Dress for success

We have previous mentioned the current predicament of the Hadza. Here is an article in the Daily Mail, Face to face with Stone Age man: The Hadzabe tribe of Tanzania.

Ah, journalists. The Hadza don’t live in the Stone Age. “Hadzabe” is the feminine plural of “Hadza”; this usage is usually considered redundant in English, so we speak of the “Swahili”, not the “Waswahili”. The journalist writes,

I introduced myself and Naftal translated my words into clicks and whistles to an older Hadza called Gonga (Good Hunter in Swahili).

He smiled warmly, revealing surprisingly well-kept teeth.

The Hadza language, like many language in Southern Africa, use clicks as consonants, but no whistles.

There is a picture of the journalist in the article. He has surprising well-kept teeth for a British journalist.

What is interesting about the picture is that the young Hadza man is dressed up for the tourism business. Hadza men don’t usually use animal skins for clothing, and they certainly don’t use hoods. A hood makes no sense in the environment in which the Hadza live. There are photographs of the Hadza dating back to the 1930s, taken by Ludwig Kohl-Larsen, and there are later photographs taken by James Woodburn and others.

It is clear that increasing use of skins and also beads is a response to tourism. The Hadza are now on the tourism circuit. They put on their faux-traditional outfits for the benefit of tourists, and take them off when the tourists have left.

If that provides more income, why not? One danger is that government officials will find it embarrassing that there are people walking about in hides and skins, and will do little to help the Hadza with the biggest problem they face, loss of control and ownership of their lands.

Hadza hunters-gatherers under threat

The Washington Post reports on the Hadza hunter-gatherers,

50,000 Years of Resilience May Not Save Tribe

Tanzania Safari Deal Lets Arab Royalty Use Lands

YAEDA VALLEY, Tanzania — One of the last remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers on the planet is on the verge of vanishing into the modern world.

The transition has been long underway, but members of the dwindling Hadzabe tribe, who now number fewer than 1,500, say it is being unduly hastened by a United Arab Emirates royal family, which plans to use the tribal hunting land as a personal safari playground.

The deal between the Tanzanian government and Tanzania UAE Safaris Ltd. leases nearly 2,500 square miles of this sprawling, yellow-green valley near the storied Serengeti Plain to members of the royal family, who chose it after a helicopter tour.

A Tanzanian official said that a nearby hunting area the family shared with relatives had become “too crowded” and that a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family “indicated that it was inconvenient” and requested his own parcel.

The official, Philip Marmo, called the Hadzabe “backwards” and said they would benefit from the school, roads and other projects the UAE company has offered as compensation…

The long-run threat to the Hadza is habitat loss. Tanzania has for many years had one of the fastest growing human populations in the world, and the Hadza have lost land from encroachment by farmers and the destruction of woodlands. Ironically, what caused the destruction of one forest was the demand for charcoal from the neighboring Ngorongoro Conservation Area.

The actions of the Abu Dhabi royal family may or may not threaten the Hadza’s livelihood, but obviously some Hadza believe it does. What the Hadza need are clear and well-defined property rights to their land, including rights to charge tourists and hunters.

Here are a few photos.

Sustainable alternative energy - biofuels in Indonesia

From Financial Times (registration necessary),

Indonesia’s Sinar Mas Agro Resources and Technology signed a deal yesterday with China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and Hong Kong Energy Holdings to develop biofuel projects worth $5.5bn in two remote provinces.

The three companies intend to plant 1m hectares of oil palm, sugar cane and cassava over the next eight years in Kalimantan and Papua to generate bioethanol from the latter two crops and palm oil, according to a Sinar Mas statement…

Susili Bambang Yudhoyono, Indonesias president, has said he want to prioritise alternative energy development to reduce dependence on oil and gas, in spite of objections from environmentalists. This includes targeting $22bn in investment to develop 6m hectares of plantations for biofuels…

The Sinar Mas Group is controlled by Indonesia’s Widjaja family whose Asia Pulp & Paper in 2001 defaulted in $14bn in debt in the biggest corporate default in emerging markets history. Kalimantan is the Indonesian portion of Borneo, while Papua is the country’s easternmost province on New Guinea island.

The Papua development will involve clearing vast swathes of virgin rainforest, including additional areas for support facilities. Many communities will almost certainly be uprooted, according to Palm Oil Watch, a non-governmental organisation monitoring the sector…

“We are also worried about the impact these vast monoculture plantations will have on the environment, particularly as the Chinese don’t have much experience in this sector.”…

Is clearing the rainforest in order to produce biofuels a good idea? Obviously, “sustainable” and “alternative” does not necessarily mean “good”.

PATVIQs and local people

Tim Abbott writes in a comment on this post,

I found this a fascinating concept when you shared it with me and am pleased to see it moving to a new stage of development. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on its utility for protected areas that are most vulnerable to degradation from excess visitation (eg. Galapagos, Namibia’s Vis River Canyon), as well as those where local people realize very few tangible benefits. I’d imagine that communities that rely on tourism will need to see an equivalent amount and distribution of benefits from PATVIQ to embrace it as an alternative.

This is a really important issue. The good thing about PATVIQs (Protected Area Tradable Visiting Quotas) is that they can be bought and retired. If you could buy PATVIQs for e.g. Galapagos, you could choose not to use them. In this way you could provide financial support without putting a strain on the environment - zero footprint.

The aim is not to eliminate tourism, the aim is to provide income without necessarily increasing the number of visitors. Also, there are wonderful parks, e.g. Virunga, that deserve support, but visitors are few because it is a dangerous place to visit. This could be one way providing support.

Clearly some PATVIQs should be allocated to local people. Should they be allocated to communities or to individuals? My instinct would be to allocate them to individuals; people can always pool their resources if they want to. I have seen too many communitarian projects turn into poverty traps. However, this is not dogma, if collective ownership rights make sense in some places, why not?

Which proportion of all PATVIQs for a Protected Area (PA) should be allocated to local people? I have no idea, but looking at PATVIQs as a way of compensating local people for the opportunity costs of PAs could be a starting point.

Jared Diamond’s Collapse

John Hawks observes that Mel Gibson’s film Apocalypto is basically a novelization of the Maya part of Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.

Diamond pushes this simplified version of Maya history as an allegory for U.S. ecological hubris…

…if you’re looking for the social zeitgeist behind this Apocalypto phenomenon, it would seem to derive from these widespread assumptions about Maya ecology and political structures that Diamond has helped to popularize. Collapse itself already simplifies vastly to make his point about ecologies and social regulation. The entire book is a case of “imposing an accessible scheme on a faraway time and place.”

Here is a fair 2005 review of Collapse by Jared Diamond. Partha Dasgupta writes,

…I think he has failed to grasp both the way in which information about particular states of affairs gets transmitted (however imperfectly) in modern decentralised economies – via economic signals such as prices, demand, product quality and migration – and the way increases in the scarcity of resources can itself act to spur innovations that ease those scarcities. Without a sympathetic understanding of economic mechanisms, it isn’t possible to offer advice on the interactions between nature and the human species…

There is no evidence that he even realises he doesn’t have the equipment to hand with which to study our interactions with nature...[emphasis added].

Ouch.

More on Collapse in a review by Ronald Bailey in Reason, here. More on Apocalypto by Tyler Cowen here.

World Parks at Risk

The October issue of National Geographic has a series of articles on The Future of Parks, including an interesting article by David Quammen. He writes,

“Serengeti National Park tells the world that the people of Tanzania, accepting some burden of inconvenience, find themselves privileged to embrace within their boundaries a vast grassland filled with lions - come and see.”

The truth of the matter is that many Tanzanians, especially the Masai who previously inhabited Serengeti, see parks as places where wild animals are favored over local people for the benefit of foreign tourists.

It is also true that parks and other protected areas work. We need them if we want to conserve biodiversity.

But there are huge opportunity costs associated with protected areas. The long term sustainability of protected areas in poor countries is threatened by inadequate compensations for these costs.

If more poor countries become more democratic, the problem will get worse. Parks are an elite concern. By appealing directly to governing elites, the international conservation community has been able to get the support it needs to maintain the parks. This system may not be viable in the long run in countries that are poor, democratic and where landlessness is a serious problem.

A hint of things to come can be seen in Kenya, where the government, worried about an upcoming election, a year ago downgraded the Amboseli National Park to a national reserve, and handed control over it back to the Masai through the local county council. 29 NGOs wrote an open letter to the president of Kenya complaining about this decision, and arguing that income from Amboseli should continue to be used to subsidize unprofitable parks, and not all be paid to the county council.

Since Amboseli generates substantial revenue from wildlife, it may survive as a protected area rich in wildlife. In the absence of additional payments for conservation or as compensation, other parks are more economically viable if turned into farms or ranches.

For some reason, there doesn’t seem to be any international organizations or NGOs that want to come up with the money so that people in poor countries can receive fair compensation for setting aside their land for the benefit of all of us.

Ecotourism: First, Do No Harm

“I think there’s been a glib … championing of ecotourism, that it’s a win-win situation,” says Martha Honey, executive director of the Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development in Washington, D.C. in an article in Science News,

When ecotourism in an area grows, the site becomes vulnerable to the same problems, such as sewage maintenance, that come with mass tourism, says John Davenport of University College Cork in Ireland.

Even for activities that aren’t usually destructive, a high volume of tourists can create a problem, he says. Such is the case with scuba diving—traditionally a well-managed, environmentally friendly sport. Throughout the world, researchers have seen a link between dive traffic and coral damage, Davenport says. Divers knock into corals or stir up silt that suffocates the reefs, which regenerate slowly.

When divers add an underwater camera to already cumbersome scuba gear—a juggling act that Davenport compares with “driving while having a shave and a smoke”—the damage becomes worse. In Sodwana Bay in South Africa, divers who took underwater photographs damaged reefs by bumping into them in on average, 9 out of 10 dives, whereas divers who didn’t take pictures caused such damage in just 1 out of every 6 dives, he reports.

“Since you’ve got a million new scuba divers [around the world] each year, it’s going to be an uphill battle,” Davenport says…

Currently, good research on ecotourism is difficult to find, says Davenport. Most destinations weren’t studied before ecotourism began, making before-and-after comparisons difficult. Moreover, many governments are reluctant to provide funding for investigations because they profit from ecotourism.

Perhaps the major barrier is the working assumption that ecotourism, with the conservation funds it raises, must be better than typical mass tourism. Says Hueter, “My concern is, that’s where the analysis ends, and only in rare cases do [researchers] look deeper.”

Read the article here.

Where, oh where, are the studies we need?

Indigenous People as Natural Conservationists

Are indigenous people natural conservationists? Is there a mysterious connection between indigenous people and the natural world?

If you think that people are natural conservationists, then human prehistory is not encouraging. Expansion of modern humans into new regions were accompanied by the disappearance large animals in those regions, megafauna extinctions (see e.g. Paul Martin’s Twilight of the Mammoths, and this paper).

Large animals became extinct up to 50,000 years ago in Australia and New Guinea, around 11,000 years ago in North America, about 1500 years ago in Madagascar, and between 900 and 600 years ago in New Zealand. This pattern closely follows the current chronology of human expansion around the world.

What about present day indigenous people? Natalie Smith has written a paper, Are Indigenous People Conservationists? Preliminary Results from the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon. She writes,

“Contrary to the widespread belief that indigenous peoples are adept managers of their natural environments, preliminary research from the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon indicates this may not be the case…

The data that I and others have acquired about the Machiguenga do not provide empirical justification for the presence of conservation in this cultural group. Given the structural difficulties that would hinder conservation (open-access resources), as well as the particular history of this group (lowdensity, semi-nomadic, family-level society), it should not be surprising that no evidence of conservation was found… In fact, I expect that it would be rare to find conservation in any group given that the emergence of such practices requires, among other things, cooperative norms, punishment of norm breakers, and renewable resources that have restricted access so that consumption by non-group members can be prevented… Instead of assuming that groups do or do not conserve, we need to identify the circumstances under which conservationist norms can evolve. And then, if the group does in fact conserve, investigate the social mechanisms that enable prosocial behavior.”

There are practices that lead to conservation of wildlife as an unintended consequence. Tribal warfare may have been an important factor in wildlife conservation. Constant tribal warfare and raiding lead to buffers zones between tribes in North and South America and in Africa, and presumably in other places as well. Wildlife thrived in these zones, much like wildlife has been thriving in the DMZ, the demilitarized zone, between North and South Korea, or along the Wall between East and West Germany.

Tough Conservation Measures

“We developed tough conservation measures to protect the environment from further harm”

Indigenous Health

There are an estimated 350 million indigenous people in the world, speaking 5000 languages, and living in 70 different counties. The Lancet has recently published a series on indigenous health.

The Lancet writes,

Major international policies such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were set up to target the world’s poorest people could, as they currently stand, actually lead to entire populations of Indigenous peoples being wiped out forever. Minority groups such as Indigenous peoples could be ignored because of the way the MDGs work—by focusing on big numbers and encouraging targets to maximise health benefits for the majority.

Besides their many other problems, these are also the people who in many instances lost land rights when protected areas were established.