by Brian Griffith.
In Namibia, they passed a Nature Conservation Act in 1996 that gave any group of villagers the right to form and manage their own nature conservancy area. Instead of imposing nature reserve zoning from above, people got an option to do it themselves. When 19 villages cooperated to form the Salambala conservancy in 1998, the area’s large animals had been wiped out by raiders from the Angolan civil war. But with local people guarding their wildlife business, the local leaders soon reported they had 600 elephants, 1,500 zebra, and three prides of lions in their 359 square mile area. They started hosting visitors to see the beasts and made some cash. The conservancy went from earning less than a thousand tourist dollars in 1998 to $37,000 in 2006. By 2008, Namibia had 52 registered conservancies, which included a quarter of a million residents and 15% of the nation’s land area. The villagers made money off the rhinos, cheetahs, and lions around their farms by selling hunting rights and hosting photographers. Pastoralists in the conservancy zones started marketing their cattle as “cheetah country beef.”
Of course the old tensions between livestock and wildlife remained. In the Purros conservancy, arguments erupted after young herdsmen killed four lions who were looking hungrily at their cows. The meeting that followed was recorded in a 2006 documentary film called Milking the Rhino. One man said he was glad the lions were killed: “I don’t want them around. My cattle are my bank. If lions come near my cattle, then I know my bank is robbed.” A local official replied, “If a lion is a problem, the government allows us to sell it to a trophy hunter. A lion is worth 40,000 Namibian dollars [US$5,000].” It seemed that the lion killers had cost their community US$20,000. And if no lions reproduced, it would end any such stream of income in the future. During the year after this meeting, a group of Purros villagers started a “Desert Lion Safaris” business.
Some of these locally-run eco-tourism efforts started to out-perform the big resorts or government parks. In villages that balanced farming with wildlife, the ancient war between agriculture and wilderness started to become a mutually beneficial business combo. The community-owned game preserves expanded the areas for wildlife around the parks, and sometimes opened up corridors to connect islands of protected land. Namibia’s local conservancies slowly linked up to open a wildlife corridor between the inland Etosha National Park and the Skeleton Coast National Park, where lions feed on dead whales and elephants “surf” the sand dunes.
(from the upcoming Animal Wars, by Brian Griffith, Exterminating Angel Press)