Abstract
Our Cessna banks into a tight turn above the East African savanna as Mount Kilimanjaro towers above, its summit rising through a layer of clouds. Below, a bright green expanse of wetland where hippos, elephants, and other wildlife wallow stands in stark contrast to the amber vastness of the plains of Amboseli National Park (fig. 1.1). As we enter the turn, Kenyan conservationist and ecologist David Western, handling the aircraft’s controls, points out one specific, smaller patch of green coming into view, its sharply defined edges and geometric shape belying an electric fence designed to keep elephants and other large grazers out. It is an island of savanna surrounded by a sea of dust.
Earth so huge, and yet so bounded
pools of salt, and plots of land–
shallow skin of green and azure–
chains of mountains, grains of sand!
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
“Locksley Hall Sixty Years After”
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Notes
- 1.
See David Western’s autobiography, In the Dust of Kilimanjaro, 1997, and Western, 2000.
- 2.
Ibid. See also Muchiru et al., 2008; Mwangi and Ostrom, 2009.
- 3.
Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993; Ravetz, 2002, p. 3.
- 4.
Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar, 1994.
- 5.
See work by Brown et al., 1997, and Curtin et al., 1999, which explore the complex interactions between climate patterns and herbivores.
- 6.
Note that I use the term fishermen, rather that the current politically correct phrases fisher or fisher folk because the fishermen (and women) I know strongly prefer it. A fisher is also a kind of carnivorous mammal, and fisher folk is extremely patronizing.
- 7.
For a review of these issues from Australia, East Africa, and North America, see McAllister et al., 2006; Curtin et al., 2002; Curtin and Western, 2008; Western et al., 2009.
- 8.
Curtin and Western, 2008.
- 9.
See the reviews by Curtin et al., 2002, and Mwangi and Ostrom, 2009, of commons systems in large rangeland ecosystems.
- 10.
See Curtin et al., 2002; Western et al., 2009.
- 11.
Spatial and temporal variability in precipitation may be the single most important explanatory factor influencing landscape vegetation patterns in arid and semi-arid ecosystems. See Muldavin et al., 2008; Augustine, 2010; Sala et al., 2012. At the scale of landscapes, these relationships are complex and can be influenced by numerous other factors, such as interactions with grazers.
- 12.
Curtin et al., 2002.
- 13.
Even in the borderlands, where the establishment of grass banks allowed ranchers to access grass during drought or to restore their own home ranches (Curtin, 2005), this approach has been of limited success because it has typically been short lived, rather than a fundamental transformation in land tenure, and there are costs to moving cattle around, unless it is carefully coordinated and becomes part of long-term grazing strategies. Though unlikely in this generation, for long-term survival, ranchers of the Malpai and elsewhere will probably have to adopt more communal approaches to herding and marketing that will reduce labor costs and increase access to forage across a wider area, while creating better regional coordination of beef production that will facilitate niche marketing of grass-fed beef and higher and more consistent prices per pound. But this would require a considerable revision in federal and state land regulations to allow multiple owners to graze allotments, a tearing down of fences, and a considerable rethinking on the part of the ranchers of their concept of private property. There is a growing grass bank movement in the West, and this approach is being more widely adopted in Montana and elsewhere. This approach marks a first step toward significant revisions to land tenure that reflect more of the African communal grazing approach.
- 14.
From a social perspective, collaborative place-based conservation is relatively new to North America, though this approach is common in the developing world and is especially well developed in East Africa. Therefore, the process of developing collaborative approaches to resource stewardship is another important lesson to be learned from the African experience.
- 15.
See Muchiru et al., 2008; Western et al., 2009.
- 16.
However, this complex dynamic has in recent decades been threatened by a static view of conservation and land tenure that looks at parks and natural areas as existing without people—the outcome illustrated in the opening pages of this book, where areas without human engagement are often simplified and less resilient.
- 17.
Western, 1997, 2000; Muchiru et al., 2008.
- 18.
D. Western, pers. comm.; D. Sonkoi, pers. comm.
- 19.
See George Hilliard’s 1996 history of the Gray Ranch, which provides a valuable window into how land tenure and history intersect on the Diamond A Ranch. Also see Remley’s 2000 history of the Bell Ranch, which has one of the few discussions of Spanish and Northern Europe land tenure styles that had important implications for how landscapes were sustained. The Spanish approach that evolved in arid and semi-arid zones was predicated on adapting to variation and was therefore more resilient. The Northern European approach was more intensive and efficient, but also much more prone to collapse. This difference in land tenure is a critical, but little discussed, facet of the history of environmental change in the Southwest.
- 20.
Hilliard, 1996.
- 21.
Remley, 2000; Curtin et al., 2002. See Hess and Holechek’s 1995 review of western grazing policy for an additional overview.
- 22.
See Canby, 1981; Hatfield et al., 2013.
- 23.
Remley, 2000; Curtin et al., 2002.
- 24.
Curtin et al., 2002.
- 25.
Hastings and Turner, 1965; Swetnam and Betancourt, 1998.
- 26.
Hess and Holechek, 1995; Curtin et al., 2002.
- 27.
Child and Lyman, 2005.
- 28.
The world’s animal population has halved in forty years as humans put unsustainable demands on Earth, the World Wide Fund for Nature’s Living Planet Index of 2014 warned (http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet _report/). The dramatic decline in animal species could cost the world billions in economic losses. Humans need 1.5 Earths to sustain their current demands, the report states. The index, which draws on research around WWF’s database of 3,000 animal species, is released every two years. The index showed a 52 percent decline in wildlife between 1970 and 2010, far more than earlier estimates of 30 percent. It is due to people killing too many animals for food and destroying their habitats.
- 29.
In the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, ranchers hauling water to stock ponds during drought to preserve endangered leopard frogs were threatened by the prospect that the habitat they created might lead to federal action against them in the event that the populations inadvertently went extinct. The issue was mitigated by Safe Harbor provisions of the Endangered Species Act, which allowed the development of regional multispecies conservation plans recognizing that if the ranchers were no longer able to haul water, they were not legally required to maintain the population.
- 30.
See Amboseli Conservation Program, http://www.amboseliconservation.org/the-amboseli-ecosystem.html, but information from 2009 is no longer available on the web.
- 31.
See Russell, 2009, and Western et al., 2009.
- 32.
- 33.
D. Western, per comm., these group ranches are not livestock ranches in the conventional sense, but communal land holdings established in Kenya beginning in the 1960s.
- 34.
http://www.soralo.org/about-soralo/; D. Western, pers. comm.
- 35.
See Corson, 2004, on the ecology of lobster.
- 36.
From a design standpoint, the dynamics of ranching and fishing have far more in common than they do with farming or forestry, which involve fixed assets and completely different approaches to resource use.
- 37.
Wilson, 2002, 2006; Steneck and Wilson, 2010; Curtin, 2010.
- 38.
See the work on local fisheries management and local populations, including Graham et al., 2002, and Ames, 2004. Fisherman Ted Ames was named a MacArthur Fellow for work identifying the local nature of cod populations based on historical fishermen’s knowledge, though Graham and colleagues’ monograph in many respects provides a more detailed overview of the dynamics of the fish populations.
- 39.
D. Western, pers. comm.
- 40.
Ostrom, 1990.
- 41.
See Corson, 2004, or refer to chapter 3, where these issues are addressed in more detail.
- 42.
See Wilson et al., 2007, for a discussion of the strategic choices made by lobstermen. This example will be discussed in more detail in later chapters.
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Curtin, C. (2015). Integrating Conservation and Complexity through the Perspective of Place. In: The Science of Open Spaces. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-205-1_1
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