Wild Success

Saving endangered wildlife once meant trampled crops and violent death to the villagers of Southern Africa. Now community-based capitalism is turning once-fearsome pests into valuable sources of wealth.

Karl Hess Jr. from the October 1997 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

What is unusual about Vwaza Marsh, and what explains my affection for it, is that it is the first park in Southern Africa to have full-scale community-based conservation practiced within its borders and the first to have rights to its resources assigned to someone other than the state. In this regard, Vwaza Marsh is a departure from the CAMPFIRE model; in the latter, use rights are restricted to communal lands, while in the former they extend to protected lands such as parks and wildlife reserves. Nonetheless, the program's goals and objectives are roughly the same as those of its Zimbabwean cousin: to conserve wildlife and habitat through robust economic incentives.

Ideally, use rights to Vwaza Marsh's plant and animal resources--resources that can be used for subsistence living or marketed regionally or globally for the highest return--will give local residents second thoughts about subdividing the park into small farming plots and cause them to rethink the economy of poaching. (A poached elephant is worth about $500 in meat and ivory, while a lawfully marketed trophy elephant is worth as much as $20,000.) But the greater importance of Vwaza Marsh transcends the conservation dividend of saving a few elephants and buffalo.

Malawi is, in many ways, the future face of Southern Africa, with a burgeoning population pushing inexorably against the last holdouts of uncultivated land within parks and reserves. The future of those protected areas--the biological seeds, so to speak, of the region's emerging wildlife industry--will depend on winning popular support for their continued existence. Clearly, if they are to exist, they must have value to rural Africans, not just value for eco-tourists. Without such value they will be treated precisely as wildlife has been treated in the past: poached on, depleted, and possibly eliminated. Creating that value is the challenge for CAMPFIRE's successors.

Of course, the long-term prospects of Southern Africa's wildlife may well depend on developments external to CAMPFIRE and CBNRM, such as broad-based industrialization to lighten the human pressure on wildlife habitat. For the time being, though, community-based conservation is the thumb in the dike. It is the most equitable, the most politically desirable, and the most socially promising alternative to the Western legacy of state prescription. It is the hope and the vision of the greener hills of Africa.

Community-based conservation can also be much more than the thumb in the dike; it can be a partial template upon which we green the hills, the valleys, and the plains of America. It is clear, I believe, how the earliest phases of wildlife policy reform in Southern Africa can apply to the United States: Robust, enforceable, and marketable rights in domestic wildlife would go a long way toward resolving such emotionally laden issues as livestock on public lands and endangered species on private property. Why not let public land ranchers have the market option of growing either livestock or wildlife, or some combination of the two? Given the proven profitability of game ranching in Texas and fee hunting of wild elk on the private lands of the Deseret Ranch in northeastern Utah (where elk outscore cattle in net revenue), I have a hunch many ranchers would embrace the wildlife bonanza.

Likewise, why not let property owners benefit from endangered species rather than just bearing the enormous cost of preserving them for the enjoyment of everyone else? And so far as I know, a privately radio-tagged and trackable wolf that earns a property owner $10,000 a year in photo opportunities is genetically the same as a public wolf that drives an angered rancher to shoot, shovel, and shut up.

What is less clear, I suspect, is what relevance, if any, the communal aspect of African wildlife reform has for a society built on individual initiative and private property. Despite our individualistic flair, Americans are extremely social animals; they settled this country and peopled its frontiers not in isolation but in community and association. That communal tradition--the
one that Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated in Democracy in America--is alive today in suburbs where families are joining together to form self-governing, gated communities and in the nation's rural heartland, where organizations such as the Sand County Foundation are melding disparate private lands into voluntary associations of cooperative wildlife management. By whatever name they are called, they are solidly in the civic and associational tradition that has been America's hallmark from the first raucous New England town meeting to the first cooperative water district set up by Utah Mormons to the first self-governing commons established by Montana ranchers in the early 1900s.

Today, the African model of communal rights can be applied to a wide range of American environmental issues. Many of our resources will not be best served by classic privatization, whether because of political barriers or the existence of more desirable options. Our public lands and national forests, our national parks, our vast scenic expanses, and our rich bounty of wildlife are prized assets that by virtue of their political sensitivity, their cultural symbolism, and their often fugitive nature are best dealt with through community-based rather than private solutions.

There is no reason, for example, why local councils made up of forest and range users of all stripes and geographies could not take over control and management of our federal estate and oversee the marketization of federal resource use rights. There is no reason why conservation trusts elected by membership associations of paying national park visitors could not assume custody of our crown jewels. There is no reason why communities could not develop collective yet voluntary strategies to protect the open-access resource of scenery, much as Randal O'Toole's Thoreau Institute has described for Wallowa County, Oregon. It's akin to zoning, but in the context I imagine it is much closer to democracy under a baobab tree. And there is no reason why large landowners could not form cooperative conservancies to provide adequate habitat for far-roaming wildlife, or why small communities could not band together to exercise common rule over local wildlife by their own means and true to their own visions.

Already, voluntary watershed management groups are springing up across the width and breadth of America to manage complex and highly interconnected landscapes. They are sculpting neighborly solutions to resource conflicts and building new institutions, all voluntary, for the management of what heretofore have been open-access resources. Logging companies in the deep South, such as International Paper, are leasing millions of acres of prime deer habitat in commercial timberland to the collective rule of thousands of hunter associations. And in the Bitterroot mountain range of western Montana and northern Idaho, ranchers, loggers, and environmentalists are communally conspiring to save the grizzly bear.

The lessons of community-based conservation echo from the savannahs and veld of Southern Africa to the very heart of America. It would be our loss, not just Africa's, if the flame of CAMPFIRE were dampened because the best our nation had to offer elephants was a ban on ivory and a proscription on trophy hunting. The flame must be quickened. At stake is the transportable dream of a khaki-shorts ecology brigade for a greener and freer world.