Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Fiddes is on the side of the vegetarian camera-toting tracker. But to my mind this is a
human who lives a dysfunctional existence. What he eats is entirely divorced from what he
does. Unlike the trapper chewing on a lump of jerky cut a week previously from the carcase
hung up back in his cabin, our modern tracker nibbles a candy bar bought 24 hours before
when he got off the plane. He is a voyeur who peers at nature through the keyhole of his
camera. Nature is spectacle, food a commodity, and he sees no need to connect the two. Has
he ever walked through an oatfield, has he ever rogued wild oats, has he ever considered
what a ticklish and painstaking endeavour it must be to remove those tight packed husks
from every one of the grains that go into making his 50 pence cereal bar? It is unlikely. To
the hunter and to the peasant, tracker man is an urban slob.
Modern urban man, vegan or otherwise, seems to have an insatiable desire to 'capture'
the nature which he no longer is part of:
Every spring in Yellowstone you are sure to see a large group of photographers standing
around - or even sitting on lawn chairs - talking loudly right out some poor badger's birth-
ing den … It's laughable to see photographers in a national park camouflaged from head-
to-toe, sometimes including face paint, photographing a bull elk as he calmly grazes along-
side the road - fully aware of their presence. 24
'The unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable', as Oscar Wilde remarked about a dif-
ferent bunch of hunters. Bill McKibben, the author of The End of Nature , has proposed a
moratorium on new wildlife photos on the grounds that there are plenty of photos already
out there for newspapers and magazines to use. 25 Indeed there are, and there is something
neurotic about our need to amass visual evidence not just of the wildlife we have seen, but
of every event that happens to us, as though the record was more valuable than the experi-
ence.
The contest between those who live within nature and those who live outside it and wish
to fetishize it is being played out in many parts of the world as the financial muscle of tour-
ism engulfs indigenous livelihood strategies. On the edge of the Serengeti from which they
have been expelled, the Maasai have been reduced to a half life, maintaining a bare minim-
um of cattle and parading themselves and their rituals before parties of tourists, who gawp
at them as they if they were part of the African fauna, or toss them a shilling. In Uganda,
the Batwa, who had been living for centuries in the montane forests of Southern Uganda,
were evicted from their lands when these were declared a national park. 26 In Chad where
the amount of land under protection increased from 0.1 per cent to 9.1 per cent of the coun-
try, there are now an estimated 600,000 conservation refugees, while the only other country
which counts them, India, has 1.6 million. 27 In 2002, India evicted 100,000 tribal people
from their lands in Assam, and in 2007, 3,000 villagers from Ghateya Madhya Pradesh fled
as State Forestry officials tear-gassed, burned and bulldozed their village. 28 In Thailand the
 
 
 
 
 
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