From Readers

Your Letters and Comments

Change Starts at Home

I just read your climate change article, “Get Real,” (Conservation In Practice, April-June 2006). Although I agree that the government is culpable and must be held accountable for its actions, I wonder why I see so little from contributors about holding individuals responsible. Our government is a reflection of our people. Our government is wasteful and negligent because we as a people are wasteful and negligent. If we don’t make a change in our own lives, we are hypocrites by demanding that the government do so. We need only look in our homes to see how much clothing and how many toys we have that we don’t need. Once we make changes, then we have the right to demand that the government do the same. But as long as we are wasteful and gluttonous, we should not expect our government to be otherwise.

CRAIG L. FLEENER

Of Smoking Guns
In reply to Jon Christenson’s “Aux Barricades!” (Conservation in Practice, April-June 2006). OK, I am biased. I am an international conservation bureaucrat working for UNDP-GEF. Translated, this means that I lead the team of biodiversity specialists working on Global Environment Facility programmes within the United Nations Development Programme. Christensen argues that “fortress conservation is making a comeback” and cites as evidence Jon Hutton’s interpretation of the 2004-2006 Business Plan for the Third Replenishment of the GEF, where he says that “Sustainable use in protected areas and buffer zones had disappeared from amongst the strategic priorities.”

This seems an odd conclusion. First, the GEF strategic priorities in biodiversity have not changed since they were first introduced in 2003. Second, the two strategic priorities to which 82 percent of the GEF biodiversity resources are allocated deal specifically with “Catalyzing Sustainability of Protected Areas” and “Mainstreaming Biodiversity in Production Landscapes and Sectors.” The former says nothing about favoring funding to “fortify” protected areas. In fact, it specifically says that “This objective encompasses the achievement of . . . social . . . sustainability” and that it will “Promote the participation of local community and indigenous groups in the design, implementation, management and monitoring of projects . . . GEF will also promote broad stakeholder participation and comanagement between government and local communities.” The second strategic priority—mainstreaming—emphasizes that its geographic focus is outside of protected areas and that its intent is to internalize the goals of biodiversity conservation and the sustainable use of biological resources into economic sectors and development models.

Essentially, GEF’s two main strategic priorities in biodiversity start at opposite ends of the spectrum and meet in the middle—with the result that biodiversity is conserved and sustainably used across the entire landscape of private, community, and public protected and production areas. In the first strategic priority, we are focusing on the biodiversity itself and saying, “We will do everything we can to protect this specific biodiversity.” With the second, we are focusing on existing production systems—very often some form of natural resource management such as forestry, fisheries, or water resources management, but also including more intense forms such as ranching or agriculture—and saying, “How can we help these systems maintain more biodiversity?” The key in both cases is the sustainability of the system. In the first, community support is often essential to the long- term survival of a protected area. In the second, the key is to make the system more biodiversity-friendly—such that the producers who use the system (whether local communities or global agribusinesses) will continue to make a living. In both cases, the key is to ensure that the system will go on working long after the GEF stops pouring in grant resources. If community-based natural resources management is the way to do this, then we will help to set it up. In all cases, people and communities are intimately engaged in both conservation and sustainable use.

JOHN HOUGH

United Nations Development Program

Urban Migration Has Perils, Too
I share Stewart Brand’s optimism about the potential for rural-urban migration to increase opportunities for biodiversity conservation and restoration (”Environmental Heresies,” Conservation In Practice, April-June 2006). My analysis of this migration, and its economic underpinnings, suggests that many of our current conservation and development projects are seriously shortsighted. However, I do offer two caveats.

First, the demo-graphic abandonment of rural lands, already underway on a massive scale in the developing world, will be associated with land-use abandonment only on the more marginal agricultural land. The most productive land is likely to remain in cultivation for the foreseeable future. The good news is that the marginal lands that will be abandoned most fully are in the very ecosystems with the greatest overall biodiversity (e.g., tropical rainforest) or the greatest megafaunal diversity (e.g., African savannas). Second, I am less sanguine about the likelihood that urban populations will automatically put less pressure on rural biodiversity. The increased wealth of these urban populations is already creating increasing demands for charcoal, bushmeat, and timber far from cities. As Lambin et al. point out (1), “A question still being debated is whether urban land use is more efficient than rural land use, and therefore whether urbanization saves land for nature.” Air and water pollution, excess environmental nitrogen, and global warming are also broader consequences of such development. Any comprehensive conservation plan associated with the tremendous opportunities provided by this land abandonment will need to be associated with increased efforts to make urban life itself more sustainable.

TRUMAN YOUNG

University of California at Davis

Literature cited:

1. Lambin, E.F, H.J. Geist, and E. Lepers. 2003. Dynamics of land-use and land-cover change in tropical regions. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 28:205-241.