Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
“legal” to kill wildlife if it is in your garden (viewed as self-defense). On the other
side, it is “illegal” to kill the same animal (viewed as poaching). Anti-poaching
activities tend to be full-time jobs for the park rangers. Many of the villagers living
alongside the park's boundary would argue that before the park's boundaries
were delineated, this was their traditional hunting ground. However, this argument
held little weight in the current laws (although many parks in South Africa are
now implementing buffer zones to try to mediate the fixity of these borders).
Transgressing these spaces and being an outsider to the system incited curiosity
about how rules and regulations are applied inside and outside bounded spaces
of wilderness. This experience helped me realize that the “winners” and “losers”
in this construct are certainly not clear-cut.
I also found that the national parks, although “public places”, are places of
privilege. I found irony in the fact that many of the national parks in Africa were
originally delineated as hunting preserves for the colonial elite. What were once
quintessential colonial relics, are now seen as national treasures and, even today,
the parks are places of exclusion. For most Malawians, a visit to the national parks
is outside of their realm of possibility. As one of the poorest countries in the world,
the option to do anything other than directly work towards daily survival is limited.
The parks, then, become places for tourists, expatriates, and national elites.
To help bridge this gap, part of my job at the Department of Parks and Wildlife
was to take school wildlife clubs on weekend visits into the national parks. For
most, including the lorry drivers who transported the children, this was their first
time inside the park, with the distance being too far and the expense too great for
most to do such a trip independently. So these subsidized trips exposed children
to “exotic places” in their own homeland. The goal was to inspire the students to
build a conservation ethic into their lives and ultimately become environmental
leaders for their community. But the harsh realities that the youth faced - of chronic
malnutrition, illnesses associated with malaria, cholera and dengue fever, and the
growing pandemic of AIDS (with upwards of 35 percent of the population infected
with HIV when I was a volunteer) - tended to overshadow the conservation
practices. How could these youth become environmental leaders, if they did not
make it past their twenty-fifth birthday? This was another harsh reminder that
human health and ecosystem health cannot be addressed independently.
Ironically, it was also my time in Malawi that helped bridge my work back into
the North American context. It was my Malawian counterpart - Andrew Bwanali
- who posed the simple question: what is the state of the Indigenous people in
the United States, the Native Americans? It was not until his question that I ever
really considered the impacts of colonization on Indigenous peoples in North
America. In my mind's eye, colonial legacies occurred somewhere else, mostly in
the Global South.
Having no answer to the question, I turned red with shame. So, with that
powerful moment, I was sensitized to issues of colonization and marginalization
in a North American context. I made a vow to educate myself about these issues
and to work with, or alongside, Indigenous communities as an ally. My first
Search WWH ::
Custom Search