the Discovery Channel added a disclaimer when it brought the series to the U.S.
A more subtle kind of fakery can occur in the editing stages. Filmmakers might be in the field for months at a time, getting limited shots of their subjects every few weeks. But all too often those short shots can be edited together to make it seem as if they occurred in a very short sequence. “The final film looks like there are a lot of these rare animals,” Palmer says. “People watching it are saying to themselves, ‘Well, golly, what’s the problem? I was just watching this film, and I see hundreds of these chimps or these white-tipped oceanic sharks or whatever,’ and then they don’t realize that the film has been put together with very little footage because it’s hard to find these animals.”
The risk to wildlife
In addition to fakery, Palmer points out that the animals themselves are often endangered by filmmakers. “We get too close, we harass them, we’re desperate to get the money shots,” he says. “And we go in so close and bother them that some of the animals even get killed.” Ethical codes for filmmakers should prevent this from happening, but they lack enforcement. “They set a marker, but if someone breaks them there is no one in the field to say, ‘Don’t do that,’” Palmer says.
Many filmmakers may find themselves placed under extreme corporate pressure to get dramatic footage of rare and endangered species. Because most crews contain just one or two people and no one is in the field watching, circumstances can lead to cutting corners. “No one’s looking at you,” Palmer says. “It’s very easy to do things that no one would know about.” He notes that there aren’t any real metrics about this, because people don’t admit it, but it happens: “The only time you hear the truth is at 2 A.M. after a few beers.”
The public’s role
The public can have a role in reducing film fakery, whether it’s during Shark Week or on another wildlife program. “I would encourage people to be a little skeptical and ask questions,” he says. “How did they get that shot? Is the animal being controlled? Did that animal come from a game farm where it was held under inhumane conditions? Especially for endangered species, how was it treated? Did the filmmakers keep their distance so the animal was undisturbed or was the animal harassed and chased down to get good footage?” Asking television networks these questions, he suggests, can lead to change: “All of these networks are sensitive. I think if the public speaks up, they will do a better job.”
Although he expresses a lot of criticism for fakery, Palmer does think that wildlife filmmaking can have a very positive effect, even in cases where the narrative plays loose with a few facts to pull at heartstrings. “People who love the film may vote in a positive way for senators and congressmen who will vote in a more sustainable manner,” he asserts. “That may be an example where fakery is, if you like, pro-conservation.”
A version of this article appeared in 2013 at Scientific American.
Cecil the Lion Redux
Two years after the infamous shooting of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe, one of his sons has also been shot and killed. Xanda, a six-year-old father with his own cubs, wandered outside of protected Hwange National Park earlier this month and was legally shot by a trophy hunter. Like Cecil before him, Xanda carried a radio collar as part of a long-term scientific research effort. Conservationists now fear that Xanda’s seven cubs could die as other males vie to take over for the late pride leader.
The Last Vaquitas: “I’ve Seen More Dead Than Alive”
Trying to save this species from extinction also means being witness to their destruction.
Trying to save one of the rarest species on Earth takes an emotional toll on you.
“It’s horrible,” says Captain Oona Layolle. “It’s really hard on everyone in the crew.”
Layolle is the campaign leader for the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s Milagro III mission, which just returned from the Gulf of California after a six-month effort to save the critically endangered vaquita porpoise (Phocoena sinus) from extinction. The most important part of their mission — a partnership with the Mexican government — involved finding and removing illegal gillnets set by fishermen to capture another local species, the totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi), whose swim bladders that sell for thousands of dollars a pound to Chinese investors. The indiscriminate gillnets, set and anchored into place, capture and kill totoaba, vaquita and everything else that crosses their paths.
“I have never in my life seen so many dead animals,” says Layolle. “Whales, dolphins, sharks, sea turtles…it’s crazy. We see the dead every day.” She sighs. “It’s gotten so it’s almost kind of normal to me now.” All told this year the Milagro crew pulled 1,195 dead animals from 233 illegal nets and fishing lines.
The list of the dead includes five dead vaquita, a species whose population had already declined to just 30 animals by the end of last year and which may fall to as few as 15 by 2018.
“A dead vaquita is the last thing we want to see,” Layolle says. “I’ve seen more dead than alive.” At least one of this year’s dead vaquita was a newborn or fetal animal, possibly pushed out by its mother in a vain attempt to save it from death in a net.
The nets weren’t the only place they found dead animals. At the end of the mission, the crew walked the 27 kilometers of beach between the Mexican towns of San Felipe and Santa Clara and found themselves on a killing field. “The beach of San Felipe was littered with the bones of totoaba,” Layolle reports. “We photographed and measured 384 totoaba heads.” The bodies were all that remained after fishermen carved out the totoabas’ valuable swim bladders.
But even amidst this catastrophic level of mortality, life persists. Sea Shepherd rescued nearly 800 live animals from nets this year, including several totoaba, many of which barely clung to life by the time they were discovered. “When we find them, most of the time they are dying,” Layolle says. “So we have to do a massage, kind of, move it back and forth with water on the lungs. Usually they just start swimming.”
They weren’t lucky enough to save any vaquita from nets, but Layolle recounts one emotional encounter toward the end of this year’s mission. “It was just when we were getting ready to turn back,” she says. “It was a very calm day, the third day in a row with no illegal fishing during the daytime. We were drifting. Suddenly a vaquita came into view of our ship. It was kind of like a call, like she was saying ‘don’t ever leave.’
“It’s so magical to see such a rare animal,” she continues. “I always remember that on the hard days.”
Despite the difficulty of their work, Layolle stands firm in her belief that their mission matters. “When I started this campaign, a lot of people told me there was no point to do it because the vaquita was already nearly gone. But I actually think it has been really important because they can’t go extinct without anyone knowing. And it can’t happen again to any other species.”
Beyond that, she feels her team has made a difference for the wildlife in the Gulf of California. “I know finding these nets has saved so many species that would have died in them,” she says. “Maybe if we hadn’t retrieved all of those nets the vaquita would already be gone.”
White Man’s Game: A Call to Look and Listen
In her new book, journalist Stephanie Hanes challenges conservationists to look beyond their own personal narratives.
Narratives have power, both good and bad. On one hand, stories can create change. On the other hand, they can serve to obscure opposing viewpoints.
Journalist Stephanie Hanes explores this potentially dangerous dichotomy in her new book “White Man’s Game: Saving Animals, Rebuilding Eden, and Other Myths of Conservation in Africa” (Metropolitan Books, $28), where she takes particular aim at conservationists, whom she accuses of often ignoring — willfully or otherwise — the narratives of the people around them. This, she claims, causes many Western-led conservation projects in Africa to have unintended consequences or even flop completely: for example, fences that protect people but disrupt animal migration corridors. “The reason so many Western projects in Africa fail,” she writes, “is not because of bad planning or poor investment strategies…[but] because we are stuck in our own mental framework. We cannot see the other narratives, even when they actively clash with our own.”
Hanes takes her book’s own narrative all the way back to 18th century explorer James Bruce, a Scottish noble whose bestselling five-volume series recounting travels up the Nile River set the stage for the “adventurer-type approach to the continent” later embodied by former president Teddy Roosevelt, whose own blood-soaked expedition to Africa resulted in his famous “collection” of more than 23,000 museum specimens. Both men were perceived by Western audiences as gallant heroes exploring savage lands, but their actions also created a somewhat ironic narrative of Africa “under threat,” which still echoes through conservation efforts in the modern era. As Hanes writes at one point, the “conservationist story of local people destroying their own land and needing outsider help to change their ways” belies the fact that local people served as stewards of their own land for generations before Westerners arrived.
Damning history out of the way, Hanes hits upon a number of modern initiatives but concentrates the bulk of her book on one recent effort: the Carr Foundation’s multimillion-dollar project to restore the wildlife, ecology and people of Mozambique’s once-bountiful Gorongosa National Park.
Since the project’s genesis in 2004, Gorongosa has been the subject of magazine articles, books and documentaries. Virtually all of these write-ups heap praise upon the Carr Foundation’s near-herculean efforts. Hanes takes a different view. She argues that the Gorongosa project is actually a bit of a failure, both for the wildlife — which sometimes didn’t survive for long after being transplanted back into the park — and for the people living in and around the region, whose health and well-being have not necessarily improved as promised or predicted.
Hanes points out numerous small, cultural mistakes, such as asking people to replant a deforested area where planting trees was actually perceived as a way to claim or steal land, or handling a lizard species whose appearance was seen as a bad omen. These errors invariably set efforts back, she writes, while conservationists responded by saying things like “they need to understand. We’re here to help.”
Other examples show more direct consequences. For example, Hanes writes of a former poacher who was hired in the early stages of Gorongosa’s construction project. He stopped poaching for a year while he earned a salary, but then the project finished and the money dried up. With no new jobs being offered, and no reason to remain loyal to the project, he immediately went back to poaching. Hanes recounts how other poachers — who all too often killed the animals that had been imported into the park at great expense — were frequently beaten by official personnel or essentially forced into near-slave labor to pay the park back for their crimes.
Her harshest criticism, however, stems from what she sees as the inability of some philanthropists and conservationists to recognize and understand the spiritual beliefs and narratives of the people they are serving, such as the communities who depend on Gorongosa for their own survival. Those beliefs, she writes, are the history that still lives on as part of modern-day life as spirits — either ancestors who serve as an unbroken chain of leadership, or as angry, vengeful gamba created by Portuguese occupation or Mozambique’s bloody civil war. The narratives of those days-gone-by remain a part of daily life, even if Westerners did not perceive them. Hanes says this inability to view the reality of the people around them either delayed or doomed at least some portions of the Gorongosa project.
The book makes valuable points that aren’t just about conservation — we could all do better to consider narratives outside our own heads. As for Gorongosa, where restoration efforts continue despite Mozambique’s continuing financial and political conflict, the narrative of the park is still being written.
Vietnam to End Bear Bile Farming
The cruel practice of tapping and mutilating caged bears for the bile from their gall bladders will soon come to an end in Vietnam. Trade in bear bile, a component of traditional medicine, is illegal in the country but a legal loophole allowed for its continued production. An agreement signed this week between Animals Asia and the Vietnam Administration of Forestry will close that loophole and ensure that the approximately 1,000 bears currently in private hands will move to sanctuaries. This doesn’t completely end the practice; a 2011 report from TRAFFIC found bear bile production and sales in 12 Asian countries.