Conservation Biology

Voices from the Tropics

Navjot S. Sodhi, Luke Gibson, Peter H. Raven, Navjot S. Sodhi, Peter H. Raven, Luke Gibson, Navjot S. Sodhi, Peter H. Raven, Luke Gibson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780470658635
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118679807
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Biology
• Index: Biological Sciences

The late Navjot Sodhi conceived this book as a way of bringing to the forefront of our conservation planning for the tropics the views of people who were actually working and living there.  In its 31 chapters, 55 authors present their views on the conservation problems they face and how they deal with them. 

Effective long term conservation in the tropics requires the full participation of local people, organizations and governments. The human population of tropical countries is expected to grow by more than 2.5 billion people over the next several decades, with expectations of increased consumption levels growing even more rapidly than population levels; clearly there will be a need for more trained conservationists and biologists.  Significant levels of local involvement are essential to conservation success, with the rights of local people fully recognized, protected and fostered by governmental and international assistance.  Overarching conservation plans are necessary, but cannot in themselves lead to success.   

The individual experiences presented in the pages of this book will provide useful models that may serve to build better and more sustainable lives for the people who live in the tropics and lead to the continued survival of as many species and functioning ecosystems as possible. 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Giving a Voice to the Tropics

Luke Gibson¹ and Peter H. Raven²

¹Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore

²Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO, USA

In this book we deal with an apparent paradox: the apparently lush ecosystems of the world's tropics, teeming with life, are exceedingly vulnerable to disturbance and disintegration. The voices of authors from many tropical countries provide examples of the successes and failures that they have met in pursuing conservation objectives in their countries. Although each person's experience has been unique, they add up to deliver a number of common themes that we shall review in the concluding chapter of this book. The enormous projected population growth in the tropics, coupled with the desire for much higher levels of consumption by a majority of people in a world whose resources are already being used more rapidly than they can be replenished, forms a situation that makes necessary the pooling of our intellectual and financial resources to try to find our way back to sustainability in a socially just world.

Knowledge about the tropics was slow in reaching Europe, although occasional spectacular animals from tropical Africa were brought to the courts of Europe and China even in Classical times. Although the lure of the Indies and their riches of spices were great, it took a massive effort on the part of Portuguese explorers to round the southern tip of Africa and travel on to the East Indies in the half century before Columbus. Subsequently, the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and ultimately the English reached far-flung localities in tropical lands and established settlements there. These settlements were coastal, however, and mostly lay in regions that had similar coastal and beach plants and animals over wide areas. As a result, the Encyclopedists, who attempted to catalog life from the late seventeenth century onward, including Carl Linnaeus, who founded our modern taxonomic system in the mid-eighteenth century, had no real idea of how biologically rich the tropics actually were. In fact, it was not until the extensive travels of Alexander von Humboldt (1799–1804), who traveled thousands of kilometers through Latin America cataloging and observing its abundant life, that the world began to understand the biological riches of the tropics in their true glory.

Subsequently, Charles Darwin's observations and collections from the voyage of the Beagle (1831–1836) began to reveal the intricacy of tropical ecosystems and to detect the thread of evolution in them. His writings (Darwin, 1845) and those of Alfred Russel Wallace (Wallace, 1869, 1889), who explored the Amazon from 1848 to 1852 and the Malay Archipelago from 1854 to 1862, brought these hitherto mystical regions to life for the general public, stimulating continuous scientific exploration for the subsequent century and a half that has continued to the present day. From the specimens that entered the great museums of the world, it ultimately came to be understood that the majority of the world's species, two-thirds or more of them, occurred in the tropics. The vast majority of them, perhaps 19 out of 20 (mostly small to very small animals and fungi) have yet to be discovered or named scientifically! It is no wonder, then, that our understanding of tropical ecosystems is so limited and our ability to convert them to sustainable agricultural systems often so limited.

Europeans reached the tropics with a colonial mentality, bent on extracting their natural resources as efficiently as possible and thus enriching the countries from which they had come. It was during the course of this effort that many tropical systems were seen to be fragile – incapable of replenishing the resources that had been extracted – and the disintegration of ecosystems that were highly productive initially often caused them to be devastated rapidly.

The knowledge available about tropical ecosystems and the biodiversity that occurs in them is poorer than that concerning temperate ecosystems. Part of the reason for this deficiency lies in the colonial history of most of the regions; those who studied them were often members of expeditions from abroad, and not resident scholars who confronted the special problems of the tropics on a daily basis. As the institutions of tropical countries and their scholarly communities have built up slowly and unevenly, the destruction of their ecosystems has accelerated much more rapidly and uniformly. One of the reasons for this disparity has been rapid population growth, especially in the tropics. At the time of Alexander von Humboldt's travels just over 200 years ago, there were not quite a billion people in the world, a minority of them living in the tropics or what are now considered developing countries. Today, there are more than 7 billion people on Earth, five-sixths of them living in developing countries, including the tropics. One billion people are projected to be added to this number during the next 12 years (Population Reference Bureau, 2012). In Africa, for example, where so many people are malnourished or starving at present, the 950 million people who live in sub-Saharan countries today will be joined by another 500 million people by 2025! The combination of explosive population growth, demand for increased consumption that is growing still more rapidly, and the continued use of often antiquated or damaging extractive technologies are destroying natural communities all over the world, nowhere more rapidly than in the tropics. By the middle of this century, which is as soon as we could begin to hope for global population stability, 2–2.5 billion people will have joined our current numbers, the great majority of them poor, and almost all of them living in developing countries. Putting the matter another way, each night when the world can be said to sit down to the dinner table, there are 200,000 more people needing to be fed. Against this background, the need for strengthening our knowledge of the tropics is evident, and the need for resident scientists and practitioners who can work to build sustainable systems for the countries with our help is absolutely urgent. This knowledge must then be put to use for the benefit of the people who live in tropical countries so that there can be a hope of attaining global sustainability.

Unfortunately for the achievement of sustainability in tropical regions, the extractive mentality that began with colonialism has persisted in many nations. Moreover, the numbers of resident scientists in most areas are small, especially in the face of the incredible biological diversity that occurs there (Barnard, 1995). A recent review of articles published in two of the leading international tropical ecology journals found that only 62% of tropical countries were represented, and 62% of all those articles came from just 10 countries (Stocks et al., 2008). Furthermore, 62% of the articles were written by lead authors based at institutions outside the country where the research was carried out.

This geographical bias has a historical foundation; much research by Europeans has been and still is conducted in their former colonies in the Old World tropics (Clark, 1985). In the Western Hemisphere, European scientists also began the period of exploration, but they were followed by many scientists from the US. These scientists chose to conduct research in the Neotropics because of their proximity and richness and, more recently, because two of the largest international scientific organizations – the Organization for Tropical Studies and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute – are based in Latin America, fostering collaborations with American researchers (Clark, 1985). Regardless of historical patterns and their underlying reasons, we have more to learn about the biodiversity and ecology of the tropics than that of any other part of Earth. Knowledge about tropical biological systems can clearly be accumulated more efficiently by residents than by occasional visitors. There is an important role in these investigations for the major systematic institutions of the world, which are mostly located outside of the tropics, in exploring their biology in the future, but clearly partnerships between them and tropical institutions hold the key for the best and most solid progress. Overall, there is a definite need for greatly accelerated research programs in the tropics, programs that can be conducted best by people who live there. When they are the ones most clearly involved in the research, it can be applied most easily to problems of conservation and sustainability in the regions where these scientists are working.

In this book, we present diverse examples of the ways that scientific principles have been applied to the conservation of tropical ecosystems, and the success of these efforts. We do this by giving a voice to people from these tropical regions, who live there or who have worked there for major portions of their lives, thus gaining practical experience in the application of what we collectively are learning. We invited some of the leading conservation biologists from a variety of tropical countries to share their perspectives on important conservation issues in their countries. The following chapters provide stories of success and loss, of small communities in Thailand working together to protect hornbills, of disordered national governments failing to protect forest habitats and their resident species within, and of many other practical experiences, both successes and failures. Our book is organized by geography, with the chapters arranged into sections corresponding to the four major tropical regions: Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania. At the end, we also include a Diaspora section, with chapters written by people from the tropics who now work on tropical conservation issues at institutions outside of the region.

We deliberately chose the integrative discipline of conservation, implying also the building of sustainable ecosystems, for emphasis here: the needs for conservation are urgent. Conservation, however, rests on a foundation of knowledge built by ecologists, systematists, soil scientists, and especially by social scientists. In many parts of the tropics, the base on which conservation can be carried is notably deficient. Steps must be taken urgently on the basis of what we do know, however, because opportunities are slipping through our fingers with increasing rapidity. At present, the world's people are estimated to be using on a continuous basis about 150% of what the world can produce sustainably (http://footprintnetwork.org), which means that every natural system we know will be simplified, depleted, and made less beautiful until we find a way to live within our means in a world where social justice becomes an important theme.

There are some significant gaps in the coverage in this book. Although many tropical countries are represented, gaps remain particularly in Central America, Andean and northern South America, central and southern Africa, and large parts of Southeast Asia. For one particular country, we invited two people to contribute a chapter, but both ultimately declined to submit a chapter critiquing the conservation measures in their country, fearing backlash by the government and the potential loss of their jobs. This country is regretfully not included in this book, the voices of its potential authors silenced. The limit of freedom of expression is a fundamental concern in many tropical regions, where particular governments can be intolerant of criticism, constructive or not, and sometimes even repressive to those who choose to offer it. The people of the world share a common interest in survival, and the challenge will be met only by finding sustainability for our planet. We hope that one of the benefits of this book will not only be to help empower those who live and study in tropical countries to be able to do an even better job, but also to help us all understand the need for common action based on mutual understanding and some of the means pertinent to taking such actions effectively. We sincerely hope that our book will help to highlight the many problems – and some of the potential solutions – facing countries in the tropics, and ultimately every one of us as well.

References

Barnard, P. (1995) Scientific research traditions and collaboration in tropical ecology. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 10, 38–39.

Clark, D. B. (1985) Ecological field studies in the tropics: geographical origin of reports. Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 66, 6–9.

Darwin, C. R. (1845) The Voyage of the Beagle. John Murray, London.

Stocks, G., Seales, L., Paniagua, F. et al. (2008) The geographical and institutional distribution of ecological research in the tropics. Biotropica, 40, 397–404.

Wallace, A. R. (1869) The Malay Archipelago. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Wallace, A. R. (1889) A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro. Ward, Lock and Co., London.

PART 1

From Within the Region

Section 1: Africa

CHAPTER 2

Conservation Paradigms Seen through the Eyes of Bonobos in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Bila-Isia Inogwabini and Nigel Leader-Williams

Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

Summary

Bonobos are the most recently discovered species of great ape, and are endemic to an area within a large convex bend of the Congo River, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In this chapter, we highlight issues related to the discovery for science of a significant population of bonobos to the west of their range (Inogwabini et al., 2007a, b), lying some 100 km outside the boundary of the nearest statutory protected area. We use this discovery to compare two opposing conservation paradigms: protected areas as a backbone of species and habitat conservation versus more inclusive conservation models that embrace community- managed conservation areas. The key conservation dilemma that this chapter addresses is why bonobos occur at higher densities in unprotected areas that have long been considered marginal habitats, while habitats previously thought to have been optimal, including areas that are formally protected, have failed to meet their conservation goals for bonobos.

Conservation Paradigms

Four centuries before the birth of Christ, the Greek philosopher Plato wrote that removing trees from Attica had led to ongoing loss of soil from high ground and left the landscape looking like a human skeleton, a body wasted by disease (Thirgood, 1981; Plato, 360 bc). This and similar writings suggest that humankind has long sensed the importance of preserving wild nature and all its interrelated components, including forests, waters, and wildlife. Such concerns have been prompted by various underlying motives, including those of a religious, recreational, or economic nature, or through a wish to ensure intergenerational equity and leave the Earth as beautiful and resilient as we found it for our children.

A defining publication for modern-day conservationists worldwide was Limits to Growth (Meadows, Randers and Meadows, 1972). This volume predicted a gloomy future for humankind, prompted by our overextraction of natural resources. Globally, humankind has gained an increasing interest in exploring the role that our species has played in shaping the ecosystems in which we live (Des Jardins, 2001). Since then, conservation and environmental issues have become a persistent theme in wider debates over human development and well-being (Ghimire and Pimbert, 2000). The establishment of numerous internati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Contributors
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Remembering Navjot Sodhi: An Inspiring Mentor, Scholar, and Friend
• CHAPTER 1: Introduction: Giving a Voice to the Tropics
• PART 1: From Within the Region
• PART 2: Thoughts from Diaspora
• Index