Contemporary policies and practices of conservation in Africa through
isolated national parks and reserves is a relic of the colonial romanticism. With the rapid population growth and the concomitant land use
change, the paradox at the heart of contemporary conservation is unraveling.
The
chickens are coming home to roost. Long-term data for 69 large mammal species
from 78 protected areas in Africa revealed a 59% decline in large mammal
population between 1970 and 2005. Closer home, large mammal populations in
Masai Mara National reserve have declined by over one third between 1977 and
2009.
Agriculture,
settlement, roads and urbanization have chocked migration corridors that
hitherto enabled seasonal dispersal of wildlife across contiguous requisite habitats.
Today wildlife is sequestered and trapped in parks and reserves, which lack the
requisite habitat resources to support viable populations, especially of large
mammals and associated predators.
In the face of irrevocable anthropogenic landscape transformation
and inexorable wildlife extinctions, conservation based on the purist pre-human
wilderness model is antiquated. Conservationists must renounce romantic notions
of nature as separate from humans – notions that have no basis in ecosystems
science – and embrace a whole landscape based approach in which diverse species
and natural habitats co-exist with modern human landscapes.
The dualism of conservation – development or biodiversity – has estranged
it in a crowded world where livelihood resources are scarce and dwindling. In Kenya
where over 20 million people live on less than two dollars a day, efforts to prohibit
compatible subsistence use of parks and reserves and privilege tourism seem
unfair, if not immoral.
The notion that nature without people is more valuable than nature
with people is an untenable colonial absurdity. People are a part of nature.
One does not need to be a postmodern ecologist to understand that the concept
of “Nature” has always been an idyllic human construct, shaped and contrived
for human needs.
A curious contradiction of nature untrammeled is the logic of
using parks and reserves for some things and not others. By excluding
long-established human use such as livestock grazing to build hotels and
resorts, excavating dams
to water wildlife, and imposing fire to manage
vegetation quality, we create parks that are no less human constructions than glorified
zoos.
Perfunctory arguments around the intrinsic essence of biodiversity
and economic benefits of tourism receipts are not enough when the vast majority
of poor rural folk who underwrite the enormous credit of conservation enjoyed
by the wealthy global urban class are mostly poor.
Any justification for conservation in the 21st century,
locally or globally, must stringently demonstrate how the fates of nature and
of people are inextricably bound together.
Conservationist
cannot promise a return to pristine, pre-human landscapes. The real challenge
for 21st century conservation is maintaining and enhancing
biodiversity and ecosystem service value of functional landscapes; urban areas,
forest plantations, agricultural monocultures, wetlands and marginal
drylands.
A new vision of conservation must embrace marginalized and demonized
cultivators and herders, and to embrace benefit sharing, an imperative which
conservationists find repugnant. To succeed, conservation must be a broad-based
coalition supported in corporate boardrooms and corridors of political power,
as well as the village council.
When recent declines in wildlife populations are examined in the
context of patterns of human settlement, the natural dynamics of ecosystems and
climate change, it becomes imperative that we must rethink the design and
management of existing parks and reserves.
Parks and reserves need not be isolated, stand alone of
biodiversity storehouses. There is a need for a paradigm shift toward spatially
connected, interdependent parks and reserves if they are to hold viable
wildlife populations and resilient habitats.
Connectivity will enable dynamic interactions among species and utilization
of ecological resources across space and time. The bigger challenge lies in
negotiating access to or acquiring portions of wildlife migration corridors
currently under private ownership.
However, there is a great opportunity here to create the largest
and most lucrative ecosystem service markets in Africa. For instance landowners
in Kenya and Tanzania could be persuaded using financial incentives such as ecosystem
service payments to lease their land for use as wildlife migration corridors. The
ecosystem service market could be developed further to enable trading of such
leases in the region's stock markets.
Implementing trans-boundary management of wildlife resources will
require novel policy, legal and institutional regimes to co-ordinate multiple
stakeholders, including national governments, local authorities, and
private/community interests such as pastoralists, agriculturalists and game
ranchers.
The East African integration process through the Arusha Secretariat
provides a legitimate platform for an earnest negotiation of a protocol for
joint management of trans-boundary wildlife corridors.
The future of wildlife conservation will remain tenuous as long as
it is narrowly focused on the creation of parks and protected areas, and assumes
often without evidence, that local people cannot be entrusted with the
stewardship of nature.
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