Nature and Communities: Garden of Eden or too close for comfort?
A couple of years back I got really hooked on this show on Nat Geo Wild or Animal Planet- one of my usual haunts. It was called Game Ranger Diaries and basically depicted the work done in a specific national park in Africa. It was a really great show, revealing how animals and humans can co-exist but also the problems that national parks encounter- in terms of limited space, the conflicts with poachers, disease and local opinion etc. It raised some really interesting ideas and explained the amazing work that a national park can do, but also the problems of what is in reality, very small pockets of safety for endangered species.
The park depended on locals to run the park, act as anti-poaching staff and educate and interact with the local community. The positives of this are that they are creating jobs for locals, offering a livelihood that prevents those locals from turning to poaching for money, employing people who understand the environment and the communities and are able to understand ways they can work with the community to ensure minimum conflict between locals and nature in the park (i.e. Elephants trampling crops). I think there are huge positives here. Park staff run education programmes to educate local and disadvantaged children about the environment they live in- some have never seen this wildlife before, despite the fact that it lives on their front door. This campaign to educate the next generation is great and shows them that there are options.
But is this all sustainable? I have also been religiously watching Planet Earth though and that raised some interesting ideas. By employing locals as park staff you are offering them employment that benefits the environment, but still an employment that intrinsically links nature to monetary value.
If people will only protect their environment if they get paid to do it, as opposed to conserving it because they believe it is their duty to do it- regardless of being paid for it- then can this really be a sustainable means of protecting an environment? For example, if funding and backing for the park collapses or if it is operating in a volatile environment and a civil war starts, then what is the incentive to protect nature- park staff may care, but if there is no financial/ lifestyle gain, or even financial/ lifestyle loss, then would the staff and community still back the scheme or would they allow poaching to happen?
I imagine most people would rather not conduct the experiment to find out. As much as I hope people genuinely do care about the environment around them, people have families to feed, and when you live so close to nature, your only choice may be to exploit it more heavily.
It would be interesting to know how much poaching is actually backed by the Western world. I’ve read a few blogs which link criminal activity and illegal wildlife trade- claiming that illegal wildlife trade is the most profitable crime, which naturally links to drugs, guns and gangs. To solve the problem of illegal wildlife trade, you ultimately have to crack down on gangs as a whole, gangs who are often in the pockets of corrupt (and allegedly democratic) governments. So who is responsible if governments won’t turn round and say no? Everything is truly interlinked and the preservation of wildlife is a thread that weaves through everything so it really does matter. At the moment, it isn’t just isolated species of animals dying out- the fabric of entire eco-systems is ripping apart and entire pieces of the web of life are removed, the rest will collapse too. Its like throwing a stone at glass and watching the impact ripple out and shatter the whole pane. If we wake up in 50 years and the world is just a concrete block, void of fish in the sea and animals roaming in vast herds, then that frankly, is a damn disgrace, so let’s hold people accountable, let’s demand that we know how our food was caught, how our clothes were made, where and how the fuel for our supposedly ‘eco-friendly’ cars is grown. If we don’t? The answer is pretty apparent.
