Excerpts from State of the Wild 2008-2009
Conservation as Diplomacy
Steven E. Sanderson
In the contemporary world of international relations, the Cold War polarities of East–West conflict are long gone and little lamented. In their place is a fractious new world of multiple and changing alliances that may shift in the blink of an eye. Iraq is only the most obvious of these, having gone from American ally (in the war against Iran) to enemy (in the first and second Gulf wars) to ally and then to global milestone, in only one generation. Similarly fluid dynamics of the new post–Cold War world are evident in varying degrees in Indonesia, Myanmar, Congo, Southern Sudan, and countless other places.
Not only are alliances at stake; the entire matter of whether one nation should engage another diplomatically provokes debate. These days, actors on the international stage are prominent for their refusal to negotiate or carry on diplomatic discourse with each other, from the Middle East, Iran, Syria, and Uzbekistan to the durable standoffs in Cuba and North Korea.
What does this have to do with conservation? Simply put, what Clausewitz famously said about war is also true of conservation: it is diplomacy by other means. Yet defining conservation diplomacy is about as easy as engaging in diplomacy itself.
Conservation, both public and private, is suffused with interstate tensions and the favor or disrepute visited on nation-state actors. Conservationists are often faced with a difficult choice: either align with interstate politics by refusing to engage in certain countries—thereby mortgaging the future of wildlife to the vicissitudes of international conflict—or diplomatically hold conservation apart from interstate politics. If we are to save wildlife and wildlands, we cannot afford the first choice—the politics of enforced abstinence—which these days would leave the Asiatic cheetah abandoned in the mountains of Iran, the tiger marooned in northern Myanmar, and the Cuban crocodile left to its own in the Zapata Swamp.
Thus, conservation efforts often choose the second route—attempting to keep conservation separate from interstate politics. In this sense, conservation diplomacy differs from interstate diplomacy in that it behaves in the fashion of relief to the victims of disaster or disease outbreak or famine. Wildlife conservationists are less like proconsuls and more like physicians and administrators of famine relief or rural development in the far outreaches of the globe. These activities are notable for their disinterest in the short-term politics of a given regime or crisis. To work in many high-conflict areas of the world, often in regions where the canons of liberal democracy are notably absent, conservation must studiously avoid—not overlook, but suspend action against—the undemocratic practices of governments and the politics and danger of internal or international conflict. However, to assume that this separation from the directed mandates of interstate politics means that conservation does not play a role in diplomacy is to ignore the inevitable interactions of private actors on the global stage.
Introduction: Future States of the Wild
Kent H. Redford
Wondering and worrying about the future has long been a human preoccupation. We have always wanted to foretell what will happen next and have invented a myriad of ways to try to do so, through reading the veination on the livers of sacrificed oxen, through casting of astragali of deer, or through interpreting patterns in the flight of birds. A conscientious appreciation of the past—a responsible memory—has become a vital part of conservation.
The Wildlife Conservation Society, which celebrates its 113th anniversary in 2008, is the proud owner of a history that now includes parts of three centuries; a history that has spanned much of the history of modern conservation and has included raising captive animal populations, developing wildlife health, establishing protected areas, educating the public, and conducting wildlife research. Our history has also spanned the time of the wide-scale destruction of nature and the rise of modern threats unthought of at the time of our birth. Perhaps most importantly for the future, during the time of our existence, humans have gone from rejoicing in the bounty and thrill of the full richness of nature to forgetting that such richness even existed.
Connecting the past to the future is a powerful and vital function of conservation. But it must be done in ways that inspire people to act by offering powerful alternate visions of the future from which to choose and powerful ways to reach the desired condition. This volume, State of the Wild, is part of our work in this effort. State of the Wild, a product of the Wildlife Conservation Society Institute, is dedicated to the conservation of the wild. This is the second volume in a series that began in 2006. With this series we hope to inform and inspire others who dream of the wild and care about ensuring its future.
Conservation and Human Displacement
Arun Agrawal, Kent H. Redford, and Eva Fearn
The history of displacing rural people is a study of power relations. Through recent colonial periods and times of rapid national development, rural people, particularly in developing countries, were moved to be more easily incorporated into national structures, or because their land was slated for large-scale development projects such as dams, roads, and plantations. Between 100 million and 200 million rural and indigenous people are estimated to have been physically displaced by megadevelopment projects since 1980, with the most significant cases in India, China, and Southeast Asia. This caused social, economic, and health risks for some of those forced to move. In response to severe human rights criticism, lenders like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank instituted policies to conduct pre-project surveys to assess impacts on people, induce voluntary resettlement, and work with national governments to outline compensation for displacees.
Now, involuntary resettlement is being blamed on another actor—conservation organizations. Indigenous advocates, social scientists, and journalists have criticized conservation organizations, arguing that protected areas, the core strategy of conservation, displaced tens of millions of people who formerly lived in or whose livelihood depended on wild areas that are now protected. These critiques have gained a great deal of attention in high-profile social science and human rights publications and in international forums such as the World Parks Congress, World Conservation Congress, and the Convention on Biological Diversity Conference of the Parties. The sweeping, rhetorical critiques claim that conservation has caused human evictions and suffering comparable to that caused by megadevelopment projects and civil wars. Human welfare and conservation have become increasingly intertwined—politically, philosophically, and practically—and ignoring human displacement undermines the moral basis for conservation. As a matter of both ethics and pragmatism, the conservation community must respond.
Emerging Diseases and Conservation: One World—One Health
Robert A. Cook and William B. Karesh
It was once believed that disease, a natural phenomenon, posed little threat to the future of wildlife. Unfortunately, that is no longer true. Drivers of global change over the past century—population growth and agricultural production, animal movement and the wildlife trade, biodiversity loss, and global climate change—all degrade wild places and hence, disturb the balance of disease and health. Wildlife populations are fragmented, stressed, and exposed to novel infectious agents, setting the stage for those under pressure to be increasingly susceptible to disease. People, domestic animals, and wildlife are threatened by changes in the environment that allow disease organisms to mutate, adapt, and spread. There is no doubt that the emergence of deadly infectious diseases—particularly zoonoses that can spread from animals to humans—has increased. If we hope to meet the challenges presented by these changes, we must understand the connections between the alterations to our environment and health.
Public health and the safety of the food supply are fundamental to the future of humanity, and most nations invest in these goals through agricultural and public health authorities. However, there is no agency with significant global reach focused on the health of wildlife. We need well-funded, counterpart organizations with missions to protect the health of wildlife and their habitats in order for the health of humans, domestic animals, and wildlife to be integrated in a balanced approach: One World—One Health.
The challenge is daunting. West Nile virus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Nipah virus, and avian influenza H5N1 are zoonotic diseases that caught society by surprise. To better prepare ourselves, we must leverage concerns about human health to develop more holistic approaches to wildlife disease. With timely information, regulatory and response mechanisms can better mitigate effects and make sound decisions about control. Responders and decision makers need high-quality information in every country, and we must encourage open systems to share knowledge rapidly. We must foster new collaborative processes to bring together industry, government, and the nonprofit sector, allowing sovereign nations to realize the benefits of cooperation.
One step is the wild bird Global Avian Influenza Network for Surveillance (GAINS), established by a consortium of partners led by the Wildlife Conservation Society. It is the first system of global health surveillance of wild birds and could ultimately become a fully integrated surveillance and information management system for a range of wildlife species, livestock, pets, and people. This combines the strengths of government, the private sector, and civil society. The open, rapidsharing of information will help us move forward from a default approach of reaction to one of prediction to safeguard the health of the planet and all those who share it.
Little is Big, Many is One: Zoonoses in the Twenty-First Century
David Quammen
Zoonotic disease is in the news again. Zoonotic disease is always in the news, of course, though most members of the general public wouldn’t recognize the subject by that fancy label. They couldn’t tell you offhand that a zoonosis is simply an animal disease that’s transmissible to humans. They read alarming stories in their newspapers, they see garish images on their televisions, they hear radio reports about bird flu or SARS or West Nile fever, about Lyme disease in the Connecticut suburbs, about an Ebola outbreak among unfortunate African villagers, but they don’t usually make connections. They tend to view these events as isolated dramas, some of which have the potential to affect them personally (Will my child get bit by a Lyme-bearing tick?) and some of which (Africa and its diseases are far away, thank goodness) seemingly don’t. They might worry themselves with the question, Is this the Big One, the next global pandemic? But they seldom pause to consider that the prospect of a Big One (which might kill millions of humans) and the increasing frequency of Little Ones (which claim only a few hundred people here or there, a few herds of livestock, a few flocks of poultry, and an uncountable number of wild animals) are parts of the same urgent and interconnected phenomenon.
Professionals know otherwise. Wildlife veterinarians, veterinary ecologists, health care workers, and conservation biologists deal variously with zoonoses and with anthropozoonoses (the converse: human diseases transmissible to other animal species) on a daily basis all over the world. They know that leaps of disease between species are common, not rare. They can cite stark statistics—that 58 percent of all human infectious diseases are zoonotic, and that 75 percent of all emerging diseases (read: new and scary ones) are likewise shared between humans and other species. They understand that infectious disease is a natural part of biological systems, like predation and competition, like metabolism and senescence. And they recognize, those experts, several other broad truths: that the growing incidence of zoonotic disease outbreaks is one ramifying problem, not a series of disconnected calamities; that it represents the consequences of things we are doing on the planet, not merely things that are happening to us; and that the whole situation will only get worse unless robust, well-informed measures are taken. The motto “One World—One Health” eloquently summarizes the goals and visions of the Wildlife Conservation Society in this realm, which include recognizing the essential linkage among humans, wildlife, and domestic animals, and the fact that practices involving land and water use, biodiversity conservation, and disease control and mitigation necessarily ramify from one kind of living creature to another. But that positive phrase also suggests to the mind (at least to a mind as gloomy as mine) its own negative: one sickness. It is all one sickness, in the sense that our planet is suffering a systemic inflammation of Homo sapiens. The increasing frequency and increasing scope of zoonotic and anthropozoonotic infections should be seen in this light—as a pattern, a set of interconnected effects, reflecting causes that are largely of human doing.
So, yes, the subject is in the news, and we can expect it to stay there.
By the Numbers
550
58
371
5000
