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Effective
Conservation Parks, Rewilding, & Local Development
Ignacio Jiménez
© 2022 Ignacio Jiménez All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 2000 M Street, NW, Suite 480-B, Washington, DC 20036-3319. Book design by Andrés Stubelt Translation by Michael Loockwood & Ignacio Jiménez Illustrations by Lalo Kubala Library of Congress Control Number: 2021945118 All Island Press books are printed on environmentally responsible materials. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Keywords: Island Press, biodiversity, conservation, rewilding, nature reserves, parks, local development, policy, environmental conflict, communication, conservation biology, Africa, Latin America, Europe, Australia, United States, India, planning, evaluation, organizations, leadership, Tompkins, wildlife management, activism
Contents A Note about the English Edition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix 1. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2. Full Nature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 3. The Method. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 4. Promotion: Basic Concepts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 5. Promotion: Tools and Practicalities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 6. Intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 7. Planning and Norming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 8. Management of Natural Areas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 9. Conflict Management. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 10. Evaluation and Renewal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 11. Organizations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 12. Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 Afterword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 About the Author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
A Note about the English Edition The book you have in your hands was first published in Spanish in 2018. It describes a practical and cohesive method for managing effective conservation programs, backed up and enriched by real-life examples taken from relevant conservation programs that I myself and other conservation practitioners have experienced on five continents. Since its initial publication, the approach described in this book has guided and strengthened conservation programs in several countries. In December 2018, approval was granted for the 138,140-ha Iberá National Park and in the following years my friends and former colleagues from Conservation Land Trust Argentina (renamed as Rewilding Argentina) witnessed the birth of the first green-winged macaws in Argentina – originating from reintroduced individuals – after over a century of absence. In 2021 they celebrated the release of the first jaguars into the park, a vital step in their pioneering reintroduction project. Overall, the story of Iberá (which makes up large sections of this book) is one of the best examples worldwide of a virtuous circle whose constituent parts include the creation of a large park, its rewilding, and the establishment of a new cultural and economic regional identity based on a reevaluation of a previously unappreciated wilderness. This self-sustaining circle is termed “Full Nature” or Producción de Naturaleza in its original Spanish. Since the book was first published, Rewilding Argentina/Tompkins Conservation has applied this approach in regions as diverse as the Dry Chaco, coastal and continental Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego. In 2019 Tompkins Conservation Chile handed control of the Pumalin and Patagonia national parks over to the Chilean government, thereby concluding the largest private land donation ever made anywhere in the world. In doing so, they established five new national parks and expanded three others, covering in total more than 4 million ha of new national parklands. In 2017 the vision behind this book traveled from Argentina to Brazil to help the Brazilian organization SPVS design and apply an ambi-
tious program aimed at presenting the largest remnant of Atlantic Forest (one of the world’s top biodiversity hotspots) in a new and more positive light. As a result of this program, the introductory story presented in Chapter 4 of this book is now somewhat outdated as the situation in the Atlantic Forest has been changed by the very ideas included in these pages. Two years later the Produçao de Natureza approach (as it is known in Portuguese) started to be used by Instituto Home Pantaneiro to promote the largest conservation landscape to have ever been set up in the Brazilian Pantanal. In the second half of 2018 I moved to Spain to apply this method in my home country. The plan was to establish a conservation landscape that could promote another virtuous circle between larger protected areas, rewilding, and local development. After talking with conservation experts we chose the Three Kingdoms region in eastern Spain. This region is home to vast mountain landscapes, recovering wildlife populations, and beautiful historic towns and villages that lost much of their original population during the last century. After getting support from international donors and building an alliance with environmental officials, we started a communication campaign similar to those successfully carried out in Argentina and Brazil, using the tools and concepts described in this book. Things were going better than expected until the COVID pandemic forced a lockdown on us. This halted all face-to-face meetings and presentations with local authorities and interest groups. Conspiracy theories developed; a well-orchestrated hate campaign, started in the social networks, was picked up by the conventional media. To cut a long story short, in the end we had to cancel the whole program as we were unable to counteract the animosity and rejection that had built up in the region. Albeit at a high price, the Three Kingdoms experience underlined one of the main ideas behind this book: the context defines the application of any general conservation method or approach. Lessons were learned and, with organizational support from Fundación Global Nature, we are applying the
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ideas of this book in other regions of Spain. All these examples show how this book has had a life of its own and has been able to guide conservation programs in at least three countries in the years leading up to the publication of Effective Conservation in English. Effective Conservation is a streamlined version of the original Spanish edition. We wanted to create an accessible text while maintaining the essence of the original. To achieve this we have created a parallel website that hosts all the original content not included in this version (www.islandpress.org/effective-conservation). These “bonus tracks” include the complete versions of most of the boxes written by conserva-
tion practitioners, plus many sections included in the original book but excluded from the English version. We believe that this dual presentation will make this book accessible to a wider public and will also provide more curious readers with access to a great range of information available on the web. I hope you enjoy this conservation manual based on interdisciplinary curiosity, passionate pragmatism, and hard-won lessons learned by conservation practitioners from many countries over decades. Ignacio Jiménez Alcossebre, 2021
Foreword The book in your hands is a practical manual for hopeful action on behalf of life on Earth. This is territory one step removed from academic theory — it is an exploration of what has worked, what has not worked (and the lessons learned from those failures), and how practical, on-the-ground conservation projects can advance the vision of a world where all who dwell on this wondrous, beautiful planet may flourish. Every conservationist knows that each place is different, having distinct ecological, cultural, and political characteristics. Our rewilding projects in Chile, though having the shared goal of bringing back extirpated species in our parks in that country, require different strategies than those we use in Argentina. And everyone who loves the wild world and works for its preservation has a story of how their path in life intersected with ideas and individuals who inspired them. The tale of how my late husband Douglas Tompkins and I became immersed in efforts to conserve and “rewild” large areas in Chile and Argentina is, like all good stories, filled with twists and turns, setbacks, and successes. We were businesspeople before our conservation careers, Doug having started the North Face and cofounding Esprit, and I having helped Malinda and Yvon Chouinard, the founders of Patagonia Inc., grow that company into a globally prominent outdoor retailer. In the early 1990s Doug and I both decided to leave business and dedicate ourselves to protecting those things we had come to love – wild beauty and wild creatures – during our years of climbing, hiking, skiing, and adventuring in wild places. We got started in land conservation in Chile, when Doug, through a nonprofit foundation he started, began acquiring private conservation lands for what is today Pumalín National Park. Our interest in ecological restoration and rewilding really began there, although most of the active restoration work focused on degraded farmlands on the periphery of the large protected area we were assembling through the purchase of private land. In 1997 a friend invited us to come to northeastern Argentina to see if we might be interested
in developing conservation projects there. One of our stops was the great Iberá marshlands of Corrientes Province. I remember flying over this incredibly flat and wet territory with no landmarks as far as the eye could see and I thought to myself, “where the hell are we?” We landed out in the center of the wetlands at a slightly drier area of private ranchland called San Alonso. Today San Alonso hosts key facilities for our rewilding team, including a jaguar reintroduction center operated by a nonprofit, Rewilding Argentina (RA). Back then I stepped out of the plane and thought this place is hot and has lots of bugs; the only thing I wanted to do was to get back on that plane and get out of there. But Doug, in just those few hours of our first visit, saw something that he never forgot. He saw the marshlands’ distinctive beauty and he immediately recognized the area’s incredible richness as wildlife habitat. A month later Doug came back and bought San Alonso, much to my surprise. And that’s how we got started in the conservation and rewilding of the Iberá wetlands. As we began to work there it was so evident, so quickly, that Iberá was a goldmine of biodiversity, despite being diminished by human activity including persecution of wildlife. Some species, such as the jaguar, which is the apex predator of the area, were regionally extinct, having been trapped and shot into oblivion decades before. In their absence, crucial natural processes were missing too. This realization began to open up a whole new area of our work, which was the rewilding of the places we were trying to conserve. At that point we began looking for people who had the background and interest to join us in what would become our most ambitious rewilding project. Over the years the RA team (strategic partner of Tompkins Conservation) has included hundreds of biologists, veterinarians, educators, construction workers, administrative and accounting personnel, legal professionals, etc. under the leadership of Sofia Heinonen, RA’s visionary director. All have contributed to the Iberá effort, which has been wildly successful. RA’s work helped create Iberá Provincial Park,
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Iberá National Park, launch a wildlife program that has pioneered the reintroduction of missing native species in Argentina, and transform local communities who now see their economic fortunes tied to Iberá’s growing profile as an ecotourism destination. For more than a decade biologist Ignacio Jiménez has been central to this program. He managed RA’s work to reintroduce giant anteaters, pampas deer, green-winged macaws, jaguars and other extirpated species to Iberá. In conceiving and writing this book, Jiménez aims to share what we have learned about implementing a large-scale rewilding project and to describe what our team has learned from other, similar efforts around the globe. On the latter point, Jiménez has solicited and presents in the book the wisdom of experienced practitioners from five continents, conservationists that have had little time or opportunity to share their hardwon knowledge. Sofia and Ignacio are the primary architects of what the RA team calls “Full Nature,” which integrates the overarching desire for ecological health with the health of human communities. Helping people in a rural, resource-producing region see that their local economic vitality can be enhanced by conservation, which produces abundant wildlife in large, nature-focused parks, can catalyze crucial political support. Of course it is not new to link economic development strategy with protected areas initiatives. But RA’s Full Nature vision for the Iberá marshlands region is an example of successful implementation of a bold conservation agenda in a Latin American context. That success came through persistence and commitment to action and has allowed RA to extend rewilding efforts to the dry subtropical forests of the Chaco region, and the coasts and mountains of Patagonia.
As Jimenez shows in Effective Conservation, theoretical principles from disciplines as diverse as conservation biology, policy sciences, cognitive psychology, conflict resolution, and organizational management can be incorporated into projects focused on park management, rewilding and local development; he presents real-life examples that embody their actual use in conservation. Because so much of the Earth has been degraded by human actions, it will take largescale wilderness recovery around the globe to fulfill the full nature vision. This will take time and lots of effort — but every hectare saved for wildlife, every project that helps reestablish missing species or augment populations of imperiled ones, moves us one step closer to a world where all life can flourish. That is the promise of rewilding, which begins with each of us choosing to be active in whatever way we can to support wildness. If we recognize the way that nature has created and shaped the diversity of life over countless eons, including human life, and acknowledge that all life has intrinsic value, then we have the obligation to work on behalf of life’s beauty and richness. In this way we show that rewilding the Earth begins with rewilding our hearts and minds, as individuals, and then sharing our love and commitment to Earth’s diversity of life through our work. Effective Conservation is a landmark publication that seeks to amplify such efforts. Please use it, share it, and inspire others to join the movement to rewild the Earth. There’s no time to lose. Kristine McDivitt Tompkins President and Co-Founder, Tompkins Conservation
Chapter 1.
Introduction Large conservation programs, like new scientific disciplines, start with a heroic age. A few individuals push forward, risking failure and harm to their own security and reputations. They have a dream that does not fit the norm. They accept long hours, personal expense, nagging uncertainty, and rejection. When they succeed, their idiosyncratic views become the new normal. Their individual stories are then rightfully seen as epics. They become part of environmental history. – E.O. Wilson, Naturalist and conservationist, United States
Paradise Lost … but on the Way to Recovery? The Maputaland-Zululand region in South Africa is one of the most beautiful places in the continent. Hundred-million-year-old mountains descend to a vast coastal plain washed by the Indian Ocean. In this region, forests, savannas, open grasslands, and wetlands create a diversity of habitats that in historic times hosted some of the world’s largest concentrations of wildlife. Explorers’ accounts talk of millions of wildebeest, zebras, elephants, buffalos, elands, and other large herbivores roaming the region as part of a massive migration originating from presentday Mozambique and, probably, from farther afield. This abundant megafauna was complemented by a highly productive system of lakes, estuaries, and reefs that harbored copious quantities of fish and seafood. Such bountiful Nature ensured prosperity for native groups like the peaceful Tsonga in the lowlands and the bellicose Zulu in the highlands. However, this paradise began to decline at the end of the nineteenth century when, after the Anglo-Zulu war, the British Empire annexed Zululand and started to isolate its inhabitants in “reserves.” Successive white governments continued the process of land alienation, assigning the most productive lands to white farmers and herding native people into marginal areas or forcing them to migrate to work in the mines, plantations, and cities. Under apartheid, forced
removals created large pockets of poverty in the rural areas that lay far from the main towns. Additionally, during the twentieth century the previously abundant wild game was systematically exterminated by white hunters and farmers who believed that these wild animals were the source of the nangana or sleeping sickness and that the region could be “civilized” and made “productive” by importing European breeds of cattle. Hundreds of thousands of wild mammals were shot annually in a hunting frenzy that surpassed even the slaughter of bison in the American West. However, this did not prevent imported cattle from struggling to survive in this hostile environment. The final result was the utter destruction of the native way of life. By the end of the past century this former paradise was one of the poorest regions in South Africa, with more than 90% of the population living in rural areas, more than 80% of households below the poverty line, limited access to education and water, and an AIDS epidemic. Yet this sorry picture was about to change as the upshot of one of the biggest environmental battles ever waged in the history of South Africa. During the 1980s and 1990s a broad coalition of organizations and citizens mobilized to protest at plans by a multinational company to mine the dunes near Lake St Lucia for titanium and other heavy metals. Half a million people signed a no-mining petition, including future president Nelson Mandela and regional leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Parts of this region were already
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protected by one of the oldest reserves in Africa, dating back to 1895: St Lucia Game Reserve. After a long battle, South Africa’s new democratic government rejected the mining company’s plans and chose instead nature-based tourism as the best development option for the region. It also became clear that the existing small, scattered game reserves would not be sufficient to protect the natural treasures of the region and promote their sustainable use for the benefit of local communities. It was during those tumultuous political years that a young anti-apartheid activist called Andrew Zaloumis returned to the region after years of persecution by the previous racist regime. Andrew had been in love with the region since his boyhood days when he had explored it with his father. For Andrew and others, the anti-mining conflict and newborn democracy opened a unique opportunity to reverse decades of marginalizing both the native people and wildlife. These were the years in which the international conservation movement was looking for ways to reconnect nature parks to the wider needs of society. Thus, during the early 1990s the Maputaland-Zululand region was host to an experiment in ecological restoration, innovative reserve management, and nature-based local development that would eventually have repercussions the world over. In 1999 Andrew and his colleagues convinced the newly elected South African government to declare the Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park, a 220,000-ha World Heritage Site stretching along the Indian Ocean coast that would merge a network of previously existing reserves into a single management unit. The site was enlarged to 332,000 ha with a new designation, Isimangaliso Wetland Park, a few years later. At the same time, they shrewdly promoted government approval for a World Heritage Act that would give legal teeth to what in most countries is only a symbolic figure of protection. They thus created South Africa’s second largest protected area, encompassing most of the habitats present in this highly biodiverse region. They also created a new management authority that would represent local communities previously excluded from decision-making and opted for a business- rather than a bureaucratic-orientated approach. This was designed to help the small but experienced and motivated team undertake management tasks and make decisions rapidly. With clear legal support and a small proactive
team, the new Isimangaliso Wetland Park was thus able to focus on conserving the region’s unique natural and cultural heritage while promoting poverty-alleviating development. In the early 1990s, a small group of entrepreneurs interested in promoting conservation through eco-tourism bought two run-down farms in the hills adjacent to the nascent Isimangaliso Park. Their revolutionary idea was to convert these farms into a single wildlife reserve that would restore the original functioning ecosystems; in addition, these farms would be run as a profitable business and create more jobs in and benefits for surrounding communities than previous land-uses had. More ambitiously, they also aimed to establish a model for other landowners in Africa to follow, whereby the maintaining or restoring of natural ecosystems would be more profitable than traditional agriculture or livestock production. As evidence of its entrepreneurial spirit, the organization was christened Conservation Corporation Africa and the new private reserve named Phinda, which means return in the Zulu language. It was no easy task. First, the Phinda team had to fight against decades of political, administrative, and psychological inertia opposed to the idea of bringing back wildlife to the private lands from which it had previously been eradicated. Then, they turned pineapple and cotton plantations into natural grasslands, reintroduced locally extirpated animals, built the first lodges, and established liaisons with neighboring communities and farmers as they marketed their fledging reserve as one of the best wildlife experiences in South Africa. These lines and most of the subsequent book were written in the village of St Lucia, a rural community of less than 1,000 residents adjacent to Isimangaliso Wetland Park and surrounded by the Indian Ocean and Lake St Lucia. From this small but prosperous community, I have witnessed and studied at first hand the results of these two independent but related experiments in conservation. Today, the two original properties of Phinda are part of the continuous 23,500 ha of the Munyawana Conservancy, where visitors can enjoy the facilities in six different lodges with 122 beds that provide local people with 450 permanent and 100 temporary jobs. Phinda managers estimate that previous land-uses (agriculture and cattle ranches) only guaranteed a quarter of these jobs. In a normal game drive at Phinda/Munyawana one sees no obvious traces
Introduction
of the former farms but instead a patchwork of seven different natural habitats inhabited now by the once-vanished buffalos, giraffes, elephants, lions, impalas, and cheetahs. This conservancy holds one of the highest concentrations of black and white rhinos on Earth. The area is fenced off from neighboring properties, a reminder of the challenges still facing wildlife in a rural landscape subject to increasing human density and pressures. All this obliges Phinda conservation director, Simon Naylor, and his team to manage intensively their populations of highly sensitive animals such as elephants, lions, and cheetahs. In times when rhino-horn powder is worth more than cocaine or gold, the threat of poaching means that heavily armed rangers are required to protect these mammals. Grasslands also need to be monitored, managed, and burned to maximize productivity, enhance plant diversity, and control invasive exotic plants. The only alternative option to active management in a reserve of this size would be to consent to the absence of certain key species.1 The situation is similar in the adjacent but much larger Isimangaliso Park. In recent years Andrew and his team have restored around 20,000 ha of land that was once covered by an estimated six million exotic gum-trees. As in Phinda, the Isimangaliso team has reintroduced elephants, buffalos, black and white rhinos, oribi, giraffe, lions, cheetahs, wild dogs, and tseseebes. This is large-scale ecological restoration, even though large sections of the park have had to be fenced off to prevent conflicts between wildlife and local communities. Thus today anybody can drive through natural grassland inhabited by spectacular megafauna where just a few years ago there were only endless lines of exotic trees. After years of protection, Isimangaliso now harbors the largest populations of both hippos and crocodiles in South Africa. Whales and dolphins now swim past Isimangaliso’s protected coastline and leatherback turtles nest on its beaches. When I asked my neighbor Mario Georgiou, a local entrepreneur, about the effect of the Isimangaliso Wetland Park on the village of St. Lucia, he didn’t think twice before declaring that “without the reserve this town would be dead.” St Lucia has gone from 500 hotel beds to 3,500 beds over the past few years. On a larger scale, the World Heritage status and the site’s management team have both been key in the construction of the new road that connects the town of Hluhluwe with
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the Mozambique border, which after decades of government-sponsored marginalization now provides access and basic services for thousands of people. As a result of the development of the new park, the number of tourist establishments in the region has increased by 60% in recent years, more than 70 small local enterprises employing around 1,500 people now work on park rehabilitation, and 26 artisan groups employing 600 people, mainly women, produce and market traditional crafts. In total, Isimangaliso provides over 7,000 permanent jobs directly related to nature tourism, plus more than 3,000 temporary jobs centered on building and maintaining fences, roads, and tourist infrastructure within the park. However, huge problems still lurk in Zululand-Maputaland. These nature reserves, along with other adjacent sites, will not solve alone the region’s chronic problems that include poverty, rapid demographic growth, AIDS, racial exclusion, and illiteracy. Yet, they do seem to suggest a path toward ecological, social, and cultural recovery that could challenge the preexisting patterns established by more traditional activities such as mining, intensive agriculture, and livestock production. The connection between large-scale ecological restoration and local development is not a mere theoretical concept for the people living in this diverse region; neither is it for visitors. Some even dream of a larger area of natural ecosystems expanding into the neighboring countries of Swaziland and Mozambique that would reach northwards to the Kruger National Park and the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, in what would be an ecologically and economically productive wilderness where flourishing herds of herbivores could roam freely. As Nelson Mandela said in reference to the reintroduction of elephants into Isimangaliso, this is “almost spiritual, a form of restitution ... an attempt to re-create the wholeness of nature so that we can live in harmony with its creator’s magnificence … so that the descendants of the elders of Maputaland, the generations of the future, too can experience this grandeur.”2 These dreams are based on the results of the work carried out by a group of conservationists who were not afraid to try out new ideas and were prepared to defy the conservative inertia and preconceptions present in the spheres of both development and conservation. They worked hard, experimented, learned, thought “out of the box,” engaged with a wider public,
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and committed themselves to living in the rural areas they aimed to restore. Professionals such as these are the true protagonists of this book.
What Is This Book About? The above description is an example of how to construct a virtuous circle through which circulate three mutually supporting effects: • A natural ecosystem whose overall state of conservation is improved by, for example, the restoration of certain parts that had been lost; • A society that obtains more benefits – some quantifiable and others more intangible, but nevertheless equally real – under this type of management than under other potential uses of the landscape (e.g., beach tourism, mining, plantations of exotic trees, industrial agriculture, and livestock production); • As a result of the two previous processes, natural landscapes will receive wider public support than other possible land-uses. In other words, the region becomes ecologically, socially, and politically resilient. The story of Isimangaliso as a protected area and St. Lucia as a community is far from unique and comparable experiences are occurring in many other areas of the world. For ten years I participated in and witnessed a similar process in the Iberá Natural Reserve, a region in northern Argentina that experienced an unprecedented process of defaunation during the second half of the last century. However, over the past 30 years, thanks to the efforts of several public and private organizations and dozens of people committed to conservation, this area has not only seen the main threats to its survival halted but also the recovery of its wildlife populations and the return of several extinct species. This environmental resurgence has enabled local communities to enjoy economic, social, and psychological benefits that are superior to those of other similar villages located far from the protected area. In light of these results, public opinion and decisionmakers at local, provincial, and national levels now give enthusiastic support to such processes. Processes of this type are occurring and will continue to occur (probably with increasing frequency) in all inhabited continents. According
to my experience, they are not the mere product of chance. They happen because groups of people in governments, companies, NGOs, and academic centers who have clear inspirational visions of conservation have set out to throw off the shackles imposed by the inertia of environmental degradation and to work proactively for the conservation and restoration of certain wilderness areas. And they have done this while living in the territory they want to transform by hiring or collaborating with excellent professionals, by insisting and using their political skills, by generating alliances with third parties that in many cases have opposite visions, and by creating solid and highly motivated teams that share their ideas and are able to put them into practice. The need for so many ingredients explains why these virtuous circles of conservation, local development, and public support are more the exception than the norm in the world of conservation. After more than 20 years of working in conservation and visiting conservation programs and protected areas in different continents, what I have seen in many cases is not particularly encouraging: “paper parks” where one enters and there are few obvious improvements regarding the processes of environmental and social degradation that are underway; unmotivated rangers, technicians, and managers doing their jobs half asleep, content just to meet deadlines and collect a salary at the end of the month, who use their authority to hinder any initiative that may threaten the status quo (that is, if they are not corrupted by the same groups that they should be fighting); consultants who repeat the same diagnoses and recommendations again and again without ever realizing that they will probably never be put into practice; scholars who get entangled in heated Byzantine discussions about the confidence intervals of population estimates of a critically endangered species rather than focusing their energy on how to save it from an extinction sink; colleagues who boycott the work of others for fear of being stripped of their prestige or their funding; groups that work toward the same goals but treat each other as competitors or even enemies; bureaucrats who channel funds from large cities in developed countries to biodiversity-rich areas using logical frameworks that only act as straitjackets and who care little for their work as long as everything looks good on their website or social media, regardless of whether or not there is any real impact
Introduction
on the ground; distrustful communities who do not see any clear benefits from protected areas or research/conservation projects involving threatened species; international NGOs that no longer remember why they were created and now put the cart of fund-raising before the horse of promoting natural ecosystems; institutions that repeat politically correct strategies or that develop projects that contain the latest fashionable concept for funders even if they fail to fit the current context of the project area or clearly do not suit the mission for which they were conceived. Thus, it is sadly common to come across conservation programs that • End up generating or promoting the existence of clearly damaged, incomplete, or fragmented ecosystems, which can lead to the extinction of some of their most distinctive species; • Reinforce inherent processes that fail to combat economic poverty, institutional weaknesses, distrust, and a lack of self-esteem in the areas in which they are working; • Are ignored by the main local political players, which prevents them from operating effectively or reduces them to an anecdotal role in land-use policies.
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• To achieve these aims we require properly trained and well-led interdisciplinary organizations and teams that share the two previous concepts as their main raison d’être. • For these teams to be effective, they must go beyond a techno-scientific approach and know how to manage the policy processes affecting the natural and human ecosystems on which they work. • To achieve the long-term support from society, these teams must communicate their visions effectively (which implies not only knowing how to transmit information but also how to listen and wait for the right moment) so that they be accepted and eventually actively backed by most of society.
If I had to summarize the general idea behind this book, which is a totally personal view of what the conservation profession should consist of, I would do so as follows: Our task is to maintain and/or restore natural ecosystems with most of their original components, thereby generating maximum benefits for and support from society, via public processes managed by properly trained and well-led, highly motivated teams that know how to communicate with key stakeholders and the general public in an effective way. Said in a less precise and technical way that For every Isimangaliso or Phinda there are may be more motivating to my fellow consermany more reserves where conservation actions vationists: Let us not be stopped by fear, lazihave not created functional ecosystems, bene- ness, or boredom. Together we can and must fits for local people, or public support. The aim generate more complete and natural ecosystems of this book is to try to help readers visualize than those that currently exist, and this must be how the most successful organizations work and achieved with broad-based public support. which factors explain their achievements. This focus fits with what Brian Child called “institutional ecology: learning how to design insti- Book Content tutions and organizations to improve economic and biodiversity outcomes.”3 To convey the above, the book is divided into The stories at the beginning of this book seek two main thematic blocks. The first is ideologito illustrate the main concepts behind its content: cal in essence and proposes Full Nature as a way of conceiving and communicating the profession • We must aspire to generate natural ecosys- of conservation. The words we choose to comtems that are in a better state of conservation municate have a tremendous effect on society’s than those we receive from our predecessors; response to our message. I coined the term Full this is not an unrealizable utopia. Nature (whose meaning is equivalent to other • These conserved or restored ecosystems terms that seek to combine conservation and the should – inasmuch as it is possible – be tied interests of society in a broadest sense) as a way to social processes that generate greater ben- to connect in a single phrase words such as parks, efits for local people and the rest of society ecological restoration, and development, which than other alternative uses of the territory. are often presented as contradictory options in
6
Effective Conservation
many public discussions. In our original setting we used the Spanish phrase Producción de Naturaleza, which has nuances that are difficult to translate into English. To concept of Producción de Naturaleza or Full Nature has helped us to obtain public and political support for the establishment of ambitious large-scale conservation programs in South America. Nevertheless, the idea behind Full Nature (i.e., that we should aim to create healthy, fully functioning natural landscapes that are connected to the basic needs of the general public) is nothing new and many effective conservation organizations around the world are using a similar approach in their work. The second chapter of this book is devoted to explaining the concept of Full Nature. The second thematic block of this book proposes a method for designing, analyzing, and managing effective programs whose aim is to achieve Full Nature. This method will be referred to as the “Boat and the Wheel” and, as explained below, is based on the ideas of the policy sciences that teach us how to manage public processes in a comprehensive manner, including those related to biodiversity conservation and/ or local development. In Chapter 3, I present the general method using as a metaphor the old steam-powered boats that were propelled by paddle wheels. In our method the Wheel represents the different parts of the public process in conservation, while the Boat signifies the organization that manages the process. I use this image to enliven what would otherwise be a dull theoretical model expressed in the form of a circular diagram. As well, the image of the paddle wheel steamer helps convey the idea that conservation is as much craft and art as science and is, above all, a personal and organizational adventure that requires courage, a cool head, and a strong heart in order to face up to all the eventualities and challenges that will litter our journey ahead. The detailed development of this theoretical model disguised as a metaphor forms the core of the book. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss promotion, Chapter 6 information gathering or intelligence, 7 planning and norming, 8 the actual management of wild landscapes and populations, 9 conflict management, and 10 evaluation, termination, and renewal. After describing the Wheel in detail in these chapters, chapter 11 then dwells on the organizational and leadership aspects that are associated with the Boat itself. Finally, there is a chapter of conclusions that summarizes all
the above, makes a number of recommendations, and ends with general reflections on the management of successful conservation programs. The book concludes with a personal afterword. In order to create a shorter version from the original publication in Spanish, I have decided to move material to an associated website. The book’s website contains complete sections included in the longer Spanish version plus many boxes with the original longer texts written by the conservation practitioners. At the end of each chapter I list the sections and boxes to be found on the web, where in all there’s 30% more extra reading material!
Clarifying My Standpoint We all talk from a personal place that determines what we say. This place is the fruit of our biology combined with those decisions taken and lessons learned during our lifetimes. As a result, we all see reality in a different way and all have our own personal standpoints and perspectives. In some disciplines this is regarded as so important that it is recommended that everyone should make an explicit effort to identify and express his or her standpoint before making any statement (especially one as ambitious as this book) or proposing any kind of policy.4 So, I shall now try to explain my standpoint, which is, after all, the one described in this book. I was born in Valencia, a city of about 700,000 inhabitants in Spain. For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to be a biologist. I believe that this is due to the combination of having had a father who was a hunter and frequently took me into the Mediterranean scrublands, a brother who is ten years older than I and took me along with his biologist friends into the countryside as a kind of “mascot,” and the influence of the greatest of all Spanish-language nature communicators, Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, whose television programs and nature encyclopedias stirred the environmental consciousness of several generations. From those childhood days I have vivid memories of standing in a crystalline icy mountain river and looking on as my brother and his colleagues laughed playfully while looking for river mollusks and otter scats. By then I already knew that field biology was probably the best job in the world and I also felt that I wanted to be part of it.
Introduction
This childhood vocation led me to study biology in my hometown but without ever experiencing during those university years the passion that I had felt as a child. Indeed, more than once I thought about quitting my studies and traveling abroad since before starting university I had had the opportunity to study in the United States for a year, which probably gave me an affinity for English-speaking people’s pragmatic and specific way of seeing and communicating, and sowed the seeds of my desire to live in other countries. Shortly after finishing University I was invited to move to Costa Rica by another brother. Here, I started to become familiar with the world of international conservation (Costa Rica’s economy depends on it!) and ended up taking a master’s degree in Wildlife Management and Conservation. The combination of my discovery of the Tropics, with its explosion of life forms, and the reading of classic texts by authors such as Michael Soulé and E. O. Wilson, who wrote of the Sixth Extinction and of Conservation Biology as a “science with a mission,” affected me deeply. Suddenly, I felt like a missionary. Slowly, I began to shed my old skin and no longer regarded myself simply as a biologist; instead I began to see myself as a conservationist. Once I had made this change, the number of topics that interested me expanded drastically and I started to study subjects that I now regarded as crucial for a good conservationist but which had little to do with biology: conflict management, project design and evaluation, organizational aspects, policy sciences, communication, environmental economics, and so forth. With my master’s degree completed I began to design applied research projects that I felt could help the conservation of endangered species. For several years, I worked with the West Indian manatee, first in Costa Rica and then in Nicaragua, carrying out a mix of ecological research, conservation plans, and outreach actions. At the same time I discovered a new vocation: teaching. Through the design and implementation of intensive courses focusing on practical aspects of conservation, I learned not only that I enjoyed teaching but that these courses obliged me to continue studying new subjects and structuring my ideas. In 2000, my friend Astrid Vargas invited me to Madagascar to set up a program to study and conserve the critically endangered golden-crowned sifaka. Working in a number of different countries has helped me understand how protected areas
7
are managed and appreciate more clearly the inevitable relationship between their fate and the developmental policies of their surrounding areas. By then it had become increasingly clear to me that conservation does not mean working most of the time with animals and wild landscapes – as I had dreamed as a child – but, rather, implies working with the people who have an effect on them (i.e., communities, governments, politicians, businesses, academia, and the media). For two years I coordinated an interdisciplinary national assessment of Spanish programs aimed to recover threatened fauna.5 During this period, I had the opportunity to spend several days with Susan Clark, another biologist who was passionate about the social sciences. She convinced me (as we ate in a medieval village in the Spanish mountains) that the policy sciences offered the most comprehensive and inclusive framework for understanding and managing conservation processes. By then, I had stopped seeing myself essentially as a biologist and had developed an interest in any discipline that would help me understand and manage more effectively the human processes that determine the success or failure of conservation programs. By 2003 and 2004 I was working as a consultant in the design and negotiation of management plans for protected areas in El Salvador (Central America) and I had gotten to know or worked with enough organizations (universities, research centers, NGOs, governments, and international cooperation agencies) to see that many conservation failures can be put down to the professional training of conservationists and the internal functioning of conservation organizations. The problem – and therefore the solution – resided largely in the design and management of organizations and teams that could effectively deliver conservation results. And what worried me the most was that many of the motivations and forces acting on these groups tended to promote inefficiency and cause them to lose sight of their original goals. In January 2005 I was traveling with my wife along Chile’s Austral Route and took the ferry to Caleta Gonzalo in Pumalin Park, a 325,000ha protected area covered by Valdivian rainforest, fjords, glaciers, and snowy peaks. Traveling through this public-access reserve with firstclass facilities I was most struck by the fact that it was actually privately owned and managed by an organization, The Conservation Land Trust
8
Effective Conservation
(CLT), which had been set up by an American millionaire, Douglas Tompkins. I remember sitting in the cozy café at Caleta Gonzalo (one of my favorite places in South America) and flicking through a book about the early years of this foundation. The book spoke of a project in the Iberá wetlands in northeast Argentina, where they were planning to reintroduce six species of large, locally extinct mammals. Knowing that no one had ever done anything similar in Latin America (and even in more developed regions in Europe and North America), I thought “these guys are crazy” but that “an organization like this could actually achieve such an ambitious goal.” Little did I know at the time that this random thought would completely change my professional life. Through a series of chance events, in late 2005 I started working for the CLT and was put in charge of initiating and then coordinating their rewilding program in Iberá. This represented a total shift in how I saw my work and duties. For ten years I had worked as a researcher or consultant and had gauged my work in terms of the quality and amount of documents I produced (i.e., reports, plans, books, and scientific articles); but now that I was in charge of a wildlife restoration program, my indicators of progress were legal authorizations, support from different stakeholders, and, above all, the number of animals established in each reintroduced population. Suddenly, the final products by which I judged my work were no longer documents (though I still had to write many), which henceforth were only means to the dual ends of the number of restored wildlife species and public support for their reestablishment. I had become a practitioner. During more than a decade of work on CLT’s Iberá Project I had the privilege to get to know Douglas and Kristine Tompkins, Sofía Heinonen, and some of the best conservation professionals I’ve ever met, many of whom lacked a flashy curriculum or recognized academic merits. And above all, I had the opportunity to observe, participate, and learn how to design, create, maintain, strengthen, and improve a high-performance conservation team. Finally, thanks to my work in Iberá I was able to discover, visit, and study the culture of nature conservation in southern Africa. In this region, a large body of institutions and professionals have had unparalleled success in the realm of ecosystem restoration and how to link it to national development policies and the needs of local communities. Moreover, Africa offers a unique oppor-
tunity to see and feel what most of the world must have looked like before humans stripped it of its ecological integrity and devastated the native megafauna that structured and filled its landscapes. Nowadays, several African countries host landscapes and organizations that act as models of what conservation should look like when it is carried out with love for the land, passion, and pragmatism, without forgetting the broader needs of society. That most of these regional achievements remain unseen or are looked down upon by much of the international conservation community remains a mystery to me. And this personal history is the standpoint from which this book has taken shape.
On the Book’s Style and Tone As a result of my personal history this book is a mestizo in a geographic sense because it is written by a southern European who has worked most of his life in Latin America and mainly reads authors from the great English-speaking conservation tradition (North America, UK, Australia, and New Zealand). Hence the book does not fit within any regional conservation culture. I admire the achievements of European conservationists, often backed by a supranational entity such as the European Union that acts as a great legislator and funder of conservation policies. I also believe that there is much to be learned from the professionalism of North Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders. However, most of my personal experience comes from working in Latin America, although I have also had the opportunity to share ideas with many excellent African professionals. Having worked most of my adult life in tropical or subtropical regions I understand that many “northern” solutions are not applicable to the governance systems of developing countries, which harbor the largest share of the planet’s biodiversity. Hence, this book has a certain bias toward solutions that work in developing countries, where, for instance, NGOs play a more preeminent role than in developed countries, and where issues such as the reduction of poverty and improving human rights are intimately tied to conservation decisions. It is also a mestizo as it has been written by someone whose training veers between the natural and social sciences. It’s certainly not a purely scientific work, even though my original
Introduction
background does still encourage me to support my ideas with empirical data or references to previous studies. Rather than a compilation of scientific principles, this book consists of stories, thoughts, opinions, and criticisms, enlivened by a number of practical tips. In this respect, the following pages aim to fulfill two main purposes: promote critical reflection and entertain. I need the latter to achieve the former given the risk of boring the reader who would prefer to spend his or her time doing something more enjoyable. It took me a while to realize that when I go to scientific conferences, the ideas that interest and excite most often do not emerge during the formal presentations and poster sessions but during conversations with colleagues that tend to take place in bars and cafés. In the informal atmosphere following these structured sessions many people feel free to say what they really think or make recommendations based on their personal experiences without feeling obliged to provide impeccable statistical analyses and significant sample sizes, and worry much less about offending their peers. In such conversations, with participants relaxed after the strictly timed talks, precious data comes to light from empirical experiences, unquantifiable intuition, anecdotes, case studies, and bottom-up practice-based learning that complements generalized theories based on formal research. Based on this experience, I hereby invite the reader to imagine that this book is the equivalent of a conversation with colleagues around a table in a bar or cafe (whichever is more comfortable), where all can talk passionately about what makes conservation programs work or fail. Picture yourself around a large round table, mostly populated by managers and practitioners from different continents, by people with decades of experience working in the “trenches” of Conservation who are still passionate about what they do and who share a feeling that great things happen when we truly commit and use our minds and hearts to protect or restore species or landscapes. Thus this book features tips and reflections from many colleagues with whom I have crossed paths over the years, whose ideas I want to include in this long conversation. Many of these authors are scholar-practitioners reflecting on their own working experiences or conservationists who like testing new ideas and sharing their reflections with their peers. It is from these management experiments, performed and evaluated by managers on the
9
ground, that some of the most interesting lessons for our profession have arisen. As usually happens in these conversations, the book has a passionate tone. Readers should not be afraid. It is merely the result of the ideas generated by a group of people sitting around a table who truly love their profession. I apologize in advance to readers if in the heat of this informal conversation we get too ardent about certain issues or air thoughts that could exasperate. I have deliberately chosen to encourage readers to act and come to their own conclusions. I think a passionate tone – at times upbeat but often critical in our profession – meets my goal of promoting both reflection and entertainment. Just like a good friendly chat after a congress. ◊
Complementary Texts Online • A note about values
References 1 See Chapter 8 on Management of Natural Areas for an explanation of the relationship between the size of a reserve and its ability to harbor different species. 2 The story of Phinda and Isimangaliso is based on extensive interviews with staff from both reserves, especially with Simon Naylor and Les Carlisle from Phinda and Andrew Zaloumis and Debbi Cooper from Isimangaliso, combined with several technical reports they provided. Recommended reading about Phinda: Buchanan, M. (1999). The return: the story of Phinda Game Reserve. Londolozi Publishers. 3 Source of the term “institutional ecology:” Child, B. (2012). Innovations in State, Private and Communal Conservation, 436 in. Suich, H., Child, B., & Spenceley, A. (eds.) Evolution and Innovation in Wildlife Conservation: Parks and Game Ranches to Transfrontier Conservation Areas. Earthscan. 4 The importance of clarifying our standpoint: Clark, T.W. (2002). The policy process: A practical guide for natural resource professionals. Yale University Press. 5 Jiménez-Pérez, I., & Delibes de Castro, M. (2005). Al borde de la extinción: una visión integral de la recuperación de fauna amenazada en España. EVREN, Evaluación de Recursos Naturales.
Introduction
Box 1.1
Two Types of Conservationists It was close to midnight and all guests at the cozy Rincon del Socorro lodge in Iberá (Argentina) had already left. I sat chatting with James Gilardi and Igor Berkunsky, two specialists on parrot conservation, about the possible reintroduction of green-winged macaws, which had become extinct in the region over a hundred years ago. We started talking about the likely opposition to the idea, mainly from inside the world of conservation. James, Director of the World Parrot Trust, looked like he had been in these situations several times before. He took a deep breath and started explaining something along the following lines. “I have been in this line of work for many years. And over the years I’ve noticed that there are two kinds of conservationists. In fact, it just takes about five minutes of listening to any of them to know which group they belong to. Both groups have quite different, almost opposite, worldviews. They speak different languages and, however much they try, it is very difficult for them to agree with the other group because they get excited, upset, or mad about any number of different topics. One group focuses on avoiding anything bad happening in conservation. They are conservative, cautious, and prefer no management actions to be taken just in case they go wrong. When faced with any initiative they will respond with a classic list of potential problems (i.e., genetics, diseases, increased human impact, or lack of data) and will propose that the action in question is abandoned or that all kinds of precautions should be taken. They often cite the precautionary principle and the need for more information, regardless of the costs in terms of opportunities that both imply. Instinctively, they prefer the dangers of inaction to the perils of failed action. They live in a world of threats and are worried by them. The other group gets excited about the idea of making things better and are willing to start something without having all the information at their disposal as they assume that this will seldom (never?) be possible. They
believe that it is inevitable to work with uncertainties and that the best way of learning is by just doing. This group gets irritated by inaction, which they see as the product of unjustifiable bureaucratic obstacles, and is motivated by the prospect of starting something that nobody has tried before. They live in a world of opportunities and are excited by them. At that time I found James’ words interesting but in the heat of the conversation I did not pay much attention to them. It was not until weeks later that his ideas came back to me and I became aware of their power. I realized that he may have identified a real and deep fault-line within our profession, for what he had said coincided with my feelings of empathy and detachment toward certain colleagues. It helped me understand why I get along well with some people but not with others, even though they all see themselves as committed conservationists. Or why certain people could work in our organization while others, however nice and even hard-working they were, never fitted in. Today I think James is right and it is likely that there are two types of people working in conservation: those that focus on preventing bad things from happening and those who want things to get better. I admit (in case the reader has any doubt by now) that I identify with the latter tendency and that this book is the product of this personal bias. Therefore, it is written especially for those who believe that we live in a time when it is not only possible but necessary to work to improve the integrity of our natural ecosystems, and that the end results will depend primarily on how ambitious our vision is and how effective we are in promoting it. Hence the book is based on a personal belief – shared with many other professionals over the years – that conservationists should not only work to prevent bad things from happening but must also recognize that good or even (why not?) great things sometimes happen – even though there is no clear-cut approach or path to achieve this.
11
Chapter 2.
Full Nature A new relationship between parks and society needed to be renegotiated. Fortunately, the idea that wildlife could pay its way and create employment had been tested on private and communal land. It began to spread to parks, suggesting that many parks could fund themselves, and could also play an important role as an engine of local economic growth with their newfound financial and economic power tending to enhance rather than detract from biodiversity objectives. In this way, parks became a beachhead for a much larger economic and environmental landscape, providing the foundation for a wildlife-based tourism economy and enhancing the value of nearby land and the probability of it switching to a nature-tourism based economy. – Brian Child, manager of protected areas, Southern Africa It is imperative that we begin to consider protected natural areas as the parks that they are. They are water factories, entertainment centers, warehouses. They are the largest living libraries in the world for research, entertainment, and aesthetic pleasures. They are carbon deposits, biodegraders, recyclers, buffer zones. But they are not gold under the mattress so you have to defend them with a pistol, because at the end someone always manages to break in. They are gold to put to work in the market, under the watchful eye of the interests of Society. – Daniel Janzen, ecologist, Costa Rica But in these times when lamb, wool, cow milk, or pork meat are paid at very low prices, “producing” wildlife or natural scenery could be a worthy option and a future investment. To this end, governments should encourage traditional activities that contribute to the creation of landscapes or to maintain endangered species, and to promote the idea that local people will benefit from nature conservation and then begin to truly value the work of researchers, technicians, and educators. – Miguel Mari Elosegui Irurtia, writer, Spain
The False Dichotomy The year 2007 was my third working for The Conservation Land Trust (CLT) on the Iberá Project. Iberá Nature Reserve is located in northeast Argentina and had been declared as a protected area of 1.3 million ha by the provincial government of Corrientes in 1983. Known as the Argentinian Pantanal, Iberá is a vast subtropical wilderness of wetlands, grasslands, and small patches of forest. CLT, a foundation chaired by philanthropist, climber, and former textile entrepreneur Doug Tompkins, is devoted to purchas-
ing private lands in regions of high conservation potential in Chile and Argentina. It then restores them ecologically, creates high-quality public infrastructure, and donates them to the respective governments to be incorporated into their national park systems. In the case of Iberá, CLT had acquired 150,000 ha in 2000 in an area identified as of high conservation value for the declared purpose of donating them to the Argentine nation to create a national park. In spite of all our good intentions, by 2007 the tension around our project was growing. Much of public opinion regarded us as forces of
13
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Effective Conservation
evil and Douglas Tompkins was generally perceived as an agent of a conspiracy organized by the “Yankee Empire” to control the vast water reserves of the Guaraní aquifer and in cahoots with the newly established American military base in Paraguay. Any “informed person” knew that “the next wars will be fought over water.” A high-ranking member of the Argentinian government went as far as to publicly announce that he had convincing evidence that Tompkins worked for both the Mossad and the CIA. The background noise was so loud that the voices of the Argentinian professionals who were working in favor of the conservation of the Iberá Nature Reserve went unheard. In a country like Argentina, with weak institutions and strong personalities, no one could understand that both the land purchase and the hard work required were due to a foundation with a team of people with clearly established goals and boundaries and not just to the work of a single person. The only thing that was being talked about was the eccentric millionaire who claimed to be devoted to conservation. For most people it was almost insulting – since it was totally alien to their culture – to suggest that someone would use their private fortune for the public good. But, above all, very few people were interested or really cared about Conservation. Public debate in Corrientes on the future of Iberá boiled down to a simple choice: you were either for production or for conservation. It was black or white. I remember listening in those days to politicians and ranchers saying that “we need to find a balance between conservation and production.” However, they always talked about reaching this balance within a legally declared nature reserve. No one spoke of the balance or compromise required outside the reserve as it was taken for granted that the rest of the province should be solely devoted to “production,” this being understood as the transformation of natural ecosystems by exotic tree plantations, rice farming, and cattle ranching. In those days, the National Forest Act was to be applied throughout the province of Corrientes and, in light of the fact that this law could be used to limit the destruction of the last remaining Espinal forests in the Iberá Nature Reserve, someone remarked publicly that “a tree should not get in the way of development.” Listening to the debate as the choice between two contrasting options – that is people vs. ani-
mals; production and development vs. conservation; or poverty reduction vs. the interests of an environmental elite – and having our work limited exclusively to the lands within the Reserve, I assumed we had no way of winning the debate. “We are roasted,” I thought, using a typical Argentinian expression. It was clear which side was going to be supported by public opinion, however much people said they cared about something as vague as “the environment.” In my experience, when society has to choose between people and wildlife, the former always wins, just as when they have to choose between economy and environment. We needed to reframe the debate to get away from what I believed was a false dichotomy. The answer lay in Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, just 35 km away from our headquarters in Iberá Nature Reserve. In the previous century, the economy of this village of about 800 inhabitants was based on wildlife pelts and temporary jobs on rice plantations and cattle ranches. But by the 1990s it was described as a village of old people and children since all the youngsters had left to look for better economic opportunities. Back in 1983 this community was the origin of the newly created Iberá Nature Reserve. Its first rangers were former mariscadores (the local name for hunters) who had stopped hunting to commit themselves to protecting the local fauna. Over a period of many years, this strategy paid off and the wildlife around Pellegrini and the Iberá lagoon gradually began to recover. Observations of marsh deer, capybaras, caimans, and waterfowl that had become scarce after decades of hunting became commonplace and soon the first visitors were coming to the area to see these animals. In those days there was no accommodation and people camped in tents. Two audacious entrepreneurial married couples with strong roots in the area but originating from other parts of Argentina created the first nature lodges. With them came more visitors, and with more visitors to the area, fewer animals were hunted and more animals seen. Word of mouth led to even more visitors and this encouraged both locals and outsiders to offer places where they could stay. By 2006 it was clear that Colonia Carlos Pellegrini now made its living mainly from nature tourism. This was its chief “product” and the local economy was now based on the non-extractive use of wildlife. Young people no longer left the village in search of employment
Full Nature
opportunities elsewhere and it was said that the town had the lowest unemployment rate in the province. And our fields, adjacent to the village and lagoon, were producing this fauna on a massive scale. Not only that, but we had already reintroduced the first giant anteaters and we were about to translocate Pampas deer to another sector of Iberá. We were actually bringing new assets to this type of “production.” Pellegrini was telling us that we were not just conservationists but we were also – along with the government team managing the provincial reserve – “producers” of the main assets on which the local economy was now based: wildlife and the scenic beauty of natural ecosystems. This enabled us to reframe the public debate and avoid being lumped into the “marginal” box of “environmentalists.” We became part of the productive sector. We were “Producers of Nature” and we could show that this type of production could outcompete other traditional alternatives in terms of income generation and employment, thereby reverting the rural exodus and heightening local pride while maintaining and restoring the diversity of goods and services provided by natural ecosystems. We starting calling our task Producción de Naturaleza in Spanish. Since I have not been able to find a satisfying translation in English that reflects all the nuances of the original Spanish phrase, henceforth I will use
the phrase “Full Nature” to describe our work. I first presented this idea in public to a group of legislators from Corrientes. As far as I remember, none of them had any special interest in conservation when we began talking. However, as I started to outline the economic and social data from Pellegrini and regale them with stories about communities that had gone through similar processes in the United States, Central America, and Europe, backed up with data from countries that unlike their neighbors have invested in producing and marketing Nature (Costa Rica vs. other Central American countries and Dominican Republic vs. Haiti), I remember how their faces changed from skepticism to surprise and then to interest. I recall one senator saying: “I had never seen it this way. This changes the whole game!” Shortly afterward my boss Sofia and I traveled to South Africa where we discovered a region that had similar problems of poverty to ours but one that had a decade-long head start in the use of Nature as a way to promote local development, employment, and empowerment. This reinforced our perception that we were on the right path. The concept of Full Nature emerged for areas where parks (understood as large areas covered by natural ecosystems under public, private, or communal ownership) with all their native species and abundant wild-
Parks
Local development
Full Nature
Restorative economy
Figure 2.1 The virtuous cycle of Full Nature.
15
Complete ecosystems with abundant wildlife
16
Effective Conservation
life act as natural showcases for an ecotourism industry and restorative economy (understood as any activity that profits from the sustainable use of complete ecosystems) that benefits local communities and creates public support for their long-term maintenance. Within this kind of framework, we believed we could create a virtuous cycle that would promote the longterm ecological, social, and political resilience of large ecosystems and the human societies that live within or around them (Fig. 1). Sofia and I started referring to conservation, not as an alternative to production, but as an alternative type of production that generates a wide range of goods and services. By then we had started to shift the regional debate, which was not between production or conservation but between types of productive uses within the same territory and which one generated the greatest benefit for society in general. We were talking face-to-face to the traditional productive sectors of society and we now possessed solid data to support our endeavors. Seven years later, the Corrientes Government – which had previously declared its lack of interest in conservation – published a book called Parque Provincial Iberá: producción de naturaleza y desarrollo local. It was presented in a beautiful colonial-style hall, full to overflowing, in Government House in the provincial capital. The room heard the provincial governor praise the publication and declare that Corrientes not only produced wood, rice, and meat, but also Nature. And this time society listened attentively with interest. In 2016, two years later, the same governor acted as host to the Argentinian ministers of tourism and environment at the presentation of the Agreement of Nature, a document that expanded the concept of Full Nature or Producción de Naturaleza to four provinces in northern Argentina and extoled the national parks and nature reserves as keystones in the development of 36 localities for about 380,000 people.
the Tropical Dry Forest – began his talk with a quote: “Use it or lose it.” I was stunned. Why had he chosen this phase to start a talk on interactions between tropical insects? It was not until after several years of work in the Tropics that I really came to understand why he began with that exhortation. The connection between conservation and development – or “use,” as Janzen put it – is imperative in a global context where different land-uses compete with each other. What few conservationists see is that this connection is not only a necessity and a kind of lesser evil which we must pass through but is also a unique historic opportunity. It is estimated that in 2007 – for the first time in human history – more people lived in cities than in the countryside. Do you remember how in the previous chapter I said that I was born in a big city and that my parents came from small towns and my grandmother from a village? This was the standard demographic pattern, not only in Europe but also in most of the world, at the end of the previous century. And it is has continued unchecked into the twenty-first century. This process, known as rural exodus, has generated important social problems in the countryside and has led to a loss of cultural diversity. However, it has also generated unique territorial and socio-economic opportunities for Conservation; or for the establishment of Full Nature as a globally important task. As a result of this exodus, in large regions of Europe and North America natural ecosystems are regenerating spontaneously and with them wildlife species considered as rare or locally extinct are reappearing in places where they had not been seen for centuries. To this process of rural migration we must add, especially since the 1970s, the design and implementation of conservation policies worldwide via the establishment and management of protected areas and increasingly restrictive environmental laws controlling pollution and environmental impacts. On top of this – and related to the increasing urbanization of the Earth’s population – the public A New Context in Old Mindsets image of hunting as a sport is no longer so positive and the number of hunting licenses granted I remember being at an international congress worldwide annually is today plummeting. (Howof the Tropical Biology Society in Costa Rica in ever, the opposite trend is occurring in regions the 1990s. Daniel Janzen – a rare blend of aca- such as the Amazon and Western and Central demic and conservation activist who had com- Africa where the bush-meat trade has increased mitted body and soul for decades to conserving pressure by hunting on natural ecosystems near
Full Nature
growing urban centers). As a result of the environmental laws and policies established at the end of the previous century, in many areas of the world it is becoming increasingly costly to harm natural resources and more public funds are becoming available for their care. This process has been well described for Europe, where most large mammals and birds have increased their abundance and/or distribution over the past three decades through a combination of conservation legislation, a decline in hunting as a recreational activity in rural areas, the implementation of programs aimed at recovering threatened species, and the emergence of new natural habitats due to rural-urban drift.1 In the United States a similar combination of factors have coincided: a decrease in hunting as a socially accepted activity (especially in California and the northeast), a rural exodus followed in some cases by the recolonization of these areas by urbanites with conservationist values, the establishment of public and private reserves, and the enforcement of environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Consequently, in the second half of the last century, first, the populations of large herbivores recovered and then over the past two decades large carnivores such as black and brown bears, wolves, coyotes, and pumas began to reappear in regions from where they had once been purposefully eradicated. Similar recovery stories have been detected for most species listed under the ESA.1 Such opportunities are occurring in other regions of the globe including Patagonia, where the collapse of extensive sheep farming (caused by a fall in productivity after decades of overgrazing) is leading to the abandonment of ranches due to a lack of profitability, and the Brazilian Pantanal. Analogous processes have taken place in Costa Rica owing to the fall of beef prices worldwide leading to the subsequent regeneration of the Dry Tropical Forest. During the 1970s, at the same time as a global conservationist culture was emerging and the image of The Wild as a rare and threatened jewel was expanding out from past historical narratives (e.g., the American Transcendentalists), another phenomenon began to unfold inexorably: international tourism. With the use of the jet engine in passenger air transport and the emergence of an increasingly prosperous middle class, tourism between nations evolved as an exponentially growing economic activity. It is no
17
coincidence that at the same time as the number of hunting licenses were decreasing, nature tourism or “photographic safaris,” as they were called at the time, were increasing. Faced with an ever-growing affluent urban population that sees natural landscapes and wildlife as scarce and desirable commodities, it is understandable that the demand for non-extractive uses of Nature’s great spectacles should proliferate worldwide. For example, my family (with all four members born in cities) spends a fair amount of our income on visiting wild places far from cities and crowds. I personally invest a large percentage of my savings in travelling to see spectacular and iconic animals such as elephants, gorillas, whales, wolves, and jaguars. I doubt very much that any of my grandparents would have been willing to spend money in a similar fashion – unless it was to hunt them down. I understand that I am not an “average world citizen;” nevertheless, an interesting exercise for readers is to think about how much they are willing to invest in this kind of travel and then compare this with what their grandparents would have spent. In other words, while my grandmother traveled in a horse cart from her village to the city of Valencia to enjoy entertainments including religious ceremonies, theater or cinema, I – her grandson – book flights, accommodation, and rent-a-cars to spend a week in wilderness areas with the least possible human presence. This demand from urbanites for access to natural landscapes also explains a new type of land-use: the purchase by wealthy urban classes of large tracts of land in areas of high scenic or wildlife value in which to install their holiday homes and/or private nature reserves, which in some cases may house an eco-lodge. This process has occurred in mountainous areas of the United States, in former forestry properties in jungle areas in Costa Rica and Misiones (Argentina), in the Andean-Patagonian forests of Argentina, and in different parts of southern and eastern Africa. Many of these “private reserves” are situated alongside public protected areas, which de facto increases their size. In fact, in some cases proximity to a public protected area increases the real-estate value of neighboring properties, provided that the area is seen as valuable by society. I recall reading a commercial advertisement in the South African Airlines in-flight magazine offering relatively small land-lots near the Kruger National Park whose principal attraction was
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Effective Conservation
the fact that owners could see elephants from for Conservation who, importantly, are real and their private swimming pools. potential customers willing to invest in the conThus, at this point in history we are witness- servation of certain regions through their reging two simultaneous opposing processes. On ulated use. the one hand, the impacts of globalized consumFaced with this dual scenario of increasing erism continue to grow and are expressed as cli- pressure on wild lands and the growing demand mate change, waste accumulation, the depletion for the regulated use of these spaces, it would of the oceans by overfishing, the exploitation of be an act of unforgivable blindness to ignore basic natural resources such as minerals, water, this demand. Moreover, in certain contexts, Full and soils, the unsustainable felling of certain Nature can be buttressed not only by nature-obtypes of forests, and the over-hunting of highly servation tourism but also (as we shall see later) commercial species such as tigers, elephants, and by well-regulated sports hunting with potenrhinos. Yet, on the other hand, a unique oppor- tial to provide local communities excellent ecotunity in the history of humankind now exists nomic returns with little environmental impact, for promoting the conservation and restoration by real estate investment with true conservation of natural ecosystems and numerous wildlife focus, and by a growing market for high-quality populations since never before have there been wild meat produced on properly managed game so many people – both urban and rural – with ranches. At this moment in time, more than ever such great environmental awareness who are there is a need to maintain and restore natural willing to invest so much of their assets in car- ecosystems and an opportunity to do so through ing for, visiting, or living in Nature. Neither have increasing demand from society. Hence, Janzen’s there ever been so many people willing to pay words: “Use it or lose it.”
Box 2.1
St Lucia and Its Relationship with a Protected Area: A Family’s Story The Georgious were Greek immigrants from Cyprus who came to South Africa in 1974 as a young couple to work in a small trading store in St Lucia, a settlement on the Kwazulu-Natal coast. At that time, St Lucia was just a fishing village that South Africans would visit on their holidays; a few rangers working for the Natal Park Board would patrol the small St Lucia estuary with its hippos and crocodiles, and provide bait for fishermen. The village economy started to change when 4x4 vehicles fell in price in the 1980s. This created the first spike in tourism as people could now drive along the pristine beaches to claim their fishing spots, which became the most popular recreational activity in the period from the 1980s to the mid-1990s. However, in the mid-1990s a multinational company drew up plans to mine the dunes around St Lucia for titanium, which spurred the creation of a national movement whose aim was to promote the idea of conservation in the area. Eventually, the Greater St Lucia
Wetland Park was set up, which would later become known as the Isimangaliso Park. The promise was that this park would create jobs through tourism. Around that time a national law was passed that forbade unauthorized driving on beaches, which began to have a negative impact on the local tourist trade. Many people thought that this would spell the end to the village’s economy and so resentment against the park began to grow. Despite these uncertainties, Mr. Georgiou decided to invest in the village’s future and opened a supermarket. Slowly, foreigners started to arrive in search of wildlife-watching experiences. It took the Isimangaliso Wetland Park and World Heritage Site several years to get organized, improve infrastructures, and boost wildlife numbers. Little by little, however, nature-based international tourism started to grow and a new industry appeared: bedand-breakfast accommodation (B&B) focused on this growing international market. People
Full Nature
started buying properties, building houses, and opening more guesthouses, which was the start of a massive change in the type of accommodation on offer. As the amount of accommodation and visitors grew, the Isimangaliso Wetland Park also started to increase in popularity thanks to a speech by Nelson Mandela, the rediscovery of coelacanths in Sondwana Bay, and the reintroduction of rhinos and elephants. Another big impulse for the Isimangaliso brand was the attraction of being able to observe the “Big Seven” of African mammals: lion, elephant, buffalo, rhino, and leopard, plus whales and dolphins. St Lucia is today a prosperous village of 500 people, with around 3000 beds for tourists, three ATMs, three supermarkets, more than 10 restaurants, curiosity shops, pedicurists, and hairdressers. Today the Georgiou
Large-Scale Experiments in Full Nature In the following section I provide a brief overview of regional processes that show how the virtuous cycles of Full Nature Production can be encouraged. It is by no means an exhaustive analysis of the subject but does represent a more or less coherent journey through a number of sites or stories that I have gotten to know in recent years. None of the following cases were inevitable and behind most of them there are people who made the right decisions at the right time, which is one of the major themes of this book. Full Nature is not something that will happen inevitably but it is an option that benefits both ecosystems and people, as long as the correct procedures are followed. In general, it does not come naturally since most of existing human institutions – values, myths, beliefs, laws, government offices, and markets – are designed to exploit natural ecosystems rather than use them in a rational manner. National studies of the economic benefits of protected areas in neighboring communities. Various national studies have tested the premise that protected areas generate local development. In Thailand, protected areas are located mainly
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family owns one supermarket, two guesthouses, a number of restaurants, and several shops. Around 70% of their customers are from abroad, although the number of South Africans who visit is steadily increasing. This rise in tourism has brought huge economic benefits to the area and several thousand people are now employed in the village. In the words of Mario Georgiou: “Unlike places such as Ibiza and Goa, we have been lucky and have not seen any great loss of traditional values since our kind of tourism is not associated with nightlife or partying. Without the park, the whole social and economic system would collapse. In my opinion, Isimangaliso is the beginning and the end of the village.” Read the full text by Mario Georgiou, local entrepreneur (South Africa), on our website.
in agriculturally marginal areas (i.e. steep-slope areas) where poverty levels are above the national average. In 2000 it was estimated that there were 10.8 million visitors to nature reserves in Thailand; interestingly, when compared with other similar poor steep-slope areas, localities close to protected areas had lower poverty rates than those that were farther from these reserves. Additionally, strict conservation areas (i.e. national parks) were less poor than areas subject to multiple uses. In other words, the areas that were more intensively devoted to maintaining complete ecosystems (i.e., not those that opted for a mixed model of traditional extractive uses combined with some conservation), were the ones that generated the most income. This makes sense when society is willing to pay more for highly conserved ecosystems than for areas with intermediate levels of degradation.2 A similar pattern of poverty reduction around protected areas has been observed in other developing countries such as Costa Rica and Bolivia. In the case of the former, three possible factors were posited to explain the greater fall in poverty around protected areas: changes in tourism and recreational services, changes in infrastructure such as roads, schools, and clinics, and changes in environmental services as a result
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Effective Conservation
of shifts in land-use due to the curbing of environmental impacts. The result was clear: tourism was the key factor and accounted for 70% of the reduction in poverty.2 Further data comes from the oldest national park system in the world. During 2016, visits to national parks in the United States generated 34.9 million dollars. Visitor spending supported 318,000 jobs, the vast majority of which were local jobs in the hospitality, retail, transportation, and recreation sectors. More than 270,000 of these jobs created by visitor spending are in communities that are less than 100 kilometers from a park. Finally, visits to the national parks in the United States grew by 7.7 % between 2015 and 2016 and associated employment rose by 31% between 2012 and 2016. In general terms, it is estimated that these parks generate for the national economy ten dollars for every dollar invested by taxpayers. This is what I call a growing industry with a high positive social impact. In comparison to other activities, the national parks in the United States are an excellent example of the economic, social, and environmental profitability of a public investment.3 “Happy communities.” Over the last twenty years I have witnessed several rural communities dodge economic, political, and social marginalization precisely because they were located in the vicinity of protected areas. As we have seen, most of the world’s protected areas are located in places traditionally considered to be of marginal interest for traditional uses (e.g. arid zones, marshes, mangroves, rainforests, and mountains). In general, governments choose to locate their natural reserves on public property located in areas of low agricultural, livestock, or industrial productivity. In fact, it is normal for these types of marginal environments to be precisely those that contain a greater proportion of public land, since they are the areas that fewer people want to privatize. Furthermore, around these areas many rural communities are excluded from the country’s political and economic decision-making centers. This geographic and political remoteness has traditionally meant that local people have fewer employment and economic opportunities and poorer access to fewer public services such as roads, education, and health. The interesting thing – which coincides with the economic studies discussed in the previous section – is that sometimes the best way to help these people overcome their marginaliza-
tion is to create a protected area on their doorsteps; on the one hand, it will limit traditional unsustainable impacts on the ecosystem and, on the other, will promote the regulated use of sustainable activities of greater profitability. In most cases that I know of, this has been achieved through the development of ecotourism, although it is true to say that the same effect could be triggered by any other activity that minimizes ecological impact while maximizing economic profitability. Tourism is thus only one of the possible options – although, as far as I know, the one with the greatest potential – for generating local development based on well-preserved ecosystems. Colonia Carlos Pellegrini, described at the beginning of this chapter, is a good example of one of these villages that has benefited from a protected area, as is the village of St. Lucia in South Africa described in the previous chapter and in Box 2.1. Another example is the town of Tortuguero in Costa Rica. This village, located between the Caribbean Sea and an area of wetlands and rainforest, was inhabited in the 1970s by just a few Afro-Caribbean families who lived off commercial and subsistence hunting, the capture and sale of the sea turtles that nested on their beach, and logging. The town was so isolated from the rest of the country that it traded mainly with Caribbean islands such as Jamaica and the Caymans. At that time there was no school or health clinic. In 1975, however, Tortuguero National Park was created, largely because of the need to protect the largest green turtle nesting area in the Western Hemisphere. The creation of the park involved the regulation and eventual prohibition of the commercial capture of green turtles, along with other extractive uses, which did not please many of the locals. When I first visited Tortuguero in 1994 the town’s livelihood was based almost exclusively on nature tourism; there were more than 20 lodges and, compared to the exodus from other similar rural communities, there was positive immigration. By the beginning of this century, Tortuguero was the only village in the entire region with a high school and a garbage-processing system. There were many opportunities for working as a boatcaptain or tour guide and no one was interested any more in capturing or selling sea turtles, or hunting wildlife from their neighboring jungle as it was easier and more profitable to take tourists to see it.
Full Nature
Other examples abound. Sited on the Patagonic coast of Argentina, the small fishing community of Puerto Pirámides, now thrives economically thanks to whale-watching and ecotourism. Or Chaltén, a small outpost located next to the Glaciers National Park created by the Argentinian army in southern Patagonia to guard the border against neighboring Chile. What the first soldiers and their families did not imagine when they were destined to this remote part of the world was that, decades later, the place would be accessible along a paved road built to facilitate the arrival of thousands of visitors who come to enjoy the majestic mountain landscapes and their wildlife. In all these towns the real estate value of land has increased exponentially, precisely because they are adjacent to a protected area. Asturias is possibly the most mountainous of all Spanish provinces. This generates important economic constraints on a society that is finding it increasingly difficult to live off extensive livestock production and has seen in recent years the extinction of its traditional mining and industrial activities. In a region of beautiful mountain landscapes, rich gastronomy, and well-preserved traditional architecture, rural tourism is seen as one of the best options. However, competition within Asturias itself and from other destinations in Spain and Europe is fierce. What competitive edge does the remote mountain village of Somiedo have? Fundamentally, its success is due to the fact that it lies within a nature reserve, which guarantees beautiful landscapes and easy viewing of charismatic species such as roe and red deer, chamois, and various species of raptors; but, above all, it is the best place in Spain to see the brown bear, a megacharismatic European species. The ability to see brown bears gives Somiedo a competitive advantage over its rivals and ensures that it receives more visitors and generates more income and employment than other towns in the same mountain range. The bear is to Somiedo what sea turtles are to Tortuguero, right whales to Puerto Pirámides, African megafauna to St. Lucia, mountain gorillas to Virunga, abundant and easy-to-see wildlife to Pellegrini, or Fitz Roy Peak and Andean-Patagonian forests to Chaltén village. Or, at another level, they do what the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty do for New York, Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame for Paris, Machu Picchu for Cuzco, Taj Mahal for Agra, or the Camp Nou
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and Gaudí’s architecture for Barcelona. They are all signature sites and regionally defining icons. However, as I suggest above, none of these stories were meant to happen and indeed there are countless examples of villages located within or adjacent to protected areas that do not benefit from them at all. “Happy” communities develop when the spectacular landscapes and wildlife present in neighboring protected areas are properly managed and offer major attractions to sufficient numbers of people. In this regard, many protected areas that are parks in name only generate neither conservation nor development and have the same lack of natural values as neighboring land. They need to facilitate processes whereby villagers will receive the benefits associated with the use of the reserve. Finally, many successful examples are linked to processes headed by a politician, conservationist, and/or private entrepreneur. When these factors (i.e., a well-managed natural ecosystem that produces tangible goods and local leaders that know how to take advantage of them) are absent, it is understandable that towns adjacent to protected areas do not truly benefit from their existence and find no reason for their persistence. I’m not talking of idyllic Shangri-La-type villages where everyone lives happily in peace and harmony. These “happy” communities are places where conflicts between local people and different interest groups, unfulfilled desires, and even new social and environmental problems associated with the use of the nearby park still arise. Along with the prestige and job opportunities, when not properly planned and regulated, nature tourism can spark new problems such as uncontrolled immigration, prostitution, poor waste management, or a loss of traditional social structures. There are no perfect solutions. However, I believe there are several characteristics that define many of these successful villages, which is that they often (a) have better economic indicators and receive more public investment than other similar communities living off more traditional production, (b) have a strong sense of pride in living in a special place that many people want to visit, (c) have a clearly positive perception of the value of natural ecosystems and the benefits of living alongside wildlife, even if they may not always share the exact views of the institutions that actually care for these assets, and, finally, (d) give the distinct feeling that if you offered them the chance to travel back in
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Effective Conservation
time to when there was no reserve and to go back to living off their former activities (e.g., subsistence or commercial hunting, logging, fishing, or ranching), their answer would be “are you out of your mind?” These “happy” communities are also very powerful promotional tools for the concept of Full Nature, which is something that any mayor, minister, governor, investor, or senator will understand. When they see that there is a group of people who have managed to improve their situation thanks to the existence of a protected area, they quickly appreciate the economic and political potential. Our work at Iberá Nature Reserve would have been infinitely more difficult if we hadn’t had a showcase village like Carlos Pellegrini. Countries that have managed to install the concept of Full Nature as part of their national identity. Nature can be instated within a nation as an integral part of its patriotic symbols and can generate widespread support both within the country and as an attractive product for the outside world. This has happened in the United States, where the first-ever national park (Yellowstone) was created. Here, thanks to the explicit policy of promoting national parks, the country’s parks are today accessible to its middle class and national public opinion has assimilated them as an inseparable part of the national identity. No other system of protected areas anywhere in the world has so many visitors nor generates so much income as the U.S. national parks: in 2016 its 20 national parks received more than one million visitors each and, of these, 12 received more than two million. In 2009 the PBS (the public television channel) produced a miniseries of 12 hours (!!) entitled National Parks: America’s Best Idea. With a countrywide audience of 33.4 million people, it was the second most-watched PBS miniseries in the past decade, equaling a series on World War II and surpassing another on baseball.4 These figures show how the idea of national parks can act as a cohesive force for a society as politically polarized as the American. A parallel case is Costa Rica, a small nation that has managed to insert national parks and other protected areas into the nation’s patriotic vision alongside concepts such as democracy and the abolition of the army. Although few Ticos or Costa Ricans know their national parks well, this does not prevent them from being one of
their main sources of pride. Such national identification has been used to successfully support activist campaigns against open-pit mining, dams, and oil exploration. Costa Rican national parks are internationally recognized and have helped create an image of Costa Rica as “the country of national parks.” The interesting fact – which speaks volumes of how well the product has been marketed both internally and externally – is that Costa Rica does not clearly outperform its neighbors in terms of the amount of protected areas, either relatively or absolutely.5 However, as a result of the firm placement of this idea in the collective psyche, the country’s protected areas generally have better levels of protection than in neighboring countries; furthermore, its image as a Great Nature Park has helped stimulate the emergence of hundreds of private reserves. Countries such as Canada, Namibia, Botswana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Kenya, India, and South Africa also identify their national parks as a significant component of their national identities. This is seen in the content of their newspapers and magazines, the paradigm being the airline magazines that are a faithful reflection of how a country wants to project itself to its citizens and visitors. From persecuted beasts to natural attractions. One of the best indicators of how the perception of society toward the wild has changed, and extent to which the natural world has become an “entertainment” product, is the evolution of the attitude toward large carnivores over the past three decades. For millennia humans have seen these beasts (tigers, lions, leopards, bears, wolves, and so forth) either as threats or as competitors. As a result, until the second half of the last century most countries deliberately aimed to control or eradicate these “varmints.” Governments and private citizens paid bounties for each dead carnivore, nobles and kings tested their manhood on hunts, farmers and ranchers pursued them with all the means at their disposal, and photos of “great white hunters” were taken in the Tropics with dozens of tigers, jaguars, and lions lying dead at their feet. But all this began to change after World War II as a result of increased knowledge of the ecological role of large predators and the urbanization process described above. In just a few decades, the very animals that were hated by our grandfathers have become idolized as symbols of the purity of Nature by new (mainly urban)
Full Nature
generations. What is even more interesting is that in some places they have evolved from being seen as an economic burden into the main attraction of a region and therefore its true economic driving force. Above we looked at the case of brown bears in a small town in northern Spain. Another wellknown example is that of the wolf in Yellowstone National Park. This canid was the target of a major eradication campaign in modern times. As a result, American society managed to virtually exterminate the wolf from the 48 contiguous states and, as part of this campaign, it was also exterminated by government agents from the country’s first national park during the early twentieth century as it was considered a threat to “good” animals such as elk and bison. In the 1990s, as conservation values evolved, the same government agencies that had once exterminated the wolf set in motion a program designed to reintroduce it to Yellowstone. As a result of this initiative, in less than 20 years this protected area went from having no wolves to claiming that it was the best place in the United States to see them. An estimated 300,000 people see wolves annually, many of whom go to the park just to see these animals. Thus revenue associated with the wolf in and around Yellowstone is estimated at US$ 35 million per year, while the cost of paying for damage caused by wolves to cattle is just US$ 60,000.6 Ranthambore National Park in India is a tiger reserve of about 39,200 ha. In 2012 I had the opportunity to visit and interview GV Reddy, one of its former directors, who seemed to retain a significant degree of prestige among his peers and neighbors. According to Reddy, in the 1970s it was estimated that there were 17 tigers in this reserve, in the 1980s about 40, about 25 in the 1990s, and in 2014 about 48. The latter number is remarkably high for a large predator like the tiger in a relatively modest-sized area. After giving us this data on abundance and associating it primarily with levels of poaching and the commitment of park managers and rangers, he quoted the following socioeconomic data: the number of visitors to the reserve had risen from 10,000 per year in the 1980s to 200,000 in 2012. This type of tourism, more focused on seeing tigers than on watching wildlife in general or enjoying the beautiful landscape, has meant that strict quotas on visitor numbers have had to be imposed. Today, those wishing to see tigers in
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Ranthambore must typically book months in advance, as you have to do if you want to attend a major sports tournament or a concert by a rock star. The park pays immediate compensation for losses due to tigers and, according to studies cited by the former director of the reserve, about 70% of the local economy depends on tiger-associated tourism; an estimated 7,000 people depend directly on this activity, to which the multiplier effect on the regional economy, estimated at nine times previous levels, must be added.7 Three years earlier, in 2009, I was in the northern part of the Brazilian Pantanal trying to spot jaguars, one of the most sought-after and elusive of all South American animals. Seeing jaguars in this area was said to be relatively straightforward: go in the dry season, follow the rivers and look out for jaguars on the river banks. It seemed a pretty chancy idea but for a fan of wildlife it was worth taking the risk even if I drew a blank. However, in five days we saw three jaguars, the last of which we watched for twoand-half hours while it napped peacefully about 12 m away from us. Sofia, my traveling companion, and I were ecstatic. She went back to the same area two years later and saw jaguars nine times in the same period. Another companion went a few years later and enjoyed eleven sightings in four days, including two animals mating and another hunting. In 2019 I repeated the visit and saw a jaguar on a two-hour boat ride during the low rainy season. If anyone has doubts about how easy it is to see jaguars today around Porto Jofre, all you need to do is enter YouTube and type in “jaguar” and “Pantanal.” Dozens of amateur videos will appear. In the 1970s, when the biologist George Schaller conducted his pioneering study of this species in the Pantanal, seeing a jaguar was something of a miracle. During my first visit to the Northern Pantanal I met Fernando Tortato, a young doctorate student who was conducting a study on the economic impact of jaguars in the area. He told me how the perceptions of the local ranchers (the pantaneiro fazendeiros) had changed in recent years thanks to tourists’ sightings of jaguars, and how persecution of this big cat had declined. He subsequently published his findings stating that jaguar ecotourism generated a gross annual income of US$ 6.8 million in revenue compared to the estimated damage to cattle of only US$ 121,500 per year. For instance, in the southern Pantanal lies Fazenda San Francisco, a private
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Effective Conservation
area devoted to cattle ranching, agriculture, and wildlife tourism based on jaguar observation. Over a period of five years in which 12,000 tourists went on jaguar safaris, the associated earnings for the ranch owners were US$ 497,000, while cattle losses due to jaguars were estimated at US$ 18,444. Indeed, Fazenda San Francisco is known to have one of the highest densities of jaguars in the whole of South America, which should come as no surprise given that the owners are nurturing the local jaguar populations with their own cattle; this allows them to increase their overall income from their property.8 Similar cases of carnivores that were previously considered as “impossible to see” and are now becoming “easy-to-observe” can be cited from many parts of the world, which increases job opportunities and reduces the persecution of carnivores habituated to human presence (and so become even easier to see!). In 2012 I went to a small town in Sierra Morena (Spain) to try to see Iberian lynx, regarded as the most endangered feline on the planet. By going to the right place, on one day I managed to see a lynx at the same time that I also came across dozens of people who likewise had traveled in an attempt to see one. Had it not been for one person who told me that he had just seen a lynx, I would have never stopped at exactly the right spot to see it. It was precisely the presence of many other observers that increased my chance of seeing the animal! A similar process is happening with tourists visiting private ranches sited around Torres del Paine National Park in Chile in order to see pumas. What I have seen in all these cases is how quickly news spreads by word of mouth that a particular elusive and charismatic carnivore can be seen in a certain place. But even more striking is how within a few years, and thanks to the presence of the people who travel to see these animals, the possibilities of success rise from, for example, 40% in a week to almost 100% in the same amount of time. This process manifests itself in a rapid increase in visits and the mobilization of private entrepreneurs – that is if public agencies do not try to curtail these processes – who bring more visitors to see animals and to stay in the area, which in turn boosts the number of visitors and makes these animals more accustomed to their presence and easier to see. Thus these processes generate a positive feedback: a significant chance of seeing this spectacular animal exists → first visits by people wanting to see
it → people invest in bringing more visitors → less persecution of carnivores by locals who in turn benefit from visits → even more visitors → animals become more used to humans and become easier to observe → increased revenues from visitors → less pressure on the once persecuted carnivores → a population increase for that species… and so forth. It is also true that these processes irritate some conservationists and pioneer researchers who suddenly see their “children” (i.e., objects of research) gaining lots of “parents” (i.e., visitors) and how these “iconic” animals stop being so elusive and magical and become accessible to all and sundry. This can lead to passionate calls to monitor and control the threat posed by so many people in the vicinity of such rare animals (See Box 7.5 on tiger tourism in India). As this happens, I picture these once persecuted animals living oblivious to the ensuing controversy, performing their basic activities (mating, eating, and resting) thanks to the fact that fewer people are now trying to kill them. Southern Africa: a major regional shift toward Full Nature.9 Southern Africa, a region mainly composed of English-speaking countries, has become in recent decades one of the largest testing grounds for innovative ideas in Conservation. Consequently, it is undergoing a massive change in land-use from traditional production (mainly livestock and agriculture) to “nature production” or, as it is known locally, Game Ranching. This story is a fascinating example of the testing and exchange of ideas between countries and institutions, mainly led by a group of academic-practitioners and public officials who have created the necessary spaces of governance. If there is a region in the world where it is clear that conservation is an alternative type of production – and in many cases the most cost-effective (in the broadest sense) – then that is southern Africa. According to some versions, this process originated in 1958 in what is modern-day Zimbabwe when three US Fulbright scholars established within governmental circles began to advocate the idea that wildlife could be more profitable than livestock farmed for meat production. This led to a series of experiments, first on a small scale and later nationwide, that included legal changes allowing landowners to benefit from wildlife. As a result, by 1980 the regulated use of wildlife had become a major activity on state, communal, and private lands in Zimbabwe,
Full Nature
which in turn led to an expansion of wildlife populations and natural ecosystems that was unprecedented in the twentieth century. By 2000 there were an estimated 1,000 private properties dedicated to this activity, covering 27,000 km² or 7% of the country. Soon this learning process was transferred to neighboring countries, thanks to the existence of a regional network of professionals called Management and Use in Nature Conservation (MUNC) who exchanged ideas and offered practical lessons. Suddenly, different regions were sharing ideas about park interpretation, the integration of wildlife and reserves into the local economy, the use of bomas or pre-release pens in wildlife capture and translocation, different types of fences to prevent conflicts between wildlife and humans, capture techniques and large mammal transportation, and institutional and legal arrangements aimed at allowing neighboring landowners to manage wildlife in a coordinated and regulated manner within a shared space known as a conservancy. This exchange of ideas generated what is arguably the largest change in land-use for conservation in history. For instance, in Namibia today about 25% of private land is used for wildlife: in 2006 there were at least 22 conservancies in private hands covering 4 million ha, and by 2007 50 communal conservancies covering 11.9 million ha (14% of the country), in
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which 230,000 people (13% of the total population) lived, had been set up. Studies carried out show how nature tourism in Namibia today is more profitable than livestock in areas that are close to tourist routes with low livestock productivity, great scenic beauty, and abundant wildlife. Other countries have jumped aboard the conservation boat. By the end of the last decade, South Africa had more than 10,000 wildlife ranches occupying just under 20 million ha (about four times the surface area of all the country’s public protected areas). Accordingly, populations of many species are now more abundant in South Africa than they have been at any time in the past 100 years, and many of the most threatened species have recovered. South Africa has more rhinos on private property than the rest of the continent put together on any kind of land, and has seen how its large carnivores (lion, African wild dog, and cheetah) have returned to hundreds of thousands of hectares of their historical ranges. All these processes have taken place on public, private, and communal property, thereby creating options for income and employment that were previously nonexistent. In economic and developmental terms, what has happened in this part of Africa is a vast transition in economically marginal areas from primary production (mainly cattle) to the service sector, represented mainly by tourism and sport hunting.
Box 2.2
Manu National Park: A Missed Opportunity for Conservation and Development? Created in the 1970s, Manu National Park in Peru covers an area of over one million hectares. It is situated where the Andes abut onto the Amazon Basin, and has an altitudinal gradient of over 3,000 m that embraces a gradient of habitats from lowland rainforests and cloud forests to towering snow-capped peaks. This park is one of the most biologically diverse places on the planet and is home to some of South America’s most charismatic animals including jaguar, tapir, giant otter, vicuña, condor, macaws, and Andean cockof-the-rock. During the 1990s its fame spread
worldwide and it became a national symbol in Peru. In the words of Peruvian conservationist: “In those days any cab driver in Lima would know about Manu.” We visited Manu in 2013, attracted by its popularity and the opportunity to meet John Terborgh, the renowned conservation biologist who was the director of Cocha Cashu. After talking with researchers, protected area managers, and workers in the tourism sector, we were surprised by the picture they painted of a place with such international prestige. Manu only received about 1,200 visitors a year, with
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Effective Conservation
a peak of 5,000 in good years. We deduced that conservationists and park managers were so intent on preserving this Park as a pristine natural gem that they had created highly stringent rules aimed at avoiding potential impacts from tourism. The national authorities had not really invested in improving access roads from the Andes or maintaining the local airstrip. The demands made by the park authorities on hotels hoping to operate in the protected area seemed more designed to drive them away than encouraging them. All this could be taken simply as a sadly missed opportunity for local development. However, the story transcends the development angle and enters the realm of pure conservation. During our trip we also detected the great concern of conservationists for two impending processes: the growing demands of
Psychological Resistance to a Great Historic Opportunity
indigenous people to regain part of the Park as their own territory, and the arrival of economic forces interested in the area’s vast oil reserves. These two groups, both with greater political clout than the conservationists and the lackluster tourism sector, were looking to change property- and land-use in the park. We saw no potentially strong political alliance that could prevent these groups from allying to reclaim large parts of the Park and open them up to oil production. Maybe only if this happens will conservationists and park managers finally lament not having established any viable ecotourism industry in the region, which could provide work for thousands, as an alternative to oil extraction, gold mining, and other exploitative uses. Read the full text on our website.
proud keepers of a European tradition based on locally scarce resources (wood and pasture) that rejected other abundantly available ones (marine In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond tells the mammals and fish). story of the Norse who colonized Greenland This new century has engendered social, ecoand how they became extinct as a result of the nomic, moral, and demographic conditions that way they defined themselves.10 By basing their differ from the previous one. However, most worldview on the ecological and social condi- of our values and institutions are organized in tions present in their Scandinavian motherland, terms of a reality that no longer exists, which they created a subsidiary culture on Greenland often prevents us from seizing the opportunibased on the use of timber and cattle production ties that novel scenarios offer. Adapting to new that was poorly adapted to the tough ecologi- opportunities is an even more pressing concern cal conditions of their new environment. Their when a new scenario obliges us to test fresh Eurocentric worldview prevented them from approaches to solving our planet’s growing envilearning from their Inuit neighbors, who used ronmental problems. Like the Greenland Norse, vessels (i.e., kayaks) constructed from locally we are reluctant to reinvent ourselves. Some of the favorable aspects of the current abundant materials such as skins and fed themselves on the equally abundant marine mam- world scenario include the following: mals. These Norse settlers in Greenland became • A worldwide increase in the urban popuextinct because their traditions and values prelation leading, among other things, to the vented them from posing the questions that abandonment of millions of hectares that would have guaranteed their survival. Instead are no longer profitable under traditional of wondering how to survive in a new environment, they decided to remain loyal to tradiland-uses. • Hand-in-hand with the previous aspect is the tional Norse uses but in a very different context. This non-adaptive approach led to their evengeneral increase in conservation awareness tual disappearance. They could have survived and declining animosity toward species such if they had managed to reinvent themselves as as carnivores that were previously considered a culture and had stopped seeing themselves as to be harmful or dangerous.
Full Nature
• The existence of a growing number of people willing to pay for the nonconsumptive use of natural ecosystems via ecotourism or for environmental services such as water, CO2 sequestration, and soil protection. This is complemented by a significant market for trophy hunting, which is now under pressure to adopt pro-conservation practices (see, for example, the recent scandals of an American killing Cecil the lion or the Spanish king Juan Carlos I shooting an elephant, as explained in Box 4.1), and the emergence of a growing market for wildlife meat in environmentally and dietetically sophisticated markets in places such as Germany and California. • Never before has there been greater pressure from citizens on governments and businesses to act to protect natural ecosystems. These demands are satisfied by a number of processes including ever stricter environmental laws; government and nongovernmental organizations becoming progressively more capable of properly managing ecosystems; more public, private, and community protected areas; and the development of increasingly stringent systems of environmental certification for businesses. To this, we can add the growing emergence of conservation philanthropy, whereby large private fortunes intervene enthusiastically in conservation causes as one of their main activities. However, all these positive factors still have to cope with a world in which poverty remains a critical issue in many of the most biodiverse countries, and in which socioeconomic indicators such as per capita income and employment rates remain key measures of success in almost every society. Faced with this new combination of factors, it is important that we conservationists pose the right questions and encourage the rest of society to join us in our work. Like the Greenland Norse, if most professionals insist on seeing conservation as mainly a biological or ethical task that is only marginally related to political and developmental issues, our ability to preserve or restore the ecosystems and populations we are working for will be severely curtailed. In the same way, if the inhabitants of marginal rural areas continue wondering how to continue what they have been doing for decades or even centuries (i.e., livestock production, com-
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mercial hunting, or subsistence fishing) instead of considering how to maximize the long-term profitability and sustainability of their lands, they will miss out on many of today’s opportunities for generating virtuous circles of conservation and development that service the global demand for natural landscapes, wildlife, natural goods, and services. In the twenty-first century conservation and development are not necessarily conflicting options that have to be balanced out or which we have to choose between. If one observes reality with an open mind, the amount of possible situations in which Full Nature is the best option for short and long-term development for a region begin to add up. This implies moving from primary economic production to the service sector. In the first case, the sun’s energy, combined with local climatic and soil conditions, produces commodities such as meat, grain, wood, fish, and minerals. In the second case, the same forces generate more sophisticated natural services such as tourism, which rely much more on the ingenuity, effort, and creativity of people than on the biophysical limits of a region. This economic transition also adds value to the traditional knowledge held by inhabitants of natural areas including the ability to move through the territory, track wildlife, ride horses, handle traditional boats, manufacture handicrafts, cook with local products, and speak native languages. By moving toward service industries that appreciate authentic experiences linked to Nature and unique traditions, traditional knowledge adapted to local ecosystems will acquire a greater market value that would otherwise be lost in light of the exodus toward the cities. Graham Child, who was director of National Parks and Wildlife in Zimbabwe for 15 years, describes this process more clearly: “With their high dependence on elastic service industries like tourism and recreational hunting, which add economic tiers to an animal production system, wildlife enterprises can be both sustainable and profitable. Profits from the finite ecological energy can be harvested from natural systems without stressing them and can be increased by growing either the volume or quality of the services. It does not require overgrazing or greater extraction of energy from the natural ecosystems. Tourism and hunting markets also favor a diversity of healthy animals in well-maintained
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Effective Conservation
and varied habitats, with the result that wildlife ventures are environmentally friendly, sociopolitically acceptable to most societies and favor nature conservation. Many farmers in ecologically marginal areas for livestock who had believed that they could not “farm in a zoo,” now realized that they could not farm profitably outside “the zoo.”11 ◊
Complementary Texts Online • Complete Box 2.1. St Lucia and its relationship with a protected area: a family’s story • Complete Box 2.2. Manu National Park: A missed opportunity for conservation and development? • Complete Box 2.3. Gaining public and political support by renaming our work as producción de naturaleza
Further Reading Suich, H., Child, B., & Spenceley, A. (eds.) (2012). Evolution and innovation in wildlife conservation: parks and game ranches to transfrontier conservation areas. Earthscan.
References 1 On the recovery of wildlife in Europe and the United States: Deinet, S., Ieronymidou, C., McRae, L., Burfield, I.J., Foppen, R.P., Collen, B., Böhm, M. (2013). Wildlife comeback in Europe: The recovery of selected mammal and bird species. Zoological Society of London. Linnell, J. D., Swenson, J.E., Anderson, R. (2001). Predators and people: conservation of large carnivores is possible at high human densities if management policy is favourable. Animal Conservation, 4: 345-349. Peek, J., Dale, B., Hristienko, H., Kantar, L., Loyd, K. A., Mahoney, S. et al. (2012). Management of large mammalian carnivores in North America. The Wildlife Society Technical Review, 12. Suckling, K., N. Greenwald, Curry T. (2012) On time, on target: How the Endangered Species Act is saving America’s wildlife. Center for Biological Diversity.
2 National studies showing reducing poverty around protected areas: Sims, K. R. (2010). Conservation and development: evidence from Thai protected areas. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 60: 94-114. Andam, K.S., Ferraro, P.J., Sims, K.R., Healy, A., Holland, M.B. (2010). Protected areas reduced poverty in Costa Rica and Thailand. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107: 9996-10001. Ferraro, P. J., Hanauer, M.M. (2014). Quantifying causal mechanisms to determine how protected areas affect poverty through changes in ecosystem services and infrastructure. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,111: 4332-4337. Canavire-Bacarreza, G., Hanauer, M.M. (2013). Estimating the impacts of Bolivia’s protected areas on poverty. World Development, 41: 265-285. 3 Economic impact of national parks in the United States: <www.nps.gov/subjects/socialscience/vse.htm> <votesmart.org/public-statement/854861/ preliminary-estimates-of-shutdowns-impactshows-more-than-400-million-in-losses-to-local-communities#.Vqj3d_mLTIU> Secretary Zinke Announces $34.9 Billion Added to U.S. Economy in 2016 due to National Park Visitation. <doi.gov/pressreleases/secretary-zinkeannounces-349-billion-added-us-economy-2016-due-national-park> 4 Data on visitation to national parks in the US and PBS documentary series: Thomas, C.C., Koontz, L. (2017). 2016 National Park visitor spending effects: economic contributions to local communities, states, and the nation. (Natural Resource Report NPS/NRSS/ EQD/NRR–2017/1421). National Park Service. <nps.gov/nature/customcf/NPS_Data_Visualization/docs/2016_VSE.pdf> Ken Burns’ “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” Launched National Conversation About Country’s Parks. <pbs.org/about/blogs/news/ken-burnss-the-national-parks-americas-best-idea-launched-national-conversation-about-countrys-parks> 5 Statistics of protected areas in Costa Rica and neighboring countries: World Database on Protected Areas. <protectedplanet.net>
Full Nature
6 Wolf recovery in Yellowstone and its economic impact: Smith, D.W., Bangs, E.E. (2009). Reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park: history, values, and ecosystem restoration. Reintroduction of top-order predators. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 92-125. 7 Economic impact of tiger tourism in Ranthambore National Park: In-depth interview with GV Reddy, former director of the reserve. 8 Jaguars and ecotourism in Brazilian Pantanal: Protecting jaguars: a good business decision for ranchers. <news.mongabay.com/2012/06/protecting-jaguars-a-good-business-decision-for-ranchers> Concone, H.V.B., de Azevedo, F.C.C. (2012). How much worth is a jaguar alive? Alternatives to conflicts between livestock and large cats in the Brazilian Pantanal, in: 49th Annual Meeting of the Association of Tropical Biology and Conservation, Bonito. de Azevedo, F.C.C, & Murray, D.L. (2007). Spatial organization and food habits of jaguars (Panthera onca) in a floodplain forest. Biological Conservation, 137, 391-402. Tortato, F.R., Izzo, T.J., Hoogesteijn, R., Peres, C.A. (2017). The numbers of the beast: Valuation of jaguar (Panthera onca) tourism and cattle depredation in the Brazilian Pantanal. Global ecology and conservation, 11, 106-114.
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9 Sources on Full Nature and the expansion of wildlife in Southern Africa: Child, B. (ed.) (2013). Parks in Transition: Biodiversity, Rural Development and the Bottom Line. Earthscan. Lindsey, P.A., Romanach, S.S., DaviesMostert, H.T. (2009). The importance of conservancies for enhancing the value of game ranch land for large mammal conservation in southern Africa. Journal of Zoology, 277: 99-105. Lindsey, P., Romanach, S., Romanach, S.S., Davies-Mostert, H. (2009). A synthesis of early indicators of the drivers of predator conservation on private lands in South Africa. Reintroduction of Top-Order Predators. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 321-344. Suich, H., Child, B., Spenceley, A. (eds.) (2012). Evolution and innovation in wildlife conservation: parks and game ranches to transfrontier conservation areas. Earthscan. 10 On the extinction of the Greenland Norse: Diamond, J. (2007). Collapse. Random House. 11 End quote from Graham Child: Child, G. (2004). Growth of modern nature conservation in Southern Africa. Pages 7-28, in: Parks in Transition: Biodiversity, Rural Development and the Bottom Line. Earthscan.
Full Nature
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Box 2.3
Gaining Public and Political Support by Renaming Our Work as Producción De Naturaleza In 1992 Douglas Tompkins founded The Conservation Land Trust (CLT), a California-based organization devoted to the creation of large national parks through the purchase and donation of large tracts of land. Its work began in Chile with the creation of Corcovado National Park and in Argentina with the setting up of Monte León National Park. In 1997 national park officials invited Douglas and Kristine Tompkins to visit wild areas in northern Argentina identified as conservation priorities. As they flew over the Iberá wetlands in Corrientes province, the seed was planted of the idea of creating a large national park but also of the reintroduction of several locally extinct species, including the jaguar. Gradually, CLT went about buying up a series of vast cattle ranches in Iberá, building basic infrastructure, gaining control of the hunting rights of these lands, removing hundreds of kilometers of fences, and, above all, establishing a team of Argentinians who were sincerely committed to their vision. Buying the land was clearly the easiest part, while communicating their vision in a way that local, provincial, and national authorities would accept it as in their interest was the hardest. In those days the Iberá wetlands were seen as an unproductive wasteland that should be drained and transformed to make them “productive.” There was also general distrust of the idea of a “gringo billionaire” buying up large expanses of land for conservation. During those years, public positions were irreconcilable: production vs. conservation, or the need to reduce poverty vs. “impositions by rich countries from the North.” The CLT team had to explain the concept of a national park in such a way that local people and political leaders alike would assimilate it into their dreams and hopes for the future. They started using the term “Producción de Naturaleza” or “Full Nature,” whereby national parks would become the motors of a new type of economy and greater well-being for local communities. This innovative narrative challenged the simplistic duality of production vs. conservation, and
was backed by a team of respected local people with vast knowledge of the territory and local idiosyncrasies. It was also key in demonstrating the positive tangible outcome of the reintroductions of giant anteaters, pampas deer, peccaries, and tapirs, and of the design and donation of high-quality public campgrounds to local municipalities. Eventually, the Iberá “brand” came to be seen as a wildlife destination, and local communities were able to see their futures reflected in a wilderness hitherto regarded as unproductive. As news started to spread about Iberá, other players started to approach CLT. The governor of the neighboring province of Chaco became interested in the concept of Full Nature when visiting the Tompkins and their team in Iberá, which motivated the authorities of this province and the Argentinian government to create the 128,000-ha Impenetrable National Park. The concept was also grasped by the new national Minister of Tourism and the Argentinean president, Mauricio Macri, who backed the establishment of the Northern Ecotourism Corridor. The President announced his intention to double the number of national parks in the country based on the belief that they can act as powerful boosts for local economies. Finally, these achievements and similar ones in Chile attracted the attention of other philanthropists interested in financing a bi-national park shared by Argentina and Chile in Patagonia in collaboration with the CLT team. In the words of Sofía Heinonen, president of CLT Argentina (presently known as Rewilding Argentina): “We continue to learn from these political, economic, and ecological processes, which are promoting the recovery of threatened or locally extinct wildlife, and generating well-being and pride in rural communities. In Iberá, the Chaco, Patagonia, at sea, and in all Argentinian regions, we are working to find ways to promote conservation through innovation in Full Nature.” Read the full text by Sofia Heinonen, president of Rewilding Argentina, on our website.