Where Gorillas and the Antelope Play

If environmental preservation efforts are going to be successful they must also serve the interest of the human population. If things are framed as the environment or people, sooner or later the environment will lose. This is a greate example of how this idea can work in practice.

---

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: September 26, 2006
BAYANGA, Central African Republic
The New York Times

The first thing they tell you here is not to play with the gorillas or the elephants.

A young male elephant gored a young Italian woman here when he attempted to play with her. And if you creep too close to the gorillas, a 375-pound silverback will charge you and, if you’re lucky, stop inches from you and slap the ground in rage.

But even if you can’t play with the animals, you can ogle them — and there are few places in the world as good for that as this remote jungle where the Central African Republic, Cameroon and the Congo Republic come together. And now the three countries have joined forces to preserve this jungle by establishing adjoining national parks that cover an area the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.

It’s part of a growing trend that deserves strong support from the West: poor countries seeking economic opportunities by protecting nature rather than pillaging it. The grandest and most unlikely of these experiments is this one, for the Central African Republic may be the single most wretched country in the world: life expectancy is 38, and every year it falls by another six months. One-fifth of children die by the age of 5. Outside the capital, government is only a rumor.

Yet while many national parks in Africa exist primarily on paper, this one is real. Game wardens patrol vigorously: they pursue poachers across international borders, and seized 70,000 snares last year alone.

Read entire article