Game Changer. Glen Martin
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The upshot, he says, is that scientists and game managers can no longer implement effective conservation policies, because that can produce images repulsive to African wildlife’s largest fan base—tourists and animal lovers from the developed world. For these people, megafauna is a highly valued commodity—but also a highly romanticized one, a commodity that can be appreciated only while alive. If a lion is killed for a trophy or an elephant culled to preserve habitat, it is transformed from an object that inspires near religious reverence to an object whose death inspires utter disgust. Never mind, says Parker, that regular rations of meat from the regulated culling of elephants and buffalo would provide subsistence farmers with real incentives for keeping game around or that pastoral tribes would tolerate predators more readily if they were to derive some income from trophy hunting concessions. The mere prospect of the sanctioned killing of wild animals is too horrific for many environmentalists to contemplate, even though it could actually work to preserve wildlife on a large scale. To a significant degree, Parker says, the lives of individual animals have come to mean more to many environmentalists-cum-animal-lovers than wild ecosystems and the complex assemblages of species they support.
Part of the problem is simple emotional accessibility, Parker acknowledges: a dewy-eyed Thomson’s gazelle, lolling lion, or cute-as-a-button elephant calf is more immediately comprehensible to the layperson than a long treatise on predator-prey relationships in acacia parklands. Still, he says,“the ‘environmental ethic’ in Kenya is pernicious, because it has become heavily invested with dogma. It is a doctrine now, a belief system, having nothing to do with the reality of ecosystems, real wildlife in real situations, the preservation of habitat. The idea of trade-offs or compromises that could result in some real progress on the ground—forget it. Ideological purity is what counts.”
Parker is particularly incensed by what he terms a faulty sense of history about Kenya—the idea that it was a stable and pristine wilderness burgeoning with wildlife until white settlement began in the late nineteenth century. He notes the evidence is solid that game populations in Kenya have always been in flux and generally pegged to shifts in human population. “When human populations were high, game was scarce. The opposite was true when situations reversed. Yes, Kenya was teeming with game at the end of the 1890s, when the central highlands started seeing significant [European] settlement. But that situation followed severe declines in tribal populations.”
In the 1880s, Kenya’s cattle herds were almost extirpated by successive waves of rinderpest and bovine pleuropneumonia; that catastrophe culminated in the great famine of 1897–98, which depopulated vast regions of countryside. The absence of cattle resulted in abundant forage for grazing and browsing wildlife, increasing the prey base for predators. Encounters with human beings were minimal. “Basically, the wildlife had a great deal of scope for expansion simply because the number of human beings was low,” Parker says.
In earlier decades and centuries, the reverse was true: human populations were relatively high in what is now Kenya, much of the land was used for grazing and farming, and wildlife conflicts with herders and cultivators were common. More people, in short, meant reduced options for wild animals. “Basically, it’s the situation we’re seeing these days,” Parker says, “though obviously the scale [of the pressures on game] is now on a much larger order.”
Misconceptions by the lay public about Africa and its wildlife are thus driving unrealistic policies, particularly in Kenya, says Parker—policies that seem high-flown and virtuous but are utterly unrealistic and unworkable, inflicting harm rather than ameliorating it. “There’s this message going out that East Africa used to be a Garden of Eden,” Parker says.“Nonsense.It’s never been a bloody Eden; it has always been a very, very rough place. Man evolved here, and so did a multitude of microorganisms that controlled human numbers—think malaria, sleeping sickness. People were just part of the shifting mix of fauna. It was always easy for people to succumb to disease, to get eaten, gored, or stomped here, to die in any number of unpleasant ways. When wildlife thrived it was at the expense of human beings and the other way around. Elephants inhibited agriculture until enough people picked up enough sticks to inhibit the elephants. That’s still how it works in the bush. So if you want people to change—out where it counts, where the animals still live—you have to give them a palpable reason, one based on self-interest, not to pick up the stick. Simply passing a hunting ban and issuing pious statements from Nairobi about the sanctity of wildlife isn’t going to cut it.”
Parker thinks often of the Wata, an elephant-hunting tribe of eastern Kenya that has now been reduced to a remnant population. He is deeply familiar with many of Kenya’s forty-plus tribes, but he particularly admires the Wata for their honesty, gentleness, great hunting prowess, and encyclopedic knowledge of wildlife. In 1960, Parker originated the Galana Scheme, the goal of which was to provide an exclusive province for the Wata—a reserve of three thousand square miles along the eastern border of Tsavo National Park, which allowed them to practice their traditional elephant-hunting culture in a sustainable fashion. Under the plan, ivory taken by the Wata was sold by the government through legal channels. The Galana Scheme was implemented with great hope and was managed first by the colonial government, later through a private enterprise. But administrative problems plagued the program until it was finally curtailed in 1976. Ultimately, the Galana Scheme was an attempt to fuse conservation with programs designed to meet the exigent needs of local people, and though it didn’t work, Parker still feels it was on the right track.
Like the Wata, Parker knows the megafauna on their own terms; he respects Africa’s large wild animals; he hunted them, fought fiercely to maintain the habitats they require for survival. He can still remember a time when the great beasts dominated the landscape. Parker once roamed the East African bush as freely as both the elephants on their endless migrations and the Wata who trailed along their spoor, poisoned arrows nocked to their bowstrings. Like them, his movements have been circumscribed by the modern world. Langata is by no means an unpleasant place, but seeing Parker at his repose, you get the sense of an old, tough bull elephant at Aberdare National Park in central Kenya, a fenced reserve of montane forest surrounded by agricultural land, safe from rapine and ruin only because of the barriers. Parker is backed up against the wire, facing into the forest, looking at an Africa that exists only in his mind, in the memories of a few peers, and in some shrinking islands of functional habitat.
But he is hardly morose. He has a profound talent for inhabiting and enjoying the moment, and comparisons of the past to the present don’t vitiate his pleasure in contemplating both. “I’ve enjoyed all of it, enjoyed it tremendously,” Parker says, recalling his years as a soldier, warden, game cropper, and man of letters. “But I was never emotionally invested in it. Most people who know me say that was probably my weakness, but it was really my greatest strength. I never felt that things had to be a certain way, that I could or should fight trends that were beyond the power of anyone to reasonably affect. I certainly didn’t enjoy all the developments I’ve witnessed, but I didn’t let them depress me. I only had one life to live, and depression wouldn’t have made me more effective in my work in any event.”
As to the future, Parker admits to deep pessimism: “There is already famine in the Northern Frontier District. People are foraging in the bush for whatever they can eat, some are dying. And that’s with fewer than forty million people in the country. Twenty years from now, it will be seventy million people. Again, that growth will come at the expense of wildlife and wildlife habitat.”
Nor does Parker think effective policies will be implemented to sustain the wildlife that remains. The trend in conservationist thinking continues to emphasize the warm, cuddly fuzziness of individual animals over habitat management. “As an example, take my specialty, elephants,” Parker observes. “Anyone who knows anything at all about these issues knows that for maximum biodiversity in forest ecosystems, you have to control elephant numbers. There is no alternative, given that migration options for elephants have now been eliminated. But the chances for a sustained rational program [of elephant culling] in this country are nil.”
The current zeitgeist, in short, supports anthropomorphism. Africa once seemed isolated from this trend, but no longer. Indeed, the modern apotheosis of the individual wild animal actually began in Kenya about sixty years ago, and the man who started it all—George Adamson—was