It is Mother’s Day on Sunday. My mother is in Barcelona in Spain at the moment and I’m sending her an e-card compliments of the African Wildlife Foundation (AWF).
I’m usually fairly cynical when it comes to environment groups, but I have some sympathy for the work of the AWF and their website and cards are very beautiful:
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
You are lucky your mother can receive emails, mine is still coming to terms with the electric typewriter!
She’s great … has a yahoo address and looks out for internet cafes. and posts her photos to flickr! she’s touring Europe for 5 weeks.
Jennifer,
I hope your “fairly cynical” attitude toward wildlife efforts in Africa is a bit more than that. In Africa, wildlife preservation efforts have been used as an excuse for forced migrations of native populations who were found to “live off of the land,” i.e., to kill and eat wildlife.
Killing and eating wildlife is, to our delicate sensibilities, not very nice. It interferes with ecotourism and filming documentaries. Worst of all, it offends people who eat tofu-burgers on whole-wheat buns and wipe their lips on recycled napkins.
Forced migration of wildlife-eaters found they had no option other than to attempt intensive farming, as their lands had shrunk massively and the production of calories per acre became a life or death mandate. But with no knowledge of intestive agriculture, and with the benevolent oversight of people who want to preserve “native Africa,” they were denied the tools of intensive agriculture.
As a result, they were consigned instantly to subsistence agriculture, poverty and disease, and became prey to ambitious warlords. Many of whom come bearing “gifts” of food from Western nations while extorting various favors in return. A few votes here, a few rapes there, etc. Actually, not a few. Lots.
Some day, likely not in my time, what the White Western Man has done to “preserve wildlife” in Africa will be marked down as an entry in the annals of genocide.
It won’t be called “green genocide,” because, as everyone knows, the green people are all very, very exceptionally nice. Even the term, “green genocide” has a kind, gentle “natural” ring to it.
So my stomach lurches a bit when I see you say, “their website and cards are very beautiful.”
Kindest regards,
Schiller.
some of those forced migrations Schiller have been to give open access to valuable resources (diamonds, oil etc)
Intensive farming in Africa has also come about where population has outgrown shifting culitivation
and then of course there has been the long-running ‘taming’ influence of those all-pervasive Christian missionaries encouraging primitive peoples to abandon their heathen animal ways and curing wanderlust.
Schiller why do you ignore religious, ethnic differences and commodity (trade dollars) influences to single out greenies?
Jennifer why do you have sympathy for the AWF and not other enviro groups? What gives them credibility other than nice pictures?
Hippo,
I single out the greens because the topic was saving wildlife. Didn’t want to go off-topic like you did.
Schiller.