Management By Exclusion: Time to keep people out of biodiversity hotspots?

This image is of a rhino grave in western Nepal.  I'm sorry about the quality but I was shooting video and extracted this frame.

The rhino was killed and horn removed by poachers next to the river you can see in background.  The grave is inside a buffer zone, that crucial area where wildlife and humans attempt coexistence on the edge of National Parks, Tiger Reserves etc.  Human/Wildlife conflict is obviously much more likely to occur in these areas and incidents involving elephant, rhino and great cat species are common, sometimes resulting in fatalities of people or animals.

The decision recently made by the Supreme Court of India to ban tourism in core areas of tiger reserves has largely been painted by the media as a showcase of the gulf between conservationists and a money hungry tourism industry.  A "believe everything you read" public has swallowed this with uninformed comment the result.

The fact is the situation is far more complex.  There are excellent well meaning people who have a foot in each camp thus blurring the boundaries the uninformed have built.  There are passionate, extremely knowledgeable people, such as my two friends and colleagues in this photograph, working as nature guides for excellent tourism operators who will be highly affected by this decision.  Food on the family table is at stake here as incomes are diminished or vanish completely.

Several weeks ago (on Facebook) I mooted the idea of "management by exclusion" in Tiger Reserves.  I will admit to having very reliable sources so my "crazy talk" at the time was not without some pretty solid grounding.  I can tell you now the jungle drums are beating loudly that India will not be the only country in the area taking this line.

So has the time come that tourism ceases (or at least drastically reduced) in biodiversity hotspots and we allow our planet to breathe a little? And does this mean we can actually pour more resources into "coldspots" and rebuild them?  And will the mechanism that drives tourism - tourists themselves - adjust their thinking so people like the ones in my photograph can still be of the huge value they are?

Maybe, just maybe, and there is no doubt a lot of tinkering is still be done with the exact laws, the Supreme Court of India and India itself has made one of the most important environmental decisions ever made...
and images like the one above become less frequent...