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...

For the Elephant, Rhino and Tiger, the decisions made this week are vital ...

As another image of a bullet ridden tiger electronically flies around the world the Standing Committee of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meets again this week.  This particular tiger, killed sometime in the week near Corbett National Park in India, will like the maybe 3000 tigers still alive in the wild be completely oblivious to the well meaning people in suits in Geneva as they discuss the issues around wildlife trade.

I don't think I'm too far off the mark here when I say that the tiger, like the rhino and the elephant, really only see us as a species to be avoided.  Contrary to what the crazies who deify this animal believe, this animal isn't some supernatural beast.  If it was, it wouldn't be in this mess.  The tiger eats, sleeps and defecates just like the rest of us.  As a top predator it has all the senses to survive in its natural habitat.  It's an animal at the top of its food chain, nothing more, nothing less.  It has done nothing wrong.

Somewhere along the line us humans have decided the tiger is something more.  We've decided the great cat can cure us of our ailments, give us greater power and virility, help us be something we can't manage to simply become ourselves.

So we revere the tiger and kill it.

I've been around the whole tiger game long enough to know this helpless animal, while being a vital part of several different ecological frameworks, is as vulnerable now as any animal on the planet.  The fragmented populations can't really fight back anymore.

Geneva this week will see part of where the real fight is taking place.  Our thinking as a collective will be reflected over the next few days.  The tipping point for the rhino, the elephant, the tiger and numerous other species has been reached.

The future of tiger farms, the status of the ivory market and the political will to really combat rhino poaching will all be examined.

It's a now or never situation.  And never is forever.

It's Global Tiger Day this coming Sunday, 29 July.  It'll be a time to reflect on the whole situation.  Right now, I'm going to hope, plant a tree and continue to do my bit to help protect wildlife.

Why?  Because it's the right thing to do...

Fight to save the Kimberley, whales, hots up as Sea Shepherd's Steve Irwin gets involved...

The Sea Shepherd vessel the "Steve Irwin" leaves on Friday to highlight the plight of the whale after yesterday's news.
The Western Australian Government, headed up by WA Premier Colin Barnett is pushing ahead with gas factories at James Price Point, north of Broome on one of the world’s most pristine coastlines.
This area is the BIGGEST HUMPBACK WHALE NURSERY IN THE WORLD. Blue whales also pass through to calve further north of the spot. Constructing the gas factories and port would mean noise pollution, destruction of habitat and also boat strikes to whales. If the gas factories went ahead it would open the door to the industrialisation of other parts of the region and could lead to coal and uranium shipments out of the Kimberley wilds.
Woodside has already started drilling into reefs and to enable the big ships to come in, there would be further drilling and dredging up to 6 km out to sea. A jetty several kilometres long would also be constructed.

This image by Adam Monk (www.adammonk.com) is of the proposed site. -- More on this soon.

UPDATE:  Here's a link to the news that Bob Brown is now involved as he and Sea Shepherd launch OPERATION KIMBERLEY MIINIMBI