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Washington Monthly , May 1993 v25 n5 p60(2) At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife. Ann O'Hanlon.

Full Text: 1993 Washington Monthly Company

Raymond Bonner moved to east Africa in 1988 to write for The New Yorker, neatly in time to watch the 1989 global ban on ivory take effect. Enchanted by the continent's peoples and wildlife, Bonner explored the interplay of the two as they relate to wildlife conservation. He discovered that American wildlife organizations such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the African Wildlife Federation (AWF) pay scant attention to local peoples while establishing wildlife policy and distort facts when it is conducive to fundraising. The case in point is, of course, elephants and the argument for a total ban on ivory. Both WWF and AWF paid exaggerated attention to the case of the elephant (elephants have never been doomed to extinction; in fact, several countries had to stabilize their elephant populations well before the 1989 ban) once they discovered this was a fool-proof recipe for fundraising. Bonner himself was seduced into focusing on pachyderms, and he serves up some juicy reporting on the politics of elephants. However, if his topic is "Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife," as the subtitle promises, Bonnet falls short.

The ban on ivory, announced in 1989 at the initiation of WWF and AWF, was an abrupt reversal of both organizations' prior position of allowing the sale of some ivory. The wisdom of allowing ivory sales is at least threefold. First, elephant populations outgrow their habitat's support capacity and therefore must be kept from trampling the forest and farmland around them and dying of starvation. The tusks from these elephants, and from elephants who die natural deaths, should not go to waste. Second, putting a value on the elephants-outside of the western aesthetic value that many Africans don't have the luxury to share--is the best way to ensure that those peoples work for the survival of the species. Finally, the African people who cope with these dangers should be the people setting and implementing policy, both because it is their land and resource, and because their involvement is a fundamental precursor to caring for the survival of the species. No foreign government that pushed for the ban on ivory ever compensated local populations for their loss of income from ivory sales, nor included any Africans in policy making, an attitude Bonner refers to as "eco-colonialist."

Though Bonner is critical of a number of conservation organizations, he serves up a particularly thorough indictment of WWF. The organization provided the Zimbabwean Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management with a helicopter used to gun down poachers on sight, killing a total of at least 57 men. A lifelong conservationist working in Namibia described the average poacher as "an average, normal guy, a poor farmer who is trying to feed his family." There were in-house arguments at WWF over the project, but it later denied knowing how the helicopter was being used.

WWF's " 1001 Club ," a fundraising gimmick conceived by South African tobacco businessman and WWF boardmember Anton Rupert, is made up of 1,000 individuals who have given $10,000 to the WWF, the 1001st being Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, a former WWF president. The secret list of members includes a disproportionate percentage of South Africans, all too happy in an era of social banishment to be welcomed into a socially elite society. Other contributors include businessmen with suspect connections, including organized crime, environmentally destructive development, and corrupt African politics. Even an internal report called WWF's approach egocentric and neocolonialist. (The report was largely covered up.)

The neocolonialist charge gets at a number of uncomfortable truths. The United States and other western nations have helped create a demand for ivory--thus contributing directly to elephant poaching and the ivory trade--and supported many a politically corrupt African government that was tied to the ivory trade. Once it became politically or financially expedient for those who had hunted African wildlife to skip the hunt, they did so and asked the rest of the world to go along. Africans were not included in such decisions.

The Africa section of the U.S. office of WWF hired its first black professional in 1991, and WWF International has yet to hire a single black in its 30-year history. And, if it's possible to rate such overt racism, the African Wildlife Federation is worse due to its name and mission: In its 30 years, it has yet to have a single black on its board of trustees or in its Washington headquarters.

Sorely missing from At The Hand of Man is an analysis of why none of the successful small-scale efforts to control elephant populations has been attempted or even proposed at the national level in Africa. What are the hurdles that might obstruct such plans? Not one of the wildlife experts proposes a national or continent-wide strategy for keeping elephant populations in check while simultaneously respecting local cultures and allocating tourist dollars. Nor does Bonner, despite his criticism of the ivory ban. Such may not be a reporter's responsibility, but his omission both of alternative strategies and of obstacles prohibiting such strategies is frustrating. Bonner claims the western approach to African wildlife management is racism and nothing else. In fact, if racism disappeared tomorrow, Africa's wildlife woes would remain. Topics critical to wildlife management yet barely touched upon in the book--crippling population growth, political corruption, and unstable governments throughout the continent --are as African as elephants and daunting obstacles in the execution of complex policy. And they were, perhaps, factors in the decision to implement the more simplistic ban on ivory than a more complex policy that, no doubt, would have been fairer to the Africans. If Bonner had yielded to his obvious urge to write exclusively about elephants and the ivory trade, perhaps he would have addressed these issues. Instead, he paints a picture that is compelling but incomplete.

Named Works: At the Hand of Man (Book) - Book reviews