The Anonymous Widower

Conservation is Dangerous

I’m watching Stephen’s Fry program called “The Last Chance to See” on BBC2.  One of the people in the program told how six enviromentalists had been killed in Cambodia and hos the Amazon and it’s famed piranhas was much less dangerous.

A couple of tales illustrate this.

Perhaps ten or twelves years ago, my late wife and myself were staying in the Datai on Langkawi.  This hotel regularly makes the top two or three in the world and having stayed there for a week, you know why.

The hotel organised tours with two local wildlife experts.  One was Malaysian and the other was the son of a British squaddie and his Nepalese wife.  To say he had the air of a hard bastard was probably an understatement.  But he needed to be as poachers and collectors were always trying to either shoot or dig up something.  At the time, they’d just taken on the Malaysian government about preserving the last piece of rainforset on Langkawi.  They’d won at the time and my son has confirmed in the last few weeks that it is still there. 

So perhaps to get things done, you not only need good economic arguments as they did, but you also need a touch of the Rambos.

It must have been about 1988 and I was in San Francisco.  I needed to get to San Jose, so I took a shared limousine as one does.  Or did!  Hopefully, they’ve built a more affordable rail system.  But I doubt it!  I hadn’t hired a car as someone was driving me around.

Two of us got in first and like me, the other was something in computers.  We were then joined by a tall, slim man about fifty or so, with a long grey ponytail.  He had a powerful bearing and looked extremely fit under a linen suit.

I thought for a moment he might be into something like drugs, but he told a tale about how he had been in US Special Forces in Viet Nam.  He’d retired as an officer and was now working protecting World Bank projects in the Amazon rainforest.  He talked about how if you harvested plants and trees very selectively, you could give the people an income about ten times more than they got from subsistence agriculture where you burned the forest.

But this didn’t work because to do this you needed to built tracks into the jungle, which allowed the cut and burners to do their damage easily and also because by giving the people a good income, you broke the power of the loan sharks who preyed on them.

Hence the need for men like him to protect the projects and those that worked on them.

Just as Stephen Fry’s film showed, to get conservation to work, you must get the economics right and make sure you control those violent men, whose interests you destroy.

September 6, 2009 - Posted by AnonW | World | Animals, Environment