Illiteracy and Poverty; Conservation Adversary
Human life totally depends on nature and natural resources. Forest and the forest based products are means of subsistence of most rural people in Nepal. Having no alternative options, people are compelled to embrace forest destruction and animal hunting / poaching activities. To feed, school and medicate their children, rural people use to collect firewood and sell them in market and generate money. They are unable to afford electricity, oil-lamp, petroleum gas and agricultural product that is why resources degradation and environment pollution are high in rural areas.
Conservation can not be made by keeping rural poor outside from the resources consumption. Conservation will be worthless by grabbing the poor people’s life. If we conserve the resources by ignoring rural people’s need then the saying will not represent “Resources Conservation for the human / life existence”. Therefore, poverty should be reduced first for conservation.
Similarly, In Nepal, to protect the forest and natural resources, government handed over forest to local communities and provided conservation and utilization responsibilities. Government assumed that forest will be conserved after delivering responsibilities to local people. But people did not know how to manage forest and utilize in sustainable way. They used to extract the resources irregularly and unscientifically. They used resources in order to fulfill short term benefit only because they were illiterate and unaware about long term benefit or to set proper vision and unknown about ecosystem, ecology and nature balance. As the result, we lost many fauna, flora and ecosystem in Nepal. Therefore, illiteracy should be eliminated for the conservation.
PARC therefore believes on “POVERTY REDUCTION & EDUCATION; CONSERVATION ADHERENT” and appeals conservationist and allied agencies to embrace it.
Dear reader, write on these matter whether you agree or disagree or you have more experience regarding this saying, ILLITERACY & POVERTY; CONSERVATION ADVERSARY”.
Thank you
Suman Bhattarai
PARC (Partnership for Rhino Conservation)
Nepal
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Perhaps we all need to be poorer
I of course agree with your saying,I supose you agree that this is within certain limits. Often with increasing wealth, human populations pass from the utilization and contamination of local natural resources (wood, pastures, soil erosion, bad garbage disposal) to the use and contamination of more global recourses (use of automobiles, electricity, gas, plastics, air, etc.) - admittedly with a relief in the use of local resources, but contributing, for example, to global warming. Most of us conservationists belong to the second group of people - this is not bad - most of us probably do consume much less than an average wealthy person (ie. American). So I agree extremely poor people have to become richer - but we must not forget most of us at some moment will have to become poorer (consume less). On average, we need to reproduce and consume less - else the planet is not going to withstand our growing population. In the long run - nature conservation is about distributing resourse more evenly between present and future peoples!
Cute animals or healthy ecosystems
I was very pleased to observe within the new Rufford Small Grants several projects attempting to protect and restore ecosystems. I believe that studying cute (and non-cute) animal species is very important and a good way to start our carriers in Nature Conservation (as I did myself) - but the conclusion of many (if not all) of these studies you will find is: “We need more healthy habitat”. So we need to move on to protecting healthy habitats and restoring the ones that have problems (to many disturbances, biological invasions, etc, etc.). This said, I believe it is often easier to study a cute animal than to protect a single hectare from urbanization, biological invasions, or human disturbances like fires or livestock browsing. And if you do not believe me, well, try!
Perhaps we all need to be poorer
Dear Drenison
I totally agree with you. People’s Need / demand will be changed according to living standard. Our (conservationists’) concern is that we have to separate poor and rich people at first and treat them accordingly. We cannot ignore those people who are fighting for food, cloth and shelter and it will not be the rationale to keep them out to use natural resource constructively as well as destructively. But, we can ignore those demand of those people who are destructing nature for comfortable life in average and also develop the charging mechanism and implement effectively.
We should not look through the same eyes to a poor who is destructing nature for livelihood (e.g. felling trees, fishing, hunting) and a rich who is destructing nature for becoming more rich (e.g. Industries, smuggling).
Suman Bhattarai
Team Leader
PARC/Nepal
Chitwan, Nepal
Cute animals or healthy ecosystems
Dear Drenison
Really I am impressed with your view. Obviously, it is easy path to enter the conservation field and contribute effort, build career, devote oneself for rural poor people by emphasizing a species. The main reason is human’s (either conservationist/donor or other) behavior because their minds are leaded with sentiment of blood and death of animal rather than floral extinction. So people develop species focused projects.
Truly speaking; youth who have knowledge/ideas of conservation fields are not getting chance to engage or contribute their effort in conservation. They use to knock several organizations for work but chance is too small. They use to roam hear and there to update themselves otherwise they start to forget their knowledge and lose enthusiasm.
At last, they start to develop project and submit national and international donor. And most of donors accept species oriented project by referring IUCN red list. There is no doubt; conservation of species cannot be hoped without healthy habitat but to conserve the habitat it needs chunk of financial resource and donor cannot trust to young or single person. That is why; people start their project by focusing species and ultimately stabilize in healthy habitat creation.
((I have a memorable experience; there were 40 students (Institute of Foresty;Oldest and main government institute for Natural Resource and Wildlife)in my batch while completing bachelor degree (B. Sc. Forestry) in 2005. Among of them; 4 were from service quota who are still in job, 4 got chance to join job, 4 are roaming here and there and remaining have flown to third countries. New products of natural resource institute are suffering from this condition)).
Suman Bhattarai
Team Leader
PARC/Nepal
Chitwan, Nepal