Tuesday, May 26, 2009

There will be a herd of angry elephants

My new German manager, Chris Dohse, is—I’ll be the first to say—a bit of a nature nut. On my first field trip of my new job (I’m assisting his company to improve processing and harvesting of baobab fruit) we were hacking through vines and slashing our way through elephant grass in search of some rare medicinal plant to which Chris would only refer to by its traditional Latin name. Go figure.

This past week, he called to warn me (three weeks ahead of time) that Africa Parks will be rounding up a herd of fifty-or-so elephants west of the lakeshore (near our area of fieldwork) to relocated them to a national park down south. I half-expected Chris not to be warning me but to be looking for a way to get in on the action. Then something struck me: why on earth is Africa Parks relocating fifty-or-so elephants a hundred-or-so kilometers south?

I did some digging. Turns out that the government of Malawi has a relocation program where Malawians from the densely populated southern region of Chikwawa have been moved up into the Mangochi region (where we work). The newly relocated had a number of elephant complaints—absolutely shocking when considering they were relocated into the elephants’ backyard. Up until some of the relocated villagers had their houses trampled, nothing was done. Now, the Government of Malawi is organizing the elephants’ relocation.

It just seems to happen like that, doesn’t it? Humans make a mess of things (overpopulation), come up with a half-baked solution (relocation), which makes a brand new mess (elephant demolition), to which the answer is that Nature will now have to accommodate our inept new “solution”. The end product is that twenty years down the road the elephants’ original habit will be entirely destroyed by slash and burn farming and further overpopulation. Then it will be same old problem, but worse.

Chris foresees this all already, which explains his frequent exasperated “harrumphs” when discussion the subject. Whether the Malawian government sees the same thing or not, I’m not sure, but their course of action would either suggest they don’t, or that they’re caught between the rock and hard place of overpopulation and environmental degradation. 

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