Time for more geeky conservation introspection.
Alas, I cannot pretend I found "The North American Conservation Model" in a serious academic pursuit. It was...dare I say it....on
Facebook, specifically on the Sierra Club's Hunter/Angler Heritage page.
One fellow there was pretty keen to
proselitize for this "North American Conservation Model" (
NACM). Should I join the fold?
Here's a link to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, a group who uses the model.
http://www.rmef.org/Hunting/HuntersConservation
I'm not much of a hunter (got cured of that by my uncanny ability to hit everything I shoot at without actually killing it) and the
NACM is designed specifically for wildlife, not fishing. Yet there are some solid parallels between fish and wildlife conservation. The ISA Philosophies harmonize well with these, the main difference being the specificity of the Philosophies for
smallmouth bass.
The differences are probably more interesting.
The
NACM calls for a ban on commercial harvest of wildlife. Commercial fisheries are a global multi-billion dollar industry and not about to go away. Fish tend to have much more resilient populations than wildlife and have fared much better under human exploitation. Yet global freshwater fisheries have for the most part already been over-run. The current free fall of oceanic fish stocks suggests a fundamental transition is at hand there as well.
Modern fisheries may be about to give way to aquaculture just as the hunter-gatherer way of life gave way to terrestrial agriculture 10,000 years ago. The implications of this paradigm shift (and yes, that cliche fits perfectly here) are as vast and deep as the ocean. Could the sea come to resemble the agricultural landscapes our forebears created on land? Could the endless blue expanses that European sailors feared to even cross before the 15
th century become a patchwork of aquaculture cages with a few gaps of wild ocean in between?
Impossible? A 19
th century pioneer to the Illinois prairie would certainly have thought the endless, homogeneous rows of 20
th century corn and soybeans were impossible. The swampy, impenetrable tall grasses they cursed and died upon for generations have now been pushed into the barest margins of the landscape. As the
NACM rightly states, those remnant prairies, rivers and forests have been saved with substantial help from the people who hunt and fish them. Perhaps it will be fishers who defend and conserve the last few patches of wild ocean just as hunters and anglers have defended the land and rivers.
It intrigues me that the
NACM defines itself as specifically North American. The principles for the model seemed to have evolved through the experience of the industrial era in the Northern Hemisphere. The wasteful buffalo hunter taking hides and tongues was gone by the end of the 19
th century in the US, unhappily
anachronized by his own destruction of the resource. It seems unlikely that conservation ethics ever slowed him down much. The regulatory structures that prohibit the practice today were put in place after the species and his livelihood was already degraded.
In contrast, the developing world in other regions is still caught in an awkward, uneven, leapfrogging evolution through and past the industrial age. It still has a walloping share of commercial hunters and "bush meat" while at the same time striving to conserve its natural resources and biodiversity. The regulatory effort to prevent people from chewing through populations of animals is fully in place there, if often overrun.
As was the case in
pre-industrial North America, the poor are struggling to feed themselves (sometimes by catching animals and sometimes by catching animals to feed to the rich). Persuading such a person not to shoot or net deer, jaguars, peccary, macaws,
bonefish, etc. has a much harsher moral dimension in the developing world than it does in modern North America where the safety net is much broader and economic opportunities abound (yes, even in a recession).
It strikes me yet again what a tremendous jackass a person has to be to tell hungry people not to take animals for food. Yet, it is almost a given that if the idle rich and bourgeois hunters had not come to the defense of game, wilderness and wildlife, the poor would have eaten their way through quite a few more North American species than they did.
And such are the choices many in developing countries are facing now.
I remember early in my graduate career sitting in a seminar, and hearing my department head declare that indigenous people shouldn't be allowed to live near national parks because they might hunt inside them...
...it is not a politically savvy thing to do, calling your department head an "
eco-
nazi". But I did. And I probably would do it again, even having suffered through the years of pay-back he dished out (
especially having suffered all the years of payback he dished out).
That is not to say I don't see his point.
The problem still persists which induced my jackass of a department head to recommend ethnic cleansing for conservation. Where I work in Belize (ostensibly still a part of the North American continent), there are gill netters in
Placencia Lagoon wiping out whole runs of
snook in Santa Maria Creek. These fishers are living on the edge. They genuinely need the money they make fishing but they are also impoverishing us all.
Maybe the case can be made that we need some heartless sons of bitches to step up and ward off the hungry masses now and then. Certainly the law needs to be enforced and the gill netting needs to stop. But should they be exiled from lagoon?
I find it difficult to believe there's not a more moderate middle path.
People can't do better without opportunity. All the high moral aspirations we claim today were pretty much devised by people who were not in need. Not hungry. Not impoverished. Teddy Roosevelt set aside the National Parks, but he also worked to create better conditions for workers. Somehow that second half didn't make it into the NACM. It seems pretty clear that any notion of
humane conservation will require a way out of poverty for the people using the resource.
The North American Conservation Model may not work so well in Belize. I am glad, however, to see it articulated.
It seems like a good place to build.
