CSotD: A solution of fearfully good logical symmetry
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The recent summit to save tigers, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, got scant attention in the US press but was reported elsewhere, apparently including Holland, where it elicited this cartoon from Arend Van Dam.
Van Dam's work is simple but contains some bite and a little more implied narrative than the average international cartoon, which tends, unlike American cartoons, to be metaphorical.
In this case, I wonder if he's beating his head against a wall. Russia has actually increased their population of Siberian tigers over the past decades. Russia was down to somewhere between 80 and 100 tigers in the 1960s, and, today, is home to some 500 of the animals. Unfortunately, the total world population has shrunk from 100,000 a century ago to about to about 3,500 today and the World Wildlife Fund estimates that tigers may disappear entirely from the wild by 2022. (Presumably this doesn't include the Siberians.)
Part of the problem is loss of habitat. Large predators need large spaces, and setting aside a few acres here and there is not likely to do more than buy them time. Well, we're all happy to denounce loss of habitat (including me), but it becomes more complex when you are asking people in Third World countries to avoid economic growth.
Denouncing is one thing, offering viable alternatives is another. Ecotourism can be a good thing, but I'm not as convinced that offering native crafts for sale is more than a token gesture which assumes that people are content to live on as a sort of living history exhibit. You can get by on sales of felt hats and hand-carved flutes as long as you aren't looking to buy expensive things like clean water, electricity and interconnection with the rest of the world.
Still, there is potential if you can get entire communities behind the idea of ecotourism. Some will stay to do that, others will go off to the capital to live a more urban existence and send home money. It's not an unworkable model in the Third World, though there are ways in which somebody needs to step in and keep things, well, civilized.
About three years ago, I interviewed a fellow about his tourist trek to the top of Kilimanjaro, and, as he was showing me photos and talking about the trip, he mentioned one of the porters who had died along the way.
Died? Yes, well, it seems these people show up to be porters who want the money but aren't actually qualified or experienced and don't have the hard-weather gear you need at those heights. The tourists loaned him what they could spare but he died. Another porter, too. And then he flipped the page and started showing me some more photos.
This does not strike me as a sustainable model, but that does not mean there isn't one.
Another vexing problem is the poaching, and, while there are people who will purchase tiger rugs and suchlike, social disapproval coupled with the increasing need to keep such things hidden away from the law like stolen art masterpieces can help against that. (Though, if bwana can shrug off the death of two porters while enjoying his triumphant walk uphill, I wonder if social disapproval has sufficient traction in this arena, either.)
And, those incurably insensitive souls aside, what do you do about the folk medicine, in which tiger parts, bear parts, rhino horns and pangolins become valuable, expensive "cures" for this and that?
Are the natural allies of ecology willing to denounce this as quackery? Or would that produce too much cognitive dissonance with their general embrace of folk medicine and alternative treatments?
I like Van Dam's solution. Never mind seeing the future, though. My own eyes are beginning to feel the effects of age, and I'm sure that, if I had some powder made from the sharp eyes of a poacher …
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