Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The next morning, I was in one of the smaller huts in Yetee, sitting across from a village elder, a
lean man whose muscled jaw and broad, veined forehead seemed tempered by years of authority.
He'd taken off a straw hat and held it in his hands, and with each question I asked, he hunched a
little, his French good though he searched for words. I wanted to know how his community felt
about the work being done here for conservation.
“It's not enough,” he said. “We need corrugated metal roofs for the schools. We need more
schools. More clinics. More trucks and motorcycles and better markets.”
“So you aren't satisfied with what the conservationists are doing?”
“It's not enough,” he repeated, a comment that I imagined everyone in nearly every country
would voice, often reasonably, for many situations in their lives.
“And if the conservationists left tomorrow and stopped their work forever, would there be
something else that would allow the people to get money and medicine?”
He sat a long time, staring at me, chewing slightly, his jaw lopsided.
“No,” he said, shaking his head faintly. “No, there's nothing else.”
Yetee lay just within the reserve, a dusty expanse with a few dozen huts clustered off the road.
Below, a small river curved around the slope skirting the village, and narrow paths descended to the
various bathing and water-gathering points.
Though many people here wore newer clothes than the inhabitants in the villages along the road
to Djolu, most had only one outfit. Shortly after Sally began paying salaries, a merchant arrived on
foot, a bundle on his back. He put down a tarp just outside the camp and began selling Chinese-
made soap, underwear, safety pins, hand mirrors, and batteries. Young men came through, leading
goats tied at the neck with vines, or herding ducks. For dozens of miles in every direction, the re-
serve offered the only source of cash.
Guy Cowlishaw and Robin Dunbar define conservation biology as “a scientific discipline that
aims to provide the sound knowledge and guidance necessary to implement the effective conserva-
tion action that will be necessary to maintain in perpetuity the natural diversity of living organisms.”
However, there are a number of views as to how this goal is best achieved, from setting aside park-
lands to establishing reserves like Kokolopori. National parks usually displace human populations,
creating situations in which the former inhabitants lack a stable means of livelihood. With an estim-
ated fourteen million conservation refugees in Africa alone as of 2005, some indigenous delegates
have listed major conservation groups as more destructive to their ways of life than industrial cor-
porations. “The battle for conservation by exclusion” has been lost, Cowlishaw and Dunbar write,
and developing nations have been unable “to set aside huge tracts of land for conservation unless
they were prepared to risk civil unrest.”
As conservationists have turned away from national parks as a model reminiscent of the colonial
period, they have begun to see local communities as their allies. Community-based reserves attempt
