John Silander has spent his career studying and conserving plant communities all over the world. In the past three decades, he has worked in Madagascar, Chile, New England, and South Africa.
But over time, he noticed that large, international conservation efforts often neglect to gain the support of local residents.
“I was struck by the amount of money being spent on conservation with a top-down approach, by organizations that don’t seek local input,” he says. “The money didn’t seem like it was being efficiently used. I started thinking, ‘Is this the way I would do things?’”
In many parts of the world, conservation hotspots are juxtaposed with communities that rely on the surrounding land for survival. Conservation justice, a concept in which Silander and his students have recently become involved, suggests that local communities are entitled to receive fair treatment and meaningful involvement in conservation efforts in their area.
“Unless you engage the local community, you’re not going to be successful,” Silander says.
Conservation for the people
In the early 1990s, Silander and his then-graduate student Joelisoa Ratsirarson worked at a field site in a coastal reserve on Madagascar, in one of the few sections of coastal forest left on the island. The remaining large, old trees growing in this forest were being extracted by locals for their lumber, Silander says, because just one tree might bring in several hundred dollars at a furniture factory two hours south – a sum that could support a Malagasy resident for a year or more.
Nearby, the environmental group Conservation International had set up a reserve in the mountains, where few people lived. But their efforts didn’t extend to the fragile coast.
“They didn’t have grassroots support, and they didn’t think they needed it,” says Silander. “On the coast, near the villages, we knew that this approach was not going to work.”
Silander set about setting up what he calls a “mini” integrated conservation and development project. He and his students approached people in the villages to find out what needs they could help meet. The villagers’ response was a surprise.
“The first thing they said was, ‘Can you buy us a soccer ball?’” Silander says.
The scientists found that the villagers were curious and willing to learn new ways to meet their needs without exploiting the forests. So they took the residents on buses to other villages in the region, where they exchanged ideas on how best to live off the land sustainably. This type of peer exchange was critical, says Silander, in learning how to use the minimum amount of resources to address each village’s needs.
“Some villages had preserved their trees; others had cut them down,” he says. “Really, the idea was to convince them that there are alternatives to harvesting the forest that will be better for them in the long run.”
Seeking local input
Fifteen years later, Silander was living in South Africa, directing a UConn Study Abroad program in Cape Town. In the nearby Cape Flats region, the Macassar Dunes Conservation Area is home to several globally threatened species. Silander says that the Macassar dunes along with other areas in the Cape Floristic Region contain a level of biodiversity equivalent to that found in comparable areas of tropical rainforests like the Amazon.
But the dunes are sandwiched between an urban township and a 200-year-old indigenous community, and the residents of both live in extreme poverty. Silander noted that conservation efforts were doing little to ameliorate the locals’ use of the dunes for sand extraction, garbage dumping, and shelter for vagrants.
“There’s a disparity in income and resources within these communities, and an even bigger disparity compared with the wealthy Cape Town suburbs,” says Silander. “Some people nearer the city have plumbing and satellite TV, while others scavenge from the dump.”
One of Silander’s students, then-undergraduate J. Stephen Ferketic, decided to try to determine what the people in the surrounding communities thought of the conservation area and the means used to protect it. With funding from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Honors Program, Ferketic surveyed local residents and conservationists to determine their opinions about the dunes and what should be done to protect them.
To the surprise of the scientists, the local residents were in favor of a fence being erected around the conservation area to deter access.
“The local people liked the fence idea because they thought it would cut down on other people dumping garbage there,” says Silander.
Conservation groups had rejected building a fence because of the potential negative connotations of boxing people out, but, says Silander, conservationists had never before actually asked the residents for their opinions.
“People need to have a vested interest, and conservation needs to have local eyes and ears,” Silander says. “If you get a critical mass to do that, it can work. There needs to be something that people can take pride in.”
Silander and Ferketic published their results in the May 2010 issue of the journal Biological Conservation. Few biological scientists publish papers on this topic, says Silander, so he hopes that his work will raise the profile of the concept and help take the results to the next level.
“The Cape Town municipality, the national parks, and the local conservation groups need to collaborate to address these needs in the region,” he says. “It’s difficult for groups to effectively do all this on their own.”
Silander attributes this new direction of his research to his students driving him to think in new and different ways.
“My students and their interests drew me into this,” he says. “I’m not happy unless I’m forced to learn new things.”
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