AR-News:New Scientist: A greyer shade of green; Being green is no longer black and white.

[Karen Dawn]

(The New Scientist takes letters at: letters at newscientist.com)

New Scientist

June 21, 2003
 Features; Pg. 40

 A greyer shade of green;
Being green is no longer black and white. Major conservation groups are
beginning to realise that their old, hard-line protectionist approach simply
doesn't work, says Fred Pearce

Fred Pearce

ALL ACROSS South-East Asia, thousands of fishermen are poisoning exquisite
coral reefs with cyanide. They crush a couple of sodium cyanide tablets into
a plastic container of water, then dive in among the reefs and squirt the
toxic liquid into the faces of any fish that catch their eye. The poison is
concentrated enough to knock out the fish without killing them, making them
easy to catch in a net, or even with bare hands.

Hours later, the fish are recovering on a plane to Hong Kong, where
customers in restaurants will pay $200 or more to choose a colourful coral
trout or grouper swimming in a tank and have it cooked and served up at
their table. Other fish might end up in aquaria in North America or Europe.
But the reef itself -- the coral polyps and algae that underpin these
"rainforests of the oceans" -- pays a heavy price too. Roughly a square
metre of reef is destroyed for every live fish caught using cyanide, says
biologist Sam Mamauag of the International Marinelife Alliance in the
Philippines. Cyanide, he says, has turned many of the most biologically
diverse reefs on the planet into marine deserts.

Many environmentalists would instinctively call a ban on the whole sorry
business. And the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development, a body set up
by the Philippines government to help preserve the biological treasures of
its western islands, does indeed want to ban live reef fishing in the
region. But it is meeting opposition from an unexpected quarter: the
Philippines branch of the WWF, the world's foremost conservation body, with
backing from its international headquarters in Geneva.

Hard to credit? A betrayal? Well, hold your fire -- the WWF is just one
among many science-based environment groups that are engaged in a savage
reappraisal of their philosophy. In their self-imposed task of saving
everything from rainforests and medicinal plants to elephants and whales,
they are coming to a heretical conclusion: conservation -- at least in its
hard-line forms -- is its own worst enemy. Far from saving endangered
species and their habitats, it often accelerates their destruction, because
it alienates local people and forces trade underground.

You would never guess this upheaval was going on when you read
organisations' promotional literature on the fight to preserve the planet's
last wildernesses. But the truth is they are beginning to think that banning
hunting and fishing, erecting fences round forests to keep out poachers, and
outlawing trade in endangered species are about the least effective ways of
saving threatened species. Sometimes the best way forward is to dismantle
existing protection laws and start again.

Several factors are driving this sea change. First, there is an admission
that hard-line conservation has a chequered history, with more failures than
successes, and that it often breeds resentment in local communities.
Secondly, there's the realisation that western environmentalists, however
well-meaning, have no right to ride roughshod over local sensibilities.
Finally, they are riding the current fashion wave: the idea that
environmental protection and economic development don't have to be mutually
exclusive. In fact, there are conservation strategies that allow them to
reinforce each other. And this ethos of "sustainable development", first
made popular at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro ten years ago, is taking
many environmentalists in directions they had never anticipated.

Until the summit, many greens still agreed with post-war conservation
pioneers such as the German zoologist Bernhard Grzimek, who decreed in his
influential book Serengeti Shall Not Die that "a national park must remain a
primordial wilderness to be effective. No men, not even native ones, should
live inside its borders." In the name of such ideals, tens of thousands of
rural inhabitants across the developing world have been evicted from their
homes to create national parks, and millions of local hunters have been
branded poachers and turned into outlaws.

But this strict protectionist mantra is being replaced. During the 1990s,
groups like the WWF and the World Conservation Union (IUCN) began to conduct
what they called "sustainability assessments" of environmental objectives.
Their goal was to show that governments' existing development policies were
unsustainable because they destroyed basic natural resources, and that a
new, greener way was needed. But to everyone's surprise, the assessments
also shone an equally harsh light on conventional environmental policies.
Many were found wanting, both morally and practically.

The evidence for the failure of conventional conservation is everywhere. It
simply takes too much land, for one thing. Take Kenya, which has turned more
than a tenth of its land into strictly protected parks and reserves. But the
majority of its large mammals still spend most of their time outside the
parks, says former Kenya Wildlife Service director David Western. And there
is a deeper problem. Wildlife habitat is often better outside the parks,
because human activities in savannah grasslands such as the Kenyan parks
region are an integral part of the richest habitat. The traditional
cattle-herding communities here may have helped promote the high density of
wildlife, say ecologists. "The ending of human activity such as fires and
shifting cultivation in the parks has reduced biodiversity," says Western.
"Those human activities created the patchiness of terrain that encouraged
more species."

And the interests of people must be considered, too. "There is no point in
creating protected areas if they fail to recognise the requirements of the
people who live in or around them. That can only lead to conflict and reduce
the chances of success," says Claude Martin, a zoologist with long
experience of running African national parks who is now director-general of
WWF International.

Hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people depend on wildlife to
survive. And if they can't make a living from nature's forests and animals,
then they will probably eliminate them with guns or chainsaws to free more
land for farming. "Parks and other protected areas will be overrun by
people's needs for land unless the parks serve the needs of the local
population," says Thomas McShane, a former programme officer for Africa at
WWF International who now heads their tropical forest division.

In Rwanda, for example, conservationist Dian Fossey tried to protect
endangered mountain gorillas by maintaining their forest habitat in pristine
condition. She saw locals as the gorillas' enemies. And she fought to
exclude tourists. But her efforts backfired, says McShane. Hunting and
deforestation threw the gorilla population into serious decline. Only after
Fossey's murder in 1985 did the Mountain Gorilla Project, established by
groups like WWF seven years before, succeed in reversing her strict
conservation strategy by bringing tourists into the area in significant
numbers. Their revenues provided an incentive for local people to protect
rather than hunt the gorillas. Since then, despite the risk that tourists
may bring human diseases to the gorillas, their numbers have been
increasing.

Green groups' reappraisal of their strategy even extends to such icons of
the strict-conservation approach as elephants and whales. WWF, which lobbied
for the ivory-trade ban that began in 1989, will support the resumption of
routine international trade in ivory once it can be policed to exclude
poachers and smugglers. That day may not be far off, says Martin. A new
worldwide system for monitoring trade should soon allow the swift
identification of poached ivory. And in future, DNA techniques for
pinpointing the source of ivory could help further.

One day, WWF may also support the resumption of commercial whaling. Already
the hard-line protectionist policy adopted by the International Whaling
Commission, an intergovernmental body that has imposed a moratorium on
commercial whaling for the past 17 years, is in disarray with increasing
numbers of whales taken under the guise of "research". Whale numbers have
recovered so much in recent years that we can no longer logically oppose the
resumption of regulated commercial whaling, said Shigeki Komori of WWF Japan
in an internal newsletter leaked to the press last year.

There are ethical as well as practical objections to hard-line conservation.
Dogmatic environmentalism, says Martin, is "in some ways as narrow and
selfish as the imperialism of old. Imperialism imposed a system of
development that took little or no account of the rights and needs of local
people. Too often, that same charge can be levelled against conservation
projects." The charge is especially potent against WWF, whose founders,
including royals such as Prince Philip, were white
hunters-turned-conservationists.

Most environmentalists outside the hard-core animal rights groups say they
are in favour of conserving traditional cultures. In practice that usually
involves preserving their hunting traditions. So WWF quietly supports the
Inuit, who hunt polar bears, and the Gwich'in people, who hunt caribou as
the animals travel through northern Canada and Alaska on one of the greatest
mammal migrations left on Earth.

Even Greenpeace makes compromises. The organisation that made its name two
decades ago in a crusade to "save the whales" now supports the rights of
aboriginal communities, such as the Makah on the American Pacific coast, to
hunt grey whales. Similar thinking has encouraged environmental scientists
to change their minds about bans on everything from African bush-meat
hunting to the harvesting of Chinese medicinal plants. Now they want to hand
over control of these natural resources to local communities. And sometimes
that will mean allowing the killing of endangered species.

The Amazon manatee is the largest of the animals that live in the largest
rainforest on Earth. This denizen of the flooded forests is seriously
endangered, following mass slaughter for its blubber during the mid-20th
century. Though the beast is now protected under Brazilian law, forest
dwellers still hunt it for its meat. And it is delicious, according to
zoologist Jose Marcio Ayres, who managed the Mamiraua Ecological Reserve in
the heart of its habitat until his death earlier this year.

Ayres wanted to conserve the manatee as much as anyone. But, though hunting
manatees was illegal, he persuaded the Brazilian government to make an
exception for forest dwellers. He encouraged the hunters to develop their
own quota system to ensure this valuable food would not go extinct. "Bans
have been tried in many reserves in the Amazon, but they don't work," he
told New Scientist last year.

Hunters can help

This project has been supported by both WWF and the Wildlife Conservation
Society, based at the Bronx Zoo in New York. Sandra Charity of WWF Brazil
says: "Hunting bans make conservation an enemy of the people. Our strategy
is to work democratically with the villagers to help them protect their
resources." Data is hard to come by, but Ayres claimed that manatee numbers
fell while hunting was banned, but have revived since hunters were given
control.

It is not yet clear just how far the new breed of environmentalists will be
willing to take this approach. Many people would draw a firm line against
hunting apes, for example, even by indigenous people. "Apes are close to
humans, so for many it is an ethical issue," says Martin. "I have sympathy
for this position." But even here, he refuses to condemn hunters outright.

Political expediency, too, plays a part in the shift away from traditional
conservation. "If we go for the ideological protectionist approach, nature
and conservation will always end up being sidelined," says Jeff McNeely,
IUCN's chief scientist.

Even the more traditionally minded groups such as Conservation International
(CI) are moving with the times. Four years ago in the journal Science, the
organisation called for the "outright protection" of rainforests and accused
groups like WWF of being "co-opted" by people opposed to conservation. CI's
president, Russell Mittermeier, denies that its policies have changed, but
it now projects a much softer image. Even within biodiversity hotspots, it
is promoting projects that, as CI's mission statement puts it, "demonstrate
that human societies are able to live harmoniously with nature".

But others still hold firm to older conservation principles. Richard Leakey,
the former director of the Kenyan Wildlife Service -- whose rangers
regularly shot poachers -- calls the idea that wildlife should pay its way
"wrong-headed". "I fear that conservationists who use bottom-line reasoning
for saving the animals they love are actually dooming them to extinction,"
he says. In cash terms, wildlife will always be worth more dead than alive,
he argues. Such views are still widely heard among groups campaigning for
animal rights, but much less so among environmentalists involved in
practical conservation efforts.

Even so, the implications of the new approach constantly surprise its
practitioners. When WWF last year launched a sustainability assessment of
the trade in live reef fish in the Philippines, all its environmental
instincts pointed towards calling for an outright ban. And an environmental
assessment that focused strictly on the fish and the reefs on which they
lived would have reached that conclusion, says Nilo Brucal of WWF's Manila
office, who coordinated the WWF assessment. But the more the researchers
broadened their view to include the political, social and economic context,
the less sense a ban made.

Brucal eventually concluded that an effective ban on trade in live reef fish
would push fishermen back into the conventional "dead fish" trade. "Because
dead fish sell for only a fifth as much as live fish, they would take five
times as many fish from the sea -- probably using a lot more cyanide," he
says. And if the ban proved ineffective, then it would freeze out the
law-abiding fishermen and leave the waters free for the cyanide fishers and
other illegal operators. "Banning would just drive the whole business
underground," says Brucal. "The fish would be collected at sea by smugglers
and we'd have even less chance of controlling the trade than we do now."

Instead, Brucal wants local communities to work harder to police fishing.
But his decision is raising eyebrows around the green world. After all,
Brucal and WWF are in the strange position of endorsing the continuation of
a trade that is fuelling the destruction of some of the world's finest coral
reefs. Are they complicit in this ecological carnage, or the brave pioneers
of a new approach to conservation? The world will have to wait and see. What
is certain, though, is that environmentalism doesn't look so simple any
more.