wildlife

Ancient Woodland, Modern Minds

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

So we live in a world where existence for so many species we happen to share this planet with is in jeopardy, or has already been denied. And here at home our ancient woodland – supporting at least twice the amount of rare or threatened species than any other UK habitat – is being wiped out at a rate faster than that in evidence in the Amazon itself. So here at least, in knowing this, we’re given something like a greater clarity, that if we can get beyond the myth that the world was made solely for our benefit we surely have a duty to protect those whose lives rest in our hands, in our ability and willingness to speak and act on their behalf.

So where do we start in such a monumental mission? There are the obvious candidates of course – the HS2 line that threatens twenty one ancient woodlands for a scheme whose money would be better spent on improving and maintaining our existing railway tracks and which, if built, would scar a wider Chilterns landscape that has so far through accident or luck escaped too much encroachment by the infrastructural outrider that so often heralds more and more development. The protests against this particular project seem set to run and run.

Then we have the sorry story down in Kent of Oaken Woods – 81.5 acres of ancient woodland due to be swept aside for a ragstone quarry, a decision which goes against not only the county council’s minerals plan but also policy of central government towards ancient woodland. And there are no shortage of other threats – road widening programmes, pylons, new houses, even oil extraction.

There is no doubt these woods need all our help and that campaigning in all its forms is now as necessary as ever. But perhaps the greatest threat to our old woodlands – and everything else – is simply the mentality that lets us think that their removal is ok, that they and the species they support are somehow secondary to our own human concerns. They are not, in our common culture, in any sense inviolable. They are, or so the logic goes, the pretty chattels that adorn a landscape loved by sentimentalists and precious few besides. There is simply no room for such pleasant irrelevancies if we want a modern and functioning nation. So the roads are ushered in, high speed lines are laid out as some kind of sleek and greener future and the end justifies any means because industry and commerce must win out, because these are the wheels that keep our world turning even when such cogs drive our own end as much as the scraps of habitat that happen to be in the way.

We can fight any number of projects and – where they threaten precious ecosystems, protected by laws that are routinely deemed fit to be overridden – it is right that people should do so. But if we are serious about preserving them for good, if we are serious about somehow grappling with the underlying assumptions, attitudes, beliefs and even that most unmodern of mindsets: the stories we tell ourselves, we have to see more clearly the ancient change in attitude – what you might even call the original sin – that let us think this world was ours to do with as we please. Without the shift in perspective such insight would hopefully bring, we will ultimately still be simply pushing at revolving doors, or banging our heads against walls. If we do not change the state of mind that underpins each push then even immediate success in any campaign will be rendered temporary because the beast would still live that breathes life into yet another threat and then another.

A long time ago there was no need to sweep aside the plants and animals that did not appear to matter to our immediate concerns. The day such acts became permissible was perhaps the inception for the sorry times we face today. The more we can all recognise that and struggle to imagine a way beyond it is perhaps the greatest and most important challenge we face. Until then nature will remain apparently expendable as will our own lifelines that she carries, a reminder if one was still needed that there is no boundary between us and the world around us except that which we have created in our minds. Demolishing that arbitrary and hitherto all too powerful border has never been more urgent or more vital.

A Very Basic Thing

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve was created in 1961 partly out of the heightened awareness of the region’s people and wildlife brought about by Laurens van der Post’s descriptions in ‘The Lost World of The Kalahari.’ Today, his name has been invoked by those very people he described – the Gana, Ghi and Tsila Bushmen – whose continued existence in that place is still very much under threat. Partly evicted in the nineties, the process was completed in 2002 as the entire population was forcibly removed to settlement camps at the edge of the park where the depression so common with people removed from their lands was compounded by alcoholism and the spread of HIV.

Restored to their territory by a ruling of the Botswana High Court in 2006, their one borehole – that was capped upon their expulsion four years previously – remains sealed and the government seem determined for this state of affairs to continue. A second court case has just taken place to assert this most basic human right of the Bushmen of access to water. The region is one of the planet’s driest and the Bushmen are having to take an arduous 300 mile trip to gather water from the nearest available source. At least one woman has died of dehydration and the conditions in general are described as harsh and dangerous. Hundreds of the tribe are languishing in the resettlement camps, too afraid to return to their ancestral lands without such a vital resource. Meanwhile numerous boreholes have been drilled for the reserve’s wildlife and a Safari Lodge within the reserve has been allowed to build a swimming pool. Many Bushmen, especially the old and young, are sufferring from lack of water. In an effort at intimidation, the government sent in truckloads of troops to the region in the run up to the court case. When it came to it, the Court reserved judgement. It is not clear when the final decision will be made. “It pains us that the animals and tourists on our land can drink our water to their heart’s content yet we go thirsty” said Jumanda Gakelebone, a Bushman in the reserve.

That Botswana’s government wants the Bushmen off the land, there can be no doubt. One very obvious reason is the diamonds found within the reserves – a further deposit of which is supposed to be under a Bushman settlement. It is perhaps convenient then that there are those who claim there can be no place for people – any people – within a wildlife reserve. Chief among such exponents is John Terbough, author of ‘Requiem for Nature’, an advocate of ‘fortress’ conservation. His feeling that “a park should be a park and it shouldn’t have any resident people in it” is echoed by Botswana’s Director of Wildlife and National Parks, Trevor Mmopelwa, who claims that allowing people to live in the reserve would “make the management of CKGR extremely difficult in that there will be two conflicting rights existing side by side.”

Is this really then a story of the contrasting needs of people and the animals they happen to share land with? Are efforts to defend the Bushmen placing human rights over that of the local wildlife? The issue has certainly been divisive but attempts to override the rights of people living on the land are at best simplistic and at worst fall victim to a mindset that is seeing indigenous people evicted from their lands across the globe at an unprecedented rate.

Their power boosted by various sponsors, no small proportion of them corporate, various big international nongovernmental conservation organisations (or BINGOs) have embarked on a huge global push to increase the number of ‘protected areas’. In 1962 there were some 1000 official such ‘PA’s’ worldwide. By 2005 there were 108,000 with more being added every day. A land mass the size of Africa itself – more than 12% of all land globally – has been ringfenced in this way.

And all too often, if these PA’s have happened to have been occupied by indigenous people, they have been moved on, either through force, through ‘soft evictions’ or the contestably phrased ‘voluntary resettlement.’ In Chad, a tenfold increase in protected land resulted in an estimated 600,000 conservation refugees during the nineties. India, the only other country even bothering to count, admitted to 1.6 million five years ago. Globally the figure could be anywhere from five to tens of millions. The figure in Africa alone may well exceed 14 million.

What should be obvious but which flies in the face of the logic of the various BINGOs is that many of the places deemed worthy of protection are so valuable precisely because of the knowledge and practices of the people living there. In Africa, where indigenous evictions from protected areas are highest, 90% of biodiversity now lies outside their boundaries. History is showing us that, for the sake of biodiversity alone, where indigenous people live in ways that are ecologically sustainable (and for that, read the vast majority), their eviction is the most counterproductive thing we can do.

Perhaps the real nub of the issue is our conception of wilderness, of the wild and our place upon it. A very real problem is our notion of nature as separate, as ‘out there’, a thing which can be visited but which sits apart from our modern lives, from the ever mounting effects of our daily actions. Tribal peoples here are seen as throwbacks, ‘archaic fantasists’ as Botswana’s President Khama has said, removed from the realities of 21st Century life, a people to be educated and absorbed.

But in reality of course they hold so much that we can learn from; often enhancing their environments through a sophisticated knowledge of biological diversity without any formal schooling in ecology, botany or zoology. The world that they inhabit holds the key to how life – far from the environmentally dystopic state of affairs most of us have grown accustomed to – can be far less intrusive on the natural world and, at its best, can approach something genuinely harmonious. How tragic then that the Bushmen and others like them should be brushed aside while we are still allowed to visit what has become a semi-artificial, pristine natural world we only ever tend to reach by jetting through the skies our planes have wounded.

The aims of international conservation are wholly noble but suffer from this trap of dual realities. Its sponsors include the World Bank as well as a host of bilateral and multilateral banks and transnational corporations. The Nature Conservancy has around 2000 corporate sponsors while Conservation International has 250 corporate ‘partners’. Often, there is a ‘debt for nature’ swap, with PAs created in return for annulment of part of that country’s national debt. So perhaps there is a kind of logic as well as more than a hint of the perverse at President Khama’s membership of Conservation International.

Perhaps, in contemplating the Kalahari, we could do worse than remember the creation of the first nature reserve ever created – Yellowstone Park – which was ‘set aside’ at the expense of the Miwok, Shosone, Lakota, Bannock, Crow, Nez Perce, Flathead and Blackfeet peoples who had all existed there benignly for so long. Laurens van der Post bought the Bushmen’s existence to a global audience and it was explicitly for their benefit – as well as that of the wildlife around them – that the Kalahari Game Reserve was created. Today the Bushmen call out to van der Post’s godson – Prince William – who is visiting the country this month. His response will perhaps indicate the kind of figureheads we can expect in the years ahead of us, it will determine whether, as a culture, we have in any way moved on from the days of evicting whole peoples whose outlook can teach us so much.

Botswana’s government’s actions are undoubtedly driven by money, by a complete disregard for both their own constitution and the basic human rights of their countrymen. At their root these actions stem perhaps from a contempt for a way of life they think we should move on from. And it is the messages we all send out, deliberately or otherwise, than help determine such perceptions. We cherish our lifestyles, the thousand little things that make them easier and often let ourselves forget our sense of what is really vital. A certain level of development undoubtedly has served us well, but perhaps we have for too long lost the very precious thing which is so vital; the sense of being part of that which lies beneath our feet. Without it we are all at sea and seek to plug the gap with things which only compound our feelings of emptiness; we are often like ghosts or children pushing at a wheel we cannot see nor understand. There has to be a greater balance, some sense of what is valid and what we need to get beyond. The Bushmen here can help to lead us back, remind us that when we live in greater harmony with the land we are all the richer for it. Don’t let us forget them and their right to such a very basic thing.