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A confused picture

Strange question you might ask, as we all know what conservation is don’t we? But I would pose that we don’t really understand the concept anymore as it has become both incredibly diluted and has multiple meanings.

For example, the Business Directory says this:

“Exploitation, improvement, and protection of human and natural resources in a wise manner, ensuring derivation of their highest economic and social benefits on a continuing or long-term basis. Conservation… (unlike preservation) implies consumption of the conserved resources."

While the Oxford Dictionary says this:

Protect (something, especially something of environmental or cultural importance) from harm or destruction."

Let’s look at the root of the word – it comes from Latin and basically just means “keep together”. And that is where we have gone wrong, as we are not keeping very much in nature “together” are we? We have somehow moved away from what conservation really is to a much more exploitative definition.

Some say we should not confuse conservation with preservation – and the latter has actually become a rather “bad” word. But preservation only really means “keep as before”.

So let’s just have a new definition of conservation – “keeping wild”. That means keeping wild areas and keeping life wild in those areas,

Now the sad thing is that we don’t really know how to “keep” things as they were before, as we have very little real information on what natural areas, wildlife populations, forests, marine life etc looked like 2014 years ago let alone 10,000 years ago. We know that the expansion of human populations and associated consequences like the proliferation of agriculture, mining, industry, water use, harvest of natural products etc has made great changes across the face of our planet. We know that our grandparents tell us that there was much more of lots of things years ago. That might not be true in some cases – but that’s a subject for another discussion.

The reality is that we have not kept things wild. Instead, as the Business Dictionary defines conservation, we have opted for “ensuring derivation of their highest economic and social benefits on a continuing or long-term basis” of natural resources. Sustainable use in other words.

Long espoused by the “major” conservation organizations, has “sustainable use worked? That should not even be a question. It has not. Even the oceans have been depleted of fish. Why has it not worked?

Two reasons at least. First, we have never bothered to establish the “size” of the resource that we use “sustainably”. We have no idea of how many fish there are in the ocean, how many lions there are in Africa, how many trees there are in the forests. We just use them for our purposes until we run into big problems as we find fewer and fewer of those resources we were supposedly using sustainably. If you have no idea of how to limit use of resources to a sustainable level you inevitably end up overexploiting them.

To assuage ourselves we set “quotas” on such practices, but as we should all know quotas are always exceeded, either because they are ignored or because they become part of the illegal trade. Until very recently nobody was greatly penalized by exceeding fishing quotas or logging quotas or trophy hunting quotas as there was nobody there (and that continues today) to effectively monitor what is happening. Overexploitation just means greater profits.

Second, it has been estimated that we need a planet 1.5 times the size of the Earth to meet our current demands. So let’s not talk about “sustainable” utilization of wild resources anymore. That concept, now very many decades old, has failed spectacularly and should get buried in a pauper’s grave.

Another concept is that we should “farm” our forests and wildlife. Farming forests is not conservation – as farmers substitute fast growing and often non-indigenous trees for the centuries-old native trees that are cut down. That is not keeping wild is it?

Farming wildlife has been heralded by a few southern Africa countries as a major solution to conserve wildlife. In fact, many “conservationists” in South Africa point to the fact that there are now many thousands more “wild” animals in the country than ever before. But farming is not conservation, it is commercial utilization. Perhaps South Africans equate “wildlife” behind fences with wildlife, but this is a stretch of their imagination. Wildlife ranches are not concerned about biodiversity, they are concerned about profits. That is why they farm selected species (the most commercially valuable ones) and neglect others. Also, a wildlife farm (or the seemingly preferred term “ranch”) cannot include predators as they will literally eat into the farmer’s profits. By farming wildlife it is not wildlife any longer. That’s not keeping wild either.

You might as well say that other facilities, like zoos, contribute to conservation by keeping and breeding animals. A zoo tiger might look like a wild tiger but that resemblance is only skin deep. A predator raised in captivity cannot be released back into the wild and be expected to “recover” hunting skills.

So if we now accept that conservation means “keeping wild”, where do we go from here? Humans need fish and wood and meat and plants to survive. Fish farming and tree farming and wildlife farming could be needed to provide our ever-increasing demands, but let’s not call that conservation any longer.

If we want to keep things wild, we need better managed wild areas where consumptive human activities do not encroach. That is the first and not necessarily easiest step. Africa has huge gazetted wildlife areas that could be restored with better management and better political will and better financial discipline. There are similarly huge areas worldwide that can be resurrected for forests and wildlife. These lands are degraded and no longer commercially valuable, but given time, can be restored. Much more attention needs to be paid there. We need to abandon highly destructive activities like growing palm oil and extensive fields of crops for bio-gas. We need to concentrate much more on renewable energy like wind, solar, tidal.

We need not only a better definition of conservation, but we also need to live more carefully, imaginatively, and respectfully to keep the wild. And let’s restrict the term “conservation” to what it really needs to be, not what many want it to be.

Picture credit: www.flickr.com 

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