International Conservation

As part of my Conservation Biology class, we were required to read a book by Robert Nash on Wilderness and the American Mind. The final chapter in this book focuses on wilderness in an international context. Historically, the United States has worked with a philosophy that wilderness is an evil that needed to be conquered by the pioneers. Throughout the development of the US, this perspective has shifted to recognize the importance of wilderness. Unfortunately, conservation efforts were mostly too late- there was nothing left to conserve. Now people in the developed world are looking at developing countries and seeing them do the same to their wilderness. Tropical rainforests are being cut down for agricultural land, lions and and tigers are being killed by trophy hunters, and elephants and rhinos are being poached for their tusks and horns.

The international community has been looking at ways to prevent the loss of wilderness throughout the world. One idea that has been proposed is the creation of International Parks where land is reserved for people around the world to enjoy the wildlife within. Other ideas include the creation of natural parks where only certified scientists are allowed to enter or the implementation of a quota system on indigenous hunters. Some people in the developed world have decided to act individually and will buy portions of tropical rainforest or other land in developing countries where they forbid human activities like logging. The challenge is that it is impossible to go to a sovereign state and say that they have to change what they are doing. It's also unfair to say to a country- we have destroyed all of our wilderness, but we won't let you do the same.

It's easy for conservationalists to say that poaching of animals like lions should be stopped, but they do not see the impact of these actions. In Tanzania there are an estimated 100 people killed by lions each year. Human survival depends on keeping a low lion population. Trophy hunters visiting this area view their actions as some of the most effective forms of lion conservation. The $30-40 thousand that they contribute to the local community for the right to kill a lion goes to indigenous people who put part of it towards efforts of conserving the remaining lions.

Regardless of what efforts the international community makes towards conservation of nature around the world, they require the support of indigenous people or their work will be futile. The local people depend on their natural resources to survive and preserving wilderness needs to be economically viable to be a possible alternative.

The same thing is true for development initiatives. You need buy-in from local people to have any tangible, positive impact.

Jared Diamond

Jared Diamond

Many of my fellow International Development students know Jared Diamond as the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel or other popular science books I would guess that fewer people know about some of the work that he did before getting into this field. In my conservation biology class on Thursday, my professor told us about one of his studies from 1975 regarding bird species in New Guinea and its nearby islands.

Diamond looked at 141 species of birds found in the area. He then looked at which species of birds were present on each island. Comparing the makeup of species on each island he tried to determine if the subsets were always predictable with the more competitive species persisting on each island.

He found that competitive ability was important and there were "forbidden combinations" of bird species that were never able to exist together. The makeup of species also depended on abiotic factors like the size of the island. On the larger islands, the species that were less competitive were able to escape from the dominant species and there were fewer species on small islands.

It's interesting to look at the life of someone like Jared Diamond and see how many different things in which he's been involved. I would guess that there are more people who have read his recent work compared to his older studies, but I think that these older studies are also quite interesting and worth a look.