National Geographic News
What about tactics in the field, among the local people? Do you think a soft approach—education and persuasion—might have failed? Do you favor a harsher effort, such as shoot-to-kill poaching enforcement by park rangers, as has been started in some parts of Africa?
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Let's answer this in the context of the first question and using a very specific example: the National Geographic Special [television] features on decades of Jane Goodall's conservation efforts [with chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania].
These are the most famous chimps in the world. National Geographic must have featured them in dozens of documentaries. Millions of dollars have been spent on them and made on their back.
Today there is only a small patch of forest left for these chimps, compared with when Goodall started her work. The total chimp populations have plummeted. The buffalo herds that were there when she arrived are all gone, as have the hippos and the crocodiles from the lake. There have been attacks by humans infringing the chimps' territory along the lakeshore and reports of killings of chimps for meat for the first time—in the very south of the park.
Today the planting of trees around the park—after watching the forest coming down for 30 years—is celebrated as a success story, a success of education and persuasion, as you call it. I would say the time has come to put an electric fence around the remaining patch of forest.
In many such hot spots there is no time left for the soft approach. In places where there might be, it should be tried, but it should be tried based on lessons learned from the failures of the past.
You have been said to scare off World Bank funding of sustainable development. Some say it is better to work with the big institutions and the logging companies, rather than to get their backs up and have them not cooperating with conservationists.
I am against World Bank funding that amounts to subsidizing of industrial logging and not [sustainable] development.
Until recently the World Bank sponsored regular meetings between African logging-company chief executives and representatives of conservation organizations. These were business negotiations based on the understanding of balance sheets and profits—who could do what and pay for what.
Some logging companies have passed the buck on bush meat to the conservation NGOs. The NGOs in turn are running around raising millions of dollars to try to control things in one or two concessions.
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