Biodiversity deferred

The furthest outposts of Africa are experiencing increases in animal poaching, trafficking of timber, bio-piracy, conflicts between humans and wildlife, and environmental violations of corporates. Yet, climate change has replaced nature conservation as a point of interest. George Berkley, the 18th century Irish philosopher, is well known for coining the phrase, ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?’ The caveat of Berkley’s intellectual musings is that he did not claim the existence or non-existence of entities. He claimed that our suspicion or belief that things exist actually enlivens their existence. Therefore, seemingly non-existent things can be real and have great meaning. His insights on the truth and the existence of things is relevant to nature conservation. If no-one documents and protects biodiversity, then its demise that falls on silent ears will be a tragic blow to the human experience of existence. Here in Africa, conservationists who work in remote forest, savannah and mountain landscapes suspect the existence of many scientifically undiscovered gems of biodiversity. Limited road or helicopter access, or unrest and war, makes scientific exploration difficult. Yet, almost three hundred years after the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeaus, devised the modern system to classify and name living organisms, scientists continue to make startling discoveries. The journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), reports that since 1993, forty two previously unknown mammal species (mostly large and distinctive) were scientifically described. The mangabey monkey from Tanzania, the Upembe lechwe antelope from Zambia and the numerous plant and tree species are just some of the spectacular finds in Africa during the last five years. Recently, international headlines were made when a British expedition led by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, discovered three new butterflies and one new species of snake in Mozambique’s northern mountains, and it is believed there are at least two more new species of plants and perhaps more new insects to discover there. Our continent is a biological treasure trove of discoveries new to science. But many species may be lost from virgin territories before the world ever knew they existed. The whirring engine of the climate change buzz seems to pretend that biodiversity conservation is no longer a concern. The major threat of the climate change agenda is that its appeal is so earnest that it makes us forgetful of the skulduggery taking place in nature – this is the heart of the problem. At worst, it hides biodiversity exploitation and injustice under the carpet. The climate change agenda redirects research objectives and media interest. It turns away political focus, blinds budget frameworks and softens the policing of biodiversity regulations. It comes with new goals which must be translated into programmes and projects. Ensuring their implementation requires effective and efficient structures, including human expertise and material resources, and strategic, organisational and technical capacity. This state of affairs allows for vigorous career mobility amongst new change agents shaping Africa’s new environmental course. Using a toolbox of jargon and rehearsed messaging of what is hot in the daily climate change headlines, many give the impression that biodiversity is an intellectual abstraction from which they are emotionally desensitised - nature is loved because it is politically correct. Perhaps this is characteristic of all the things we appreciate in the 21st Century. Society’s romance with nature, it seems, is over. Now, biodiversity conservation strategies that have taken so long to devise after the adoption of the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity in Rio de Janeiro, the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) and other biodiversity-related international agreements, need to be modified. Many say that the biggest advantage of climate change agenda is that it is an excellent bargaining vehicle to get recalcitrant corporates around the environmental table. This is almost as if to say, that, what the biodiversity era of the 1990s could not achieve, the 21st century’s climate change agenda can. Environmental ideologies are mysterious, new-age commodities. Its exchange involves sophisticated wheeling and dealing of big money and information. Indeed, climate change problems leverage massive funding and other forms of environmental co-operation in a manner that the biodiversity movement could not. But the one magnificent achievement that makes the biodiversity movement stand head-and-shoulders above the climate change agenda is that it instilled a deferential love and enjoyment of nature. It wooed us with miracles: rivers and mountains, gorillas in mist forests, polar bears in snowscapes, and whales in endless blue oceans. It inspired appreciation for exotic travel (ecotourism) and ardent support of charities for indigenous tribal groups and cultural rights. It gave us big, flirtatious hearts, generosity and a sense of diversity in a complex world. On the other hand, climate change has instilled an acopolyptic fear of nature - a dark uncertainty of a shared global fate. The passion for nature has been replaced with diplomacy. Now, it is all clinical thinking, economic elbowing and political stratagems. Even suspicion and ‘green rivalry’ at work or home are elevated – who is the culprit who left the lights on? May the person who drives to the corner shop for a non-organic sandwich be locked up. International non-governmental organisations inject USD 40 million per annum for protected areas in west-central Africa. However, this covers only 10% of of the region’s protected area management costs. In South Africa, few know that 2,000 (13%) of our country’s plant and tree species are in trouble with extinction. Finance for biodiversity conservation and scientific exploration is on the decline. It is becoming dependent on goodwill and the support of wealthy philanthropists and old-school nature lovers of a bygone era. In contrast, funding to combat the effects of climate change, for example, through technology transfer, public-private business co-operation and VIPs attending expensive international conferences, have risen exponentially. It suggests that many of the economic forces inside the modern body-politic are pathogenic in respect to harmony with nature and practising what it preaches. It does not help that biodiversity stories are seldomly featured in the news, and in public and political debates. Nor does it help that university enrolments in the botany, zoology and the ecological sciences are in decline. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report on the state of biodiversity, called Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 (released in May 2010), explains that global and individual government measures for protecting biological resources have been insufficient. Therefore, it is unsurprising that none of the twenty one sub-targets accompanying the overall WSSD target of reducing biodiversity loss by 2010 were definitively achieved. Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), widely revered as the earliest father of conservation in America, is quoted as saying that... “One of the penalties of a sound environmental education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on nature is quite invisible to laypersons. We must either harden our shells and make believe that we can do nothing with what we know, or we must be doctors who see the marks of death in a society that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise”. Where does this mayhem leave us? It puts a damper on the pioneer study and exploration of wilderness areas and the discovery of her biodiversity. It is also a nemesis that downplays the appreciable talent of our field practitioners and biodiversity scientists who can easily be baited by carrot-and-stick opportunities that generally come with new environmental agendas. But most importantly, here in Africa, we remain in dire need of researching, analysing and documenting ourselves - our heritage of nature and culture, and its implications for our lives today. We still need to understand what these things are, how they work, and importantly, what it actually signifies to us. So instead of nodding in agreement and cosseting the new environmental dogma, we must be unapologetic and keep banging the drum that the biodiversity problems of yesterday remain the problems of today. Biodiversity issues should be centrally integrated in the climate change agenda. Nature education, particularly of children, and nature activism should be revitalised. In the 1970s and 1980s, nature radicals who protested by, for example, chaining themselves to trees, inspired values of great passion and care. These days, this level of action is needed more than ever to mobilise ‘hearts' and not ‘pockets'. Berkley’s oft-quoted discourse on the existence of things presents a marvellous revelation. Even if we don’t hear the sound of a tree falling, we should not forget about the undiscovered marvels that nature offers us and its implications for future human generations. Cherish nature and keep the love alive. Dr Golding is an Honorary Research Associate (Botany) at the University of Cape Town and is the author of Extinction by Design: plant ecology, species extinction and taxonomy in south-central Africa.