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the game changers book pdf
For anyone who has traveled the developing world, Nairobi is instantly recognizable. It is the doppelganger of Manila, Mexico City, Lagos, Bangkok-a dynamic conurbation of immense size, swelling almost visibly, with a core of decayed high rises surrounded by concentric rings of slums and gridlocked roadways. The only clues that this is the capital of Kenya, the heart of East Africa, are the marabou storks perched disconsolately on the fever trees along Uhuru Highway, the city's primary thoroughfare. Somehow, they still evoke the veldt and the bush, the teeming game.
Fifty years ago, lions hunted and black rhinos browsed in the acacia scrub on the very outskirts of town. Today, the only sizable expanse of open land near the city is Nairobi National Park, a partly fenced thirty-thousand-acre reserve that is adjacent to Kenyatta International Airport and still contains fairly robust populations of plains game. It is not unusual to see the bloated carcass of a zebra or impala that somehow broke through the wire next to the airport's service road, only to be struck by a cab shuttling passengers to and from the city.
The park, however, is a mere remnant of what was. More (or less) than that, it is hardly representative of an intact and functioning East African ecosystem. Rather, it is a de facto landscape-scale zoo that exists because of the fences. Nor is it inviolate. Poaching, poisoning, and encroachment by livestock herders and squatters all go on here, reflecting in microcosm the processes that are degrading game populations and habitat throughout the region.
I came here one morning to interview him as part of an investigative project on East African conservation issues. Many of the people I had talked to earlier had emphasized the necessity of meeting with him: Parker, they said, had perspective. He understood the history of game management-more to the point, he had contributed to that history; he was part of it. He was unsentimental and science oriented. He could see and explain the Big Picture. After some effort, my cabbie found his home-a small house set well back from the road in a grove of large trees. Parker answered the door at my knock. We sat down, drank hot beverages-tea for him, coffee for me-and talked into the afternoon.
As a commander of a platoon of the Kikuyu Tribal Police, Parker fought the Mau-Mau on the slopes of Mount Kenya and the Aberdares. Later, he spent decades as a game ranger and warden, ultimately responsible for wildlife management in a district that covered thousands of square kilometers. He shot hundreds of elephants in culling operations aimed at protecting the rangelands and killed a comparable number of Cape buffalo that threatened tribal and colonial cattle with bovine diseases. He battled Somali shifta (bandits) who were terrorizing pastoral herders, and he implacably persecuted poachers. He consulted on game management and traded in ivory. He is one of a remaining handful of professional hunters and wardens who experienced East Africa at a time when it was a wilderness surrounding a few islands of human habitation, unlike the current obverse.
But as Parker looks back on his life, he has no illusions of overarching accomplishment. All the years he spent as a game warden, diligently enforcing regulations and apprehending malefactors, now seem to him, in large degree, wasted effort. Kenya's megafauna continue to decline despite the best efforts of game wardens, wildlife biologists, animal enthusiasts, and a 1977 hunting ban that was originally hailed as a template for the salvation of the continent's wildlife.
Parker is thus less than optimistic about the future for Africa's wildlife. He acknowledges that many well-meaning and well-funded efforts by people of good conscience are under way to stem and reverse the decline of the game. But, he says, it probably won't be enough. It's not just the poaching, the government corruption, the ongoing implacable conversion of habitat to cropland and grazing commons; those trends, he says, are mere symptoms. The real problem, the only problem in his eyes, is shifting trends in biomass.
To the newcomer, East Africa is vast, seemingly endless. The Serengeti stretches to the horizon, speckled with plains game. The hills and gorges of Laikipia and the Northern Frontier in Kenya, bordered by the eastern Rift Valley, form a gigantic fractal landscape that defies normal conventions of space and boundary. But Parker has patrolled this land for fifty years, from Uganda through Tanzania. To him, it is familiar, discrete, comprehensible-and finite. And it is not large enough, rich enough, to respond to the demands now made on it. Something has to get the short end of the stick. And that, says Parker, is the megafauna-and the people who historically depended on the megafauna, such as the Wata, a near-extinct Kenyan tribe whose members specialized in hunting elephants with powerful longbows and poisoned arrows. All have been supplanted, he says, with the "strange form" of human being: modern, technologically savvy, urbanized primates whose social status depends on the accumulation of wealth, namely, the conversion of natural resources into goods and money.
Parker explains that East Africa's great elephant herds originally traversed thousands of miles in their migrations, traveling from Ethiopia to Zambia and back in stately, seasonal rounds as they sought forage and water. And wherever they went, they shaped ecosystems. "They were one of the great evolutionary engines on the continent. An area that contained too many elephants was ultimately stripped of forest. Then the elephants declined in number or moved on and plains game moved in, until the forest came back. Then the elephants returned, and on and on." This dynamic resulted in a rich tapestry of habitats, with many "edges": mature and secondary forest, brushlands, savanna, transition zones of every permutation. This varied habitat in turn supported a tremendous diversity of wildlife.
"As a game warden, I was brought up with the idea that conservation is a growing thing, an idea that would only gain power with time," says Parker. To a certain extent, he says, the decades have borne out that intimation: conservation and its later permutation, environmentalism, have never been more voguish. But the reality shows that where it counts, real conservation is declining. As a percentage of government expenditures, the greatest amount of money put into Kenyan conservation was around 1900. Also, in 1900, 23 percent of Kenya's land was game reserve-absolutely inviolate sanctuary where hunting was proscribed. Today, only 4 percent of Kenya's land has reserve status." Driving the land conversion, Parker observes, is population growth; Kenya's human numbers have shot up from eight million people at the declaration of the country's independence in 1963 to thirty million today. Since 1977, the year the hunting ban was introduced, wildlife populations have fallen by 70 percent.
Still, a fraction-even a significant portion-of the game could be preserved, says Parker, if it had real value for the people who live with and around it. But public policy in Kenya, he claims, has reduced its value. The hunting ban ultimately has come to mean that wildlife cannot be utilized in any way and hence has no value to rural residents. Ecotourism benefits the wealthy lodge owner and the tour company operator but not the pastoral herdsman caring for a herd of goats or the freehold farmer scratching a subsistence living from a hectare of maize and pumpkins. For them, wildlife is at best a neutral entity, although seldom even that: elephants raid the maize, lions and hyenas eat the goats. Tribal people can't, legally, take an elephant or eland for food or sell a permit to a wealthy trophy hunter for a lion. So it makes more sense to poach the elephant, poison the lion, and subsequently raise the goats and maize in peace.
The upshot, he says, is that scientists and game managers can no longer implement effective conservation policies, because that can produce images repulsive to African wildlife's largest fan base-tourists and animal lovers from the developed world. For these people, megafauna is a highly valued commodity-but also a highly romanticized one, a commodity that can be appreciated only while alive. If a lion is killed for a trophy or an elephant culled to preserve habitat, it is transformed from an object that inspires near religious reverence to an object whose death inspires utter disgust. Never mind, says Parker, that regular rations of meat from the regulated culling of elephants and buffalo would provide subsistence farmers with real incentives for keeping game around or that pastoral tribes would tolerate predators more readily if they were to derive some income from trophy hunting concessions. The mere prospect of the sanctioned killing of wild animals is too horrific for many environmentalists to contemplate, even though it could actually work to preserve wildlife on a large scale. To a significant degree, Parker says, the lives of individual animals have come to mean more to many environmentalists-cum-animal-lovers than wild ecosystems and the complex assemblages of species they support.
Parker is particularly incensed by what he terms a faulty sense of history about Kenya-the idea that it was a stable and pristine wilderness burgeoning with wildlife until white settlement began in the late nineteenth century. He notes the evidence is solid that game populations in Kenya have always been in flux and generally pegged to shifts in human population. "When human populations were high, game was scarce. The opposite was true when situations reversed. Yes, Kenya was teeming with game at the end of the 1890s, when the central highlands started seeing significant [European] settlement. But that situation followed severe declines in tribal populations." 2ff7e9595c
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