in response to the Beard quote...
I feel compelled to write something in response to the quote that Gillian posted by Peter Beard (on my Feb 23rd posting), about the parallel destruction that elephants and humans cause. First of all, the destruction that he mentions is not just in Kenya (where he spent most of his time in Africa), I have seen it right here in Botswana, in Makgadikgadi (where I work) and in Moremi, where parts of the park look like a war zone because the number of elephants is just too big for the small space they inhabit and they have completely destroyed the vegetation. In the past, the answer to this was culling ( controlled shooting of elephants to keep the population down), but to me this seems like a pretty inhumane way to solve the problem. Especially because often the reason for overcrowding of elephants in the park is a result of the fact that they have been hunted and poached in all of the unprotected areas just outside of the park, and have been smart enough to realize that they are much safer if they stay inside the boundaries of the park, even if this means less space to roam. So wouldnt a better answer be to stop ele hunting outside the park, rather than wait until there are too many in the park, and then kill them anyways, under the guise of "management"?
The other part of the quote I thought was interesting was:
"Again and again, we adapt to the damage we cause. That is our genius. We do to our forests what we have forced all the Babars and Dumbos to do to theirs. At the highest levels of leadership (and guilt), we cover our tracks and invent perfect excuses."
In one of the books I was in fact just reading this past weekend about Peter Beard, a friend of his commented that he had been a follower of Peter Beard (who preaches a sort of end-of-the-world gloom and doom rhetoric) until another friend of his once said something along the lines of, if we as humans can destroy the world, who says we cant build it back up again? To me there is something really unsettling about this statement, but I cant exactly pinpoint it or put it into words...any thoughts?
(and if you are all wondering who peter beard was, funnily enough, i only was introduced to his work this past weekend, the day before gillian put up that post...he is a new york-born artist/photographer who has spent a large part of his life in kenya, both in the bush photographing wildlife (he recorded the great elephant die-off in Tsavo Park in keyna a few decades ago) but also a big figure (ie playboy) in the kenyan expat social scene and the new york art world. he discovered iman (took photos of her with lions), was married to cheryl tiegs...etc etc. you can google him for yourself. )
posted by Clare Gupta @ 2:30 PM
1 Comments:
My thoughts about these issues may not fit together neatly (such is blogging), but to keep a healthy discussion going on blogginginbotswana, I’d like to offer a response to Gillian’s quote, too.
First, I think about all the human populations being confined within limited and unnatural boundaries in Africa today*. This came up again and again in “The Shadow of the Sun,” a new collection of writings by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski that I read recently. When Europeans colonized Africa, some 20,000 nations, tribes, and ethnic groups were reassembled into roughly 50 countries. That, coupled with environmental instability, is cause for a lot of conflict.
A good illustration is Rwanda. Kapuscinski writes a chapter about Rwanda, as does Jared Diamond in his new book, “Collapse” (550 pages that were not as enjoyable, I’m sad to say, as “Guns, Germs, and Steel”). These books have a great dialogue on the subject, actually. Diamond, the environmentalist, draws on a lot of anthropological research and focuses on land ownership and inheritance. Kapuscinski, the journalist and storyteller, writes more about cattle. Go figure. Now, all of this pulls back into the elephant issue here: “It is not rare, even today, to hear Rwandans argue that a war is necessary to wipe out an excess population and to bring numbers into line with the available land resources” (this quote is from the Diamond book, and it dates from after the 1994 genocides). I wonder what the elephants are thinking behind those perpetually soulful eyes when they look around at their neighbors and the deserts they’ve helped create. Would they turn to violence if they had an understanding of culpability? (Another interesting parallel between Rwanda and elephant overpopulation: like the Hutus held in refugee camps outside Rwanda who stared in daily at forbidden, greener pastures, a bunch of Botswanan elephants have just crossed the border into eastern Namibia and are tearing up the place searching for food and water. I guess at a certain point food will always become more valuable that safety.)
Clare mentioned that Beard photographed the Tsavo die-off, and this Beard quote touches on that; many of the elephants at Tsavo died with stomachs full of wood. I was reading earlier tonight that the reserve’s overseers seemed to know that trouble was coming, but popular opposition kept them from culling the elephant population. I wonder if culling (which, as an aside, makes me think of the restriction of individual reproductive choice in China) would be a sustainable practice, and I wonder how long it would take to find out. But then, what’s the point of culling, to maximize the number of elephants in one place because we’ve minimized their presence elsewhere? Sincerely, is that the best we can do?**
That ties back in to the quote that made you uncomfortable, Clare: “If we as humans can destroy the world, who says we can’t build it back up again?” That is rather cavalier. We, humans, are part of nature’s capacity for self-destruction. Yet I think we’d better hope that we can do something to improve the world. If the conditions of nature became fixed right now—same number of every plant and animal, same air, same water, same land—would we be content? Should we be content? I don’t think that humans can rebuild nature, exactly—that’s just the nature of nature. What humans can and should do is enable nature to heal itself. Now, that introduces a really hard question that I don’t have an answer for: What does it mean for nature to heal itself, and when does human involvement become “unnatural”?
The more I learn about it, the more I get the feeling that the continent of Africa must be the most complicated place in the world. I’m very excited about going back this April.
To end on a more positive note, anyone living in or near New York should definitely check out the Gregory Colbert show at Pier 54. Maybe he’s the next Peter Beard. He photographs people “communing” with wild animals like cheetahs, elephants, and whales (in Vava’u!), and he’s got a fashion connection—Donna Karan is among the collectors of his $60,000 to $350,000 photographs. What’s up with fashion, photographers, and Africa, anyway?
Daniel
p.s. Jayne, if you’re reading, I’d really like to hear what you think about all this.
* Also, there’s an interesting article on rebuilding Africa’s failed states in last week’s Economist. Check that out if you’re interested.
** Stopping elephant hunting outside the parks does seem like a more comfortable long-range solution. It’s just that as an economic decision, poaching elephants is probably hard to beat. If you’ve got a taste for money, there’re not many other ways to earn it in rural Africa (and thus, African cities are massively overcrowded with people from rural areas, people searching for work, which the fragile African environment can barely afford to support).
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