Conservation and Local People

I’ve done a lot of my work outside protected areas; it’s simply a fact of life that there just aren’t enough protected areas to contain all the animals.  So, we go to them.  Laikipia District was not protected; though Segera Ranch (http://www.zeitzfoundation.org/) was particularly conservation oriented, the communally owned areas where quite overgrazed.

I’m a firm believer that you can’t just fence in an area and expect things to go well- just look at the example of Tana River Kenya.  You need the cooperation and involvement of the local people.  Really, you need their lives to improve in some way by helping these efforts.

Tangkoko, where I work now, is a protected area, but people still go through it and are permitted to fish off the park.  There is also illegal activity, and this is sometimes how our monkeys get caught in snares (we pull any snares we find and GPS map them).  There is also a thriving ecotourism business set up around the monkeys (this has some potential issues to, which is why we supposedly have two tourist groups, with our other groups protected by the Wildlife Service here- no tourists, except poorly obeyed and enforced- that’s a whole other thing I won’t post about)..

So, people have not lost the use of the area, not entirely.  But, oh the downside…the pictures below will tell you why I wish the park was a bit more closed, though I know that would likely cause problems.

   

Fishermen throw their trash- food wrapper, bottle, shoes- all along the beach.  Here’s my highly endangered monkeys foraging amongst the trash.  Being exposed to who knows what human pathogens that they are susceptible to, and eating things that may be quite bad for them (the male below is eating powdered milk).

This is why us crazy scientists want to keep people out of protected areas. 

How do we resolve this kind of issue?  Well, I am becoming very tempted to 1) show these pictures to local people, as part of an outreach program (in which the harm to the monkeys is explained) and 2) to organize some kind of trash clean up.