DESERT FANTASIES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 143

What an elegant Scheherazade for the conference. Her stories of Abu Dhabi and the
Emirates spoke of days from long, long ago when there was no pollution, no destruction
of wildlife habitat, and no tourism geared toward consuming, consuming and consuming.
At most, the princess made an oblique call for action; otherwise, she said, “we lose our
heritage.”
Many of those birds and wildlife have already lost their homes, sacrificed to the
construction of more hotels and resorts. The falcons were saved—falconry is now on
UNESCO's cultural heritage list. Margit Gabriele Muller, a German veterinarian, directs
the preservation effort at the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital, which has won awards for saving
more than 30,000 of the endangered birds.
At an earlier conference in Abu Dhabi, Paul Vercammen of the Sharjah Breeding
Centre for Endangered Arabian Wildlife warned that the remaining wetlands of the UAE
were either “developed or earmarked for development.” That leaves shorebirds like the
bald ibis, the slender-billed curlew and the sociable plover on the critically endangered
list of threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
And since the Arabian Peninsula is also at the crossroads for migratory birds from
Europe and Asia to Africa, this destruction threatens those birds as well. The only answer
that these scientists have come up with is the creation of protected areas fenced off from
developers who want one more glamorous resort spa at the expense of the nearly extinct
Arabian leopard and the Arabian oryx whose lithe body and curved horns are the emblem
of the region. The governments are slowly agreeing and creating the equivalent of protec-
ted parks, drawing on the native concept of hema , one of the world's oldest systems for con-
serving and protecting rangeland, which was critical in a nomadic society. The Sir Bani
Yas Island wildlife preserve south of Abu Dhabi is also an inspiration, initially under the
protection of Sheikh Zayed, and now a respected reserve as well as a draw for tourists.
The crisis has nearly overwhelmed conservationists because “perhaps more than any
other region in the world the Arabian Peninsula has seen massive social and environment-
al change in only the last 50 years,” according to the report written from a decade of these
workshops. The culture of Bedouin poetry had no influence over owners of five- and six-
star hotels.
Nothing is safe from the developers. Along the shore, just west of Abu Dhabi where we
were meeting, the salt flats, or sabkhas , that were part of that old nomadic world are dis-
appearing. To hoteliers these inhospitable stretches of white salt-crusted water are a nuis-
ance that need to be destroyed to create attractive beach properties. To geologists, these
flats—the largest of their kind in the world—are not only essential to preserve a healthy
shore life, they are a rare record of sea levels from prehistoric times. Graham Evans and
Anthony Kirkham, scientists who have been studying the sabkhas since the early 1960s,
have been leading a campaign to convince the government to preserve these flats.