>From Forbes Magazine ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
10-5-98
Calvinism minus God
By Robert H. Nelson
EAST AFRICA REMAINS HOME to large numbers
of elephants, buffaloes, hippopotamuses,
crocodiles, gazelles and many other species, but
poachers have almost wiped out rhinoceroses in
the past 15 years. With an exploding human
population, Africa's remaining wild species will
go the way of the rhinos unless better ways are
found to reconcile wildlife and human habitation.
The African wildlife conservation movement long
took its cues from the U.S. but eventually saw
the American way didn't work in Africa. The old
strategy resulted in large national parks, often
established by colonial authorities, from which
humans were virtually excluded. In some cases,
these parks were created through a kind of
ethnic cleansing in which native peoples were
removed from lands they and their ancestors had
long inhabited. It was command-and-control
environmentalism at its worst.
The humans not only resented, they openly
defied, antipoaching laws. Hungry people will do
what is necessary to feed their children.
Moreover, much of African wildlife is highly
migratory—unlikely to differentiate between
national parks and some poor farmer's cornfield.
Now African environmentalists have abandoned
the American model and are devoting their
efforts to finding ways to bring wildlife into the
market system.
The Campfire program in Zimbabwe has
received international attention as a working
example of this trend. Near Hwange National
Park, a foreign hunter pays $10,000 to shoot an
elephant—a hard target to miss—and the money
goes into a pot that is divided among the people
in the immediate surrounding community and a
district council. A lion costs about $3,500; a
buffalo, $2,000; and an impala, $300.
At these prices, the locals want to keep large
numbers of the animals alive for future hunting
revenues, rather than eliminate their nuisance
presence.
When the Endangered Species
Act was applied, it decreed that
the northern spotted owl must
have priority over human needs.
In northern Malawi, Peace Corps volunteer
Stephanie Jayne has helped to set up a program
by which local people—formerly forbidden to
forage in the park—can harvest thatch grass
(used in Africa to build houses) in the nearby
Vwasa Marsh preserve. Community rights to fish
and collect medicinal plants and other resources
within the park boundaries may soon exist as
well. On a recent trip to East Africa I saw other
market-oriented initiatives of this kind in Zambia
and Tanzania.
I sense the world environmental movement is at a
crossroads—even if it doesn't know it. A few
years ago a conference of 60 world wildlife
conservation leaders at Airlie House in northern
Virginia noted: "The chief strategy of
conservationists for more than a century has
been exclusionary and implicitly misanthropic." It
concluded: "Homo sapiens is an ecological
reality" and efforts to "conserve biological
diversity must be efforts to address human
needs, too."
Unfortunately, too often the environmental
movement in the U.S. is still operating according
to the old ways of thinking. When the
Endangered Species Act was applied in the
Pacific Northwest, it decreed that the protection
of the northern spotted owl must have priority
over any human needs. Lumber mills shut down
and workers by the thousands were put out of
their jobs. Too bad, shrugged the
environmentalists.
Professor William Cronon of the University of
Wisconsin at Madison is perhaps America's
most distinguished environmental historian. He
set off a firestorm in the environmental movement
with a recent article called "The Trouble with
Wilderness." Cronon is bothered by the
movement's tendency to contrast between
"malign civilization" and "benign nature." There is
an "undying dualism" expressed here, he says, in
"a contrast of good and evil. And humans are on
the evil side."
Which, as he pointed out, can lead only to one
conclusion: "The only way to save nature is to kill
ourselves." Calvinism minus God—people are
sinners with no hope of redemption short of mass
suicide.
If the American environmental movement
expects to continue to enjoy popularity, it had
better learn to make some of the compromises
that are being tried in Africa today. We love our
forests and lakes and mountains, but not more
than we love ourselves.
Robert H. Nelson is a professor in the School of Public
Affairs at the University of Maryland and senior fellow
of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. His latest book
is Public Lands and Private Rights (Rowman &
Littlefield).
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