Game Drive in the Masai Mara

This blog post should start with the caveat that it is written as a critique of the Masai Mara. The establishment of a reserve or a park for the preservation of native species through tourism is a questionable undertaking which may not yield the intended results for people and native species.

No alternative suggestions are given in the blog. It is simply a critique of the Masai Mara based on the experience of the author with no basis more reliable than my own impressions, some grey literature and a few papers.

Overview of the Masai Mara:

The Masai Mara National Reserve covers an area of 1,510 square kilometers. The reserve belongs to the Masai people. It is named for the Maasai, original inhabitants of the area and the Maasai word 'Maa' which means spotted (as it is spotted with patches of shrubs and shadows of passing clouds). The Masai Mara acts as a kind of continuation of the Serengeti National Park game reserve in Tanzania and as a through-way for animals in the Great Migration from July to October.

The altitude of the Masai Mara ranges from 1,500 to 2,170 meters and temperatures range from 30 to 15 degrees celsius. December and January are the warmest times of the year; June and July are the coldest. The rainy season 'long rains' generally happen in April and May and 'short rains' are in November. The dry season is usually from July to October. The dry season is the time when the majority of the tourism happens in the area.

Questions remaining from the experience:

The first question: Is the Masai Mara Reserve effective? Does it act as a mechanism for preservation of wildlife and for the betterment of the people of the area? i.e. does creation of wildlife reserves act as a mechanism for the meeting of the millennium development goals?

A study funded by WWF and conducted by ILRI from 1989 - 2003 looked at several ungulate species populations in the Masai Mara finding losses of 95% for giraffes, 80% for warthogs, 76% for hartebeest, and 67% for impala. Increased human settlement in and around the reserve was cited as the mechanism for the loss (Ogutu et. al. 2010). This means that people were eating them and sending the meat off for black markets as 'bush meat' which comprises a part of the diet for many Kenyans (Kiringe et. al. 2007)

These negative anthropogenic effects are not just felt for the ungulate species. The Spotted Hyenas of the Masai Mara are also experiencing stress and increased death rates. The proportion of deaths caused by humans has been dramatically increasing for this species since 1985 (Pangle & Holekamp 2010). Cheetahs have also experienced a negative effect of the anthropogenic factors in the area. The population has been declining from 30- 50% since 1966 (Isaboke 2004-2005).

Second question: Is the establishment of a reserve job creation for the Maasai? The Masaai we saw were living in slum like conditions on the outskirts of the Masai Mara and selling lion tooth necklaces, knives etc. Creating a reserve in this case seems to have caused them to be sedentary.

Job creation is a complicated economic outcome of a number of events. If the markets are allowed to openly choose the mechanisms and standards of work then little chance exists for the Maasai to get jobs in the Masai Mara. Free market creation of jobs often means that industry will choose experienced workers from the existing pool; people who already work in the industry. One example of this that we witnessed is that the drivers of the busses in the park were mostly Kikuyu. One Maasai I met told me that he really wanted to become a driver. He wrote me later that to learn to be a driver "i must travel to the city and go and learn there." He said it will take two years to complete the school and "in kenya everything u do need money..."

Finally our experience begs the question: How wild are the animals that live in the Masai Mara? They live like celebrities surrounded by paparazzi at every move. The Cheetah we saw eating an impala was surrounded by backcountry tourism vans full of tourists. The lions resting in a patch of Acacia were seen by hundreds of tourists in whose drivers drove right up to them. Literally we were a few meters away from the resting pride. The Gnu and Zebra walking near the roads were running away from the speeding tourism vans who were on the way to go and look at the cheetah.

References

Isaboke W., Kahiu M., ROSS M.W., Wambua C. 2004-2005. Cheetah census in Kenya; Priority 1: South Western Kenya, East African Wildlife Society Cheetah Conservation Fund, Kenya

Kiringe J.W., Okelloa M.M., Ekajula S.W. 2007. Managers’ perceptions of threats to the protected areas of Kenya: prioritization for effective management, Oryx. 41:314-321

Ogutu J. O., Piepho H.P., Dublin H.T, Bhola N., Reid R. S. 2009. Dynamics of Mara-Serengeti ungulates in relation to land use changes, Journal of Zoology. 278(1): 1–14

Pangle W.M., Holekamp K.E. 2010. Lethal and nonlethal anthropogenic effects on spotted hyenas in the Masai Mara National Reserve, Journal of Mammology. 91(1):154-164

Your exact errors make a music

Listening to the San Francisco Zen Center podcast I heard Ryushin Paul Haller read this poem today by William Stafford. It has inspired me to get away from Masters Thesis writing and go for a good long run.

Your exact errors make a music

that nobody hears.

Your straying feet find the great dance,

walking alone.

And you live on a world where stumbling

always leads home.

Year after year fits over your face—

when there was youth, your talent

was youth;

later, you find your way by touch

where moss redeems the stone;

and you discover where music begins

before it makes any sound,

far in the mountains where canyons go

still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.

—William Stafford, from You Must Revise Your Life

Feeding the world without destroying it.

The University of Minnesota just put out a new video on one of the greatest ecological issues of our times: Agriculture.

In the video 'Big Question: Feast or famine?' the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment talks about rising populations, growing land area for agricultural production and gives a generally rousing call to action for agronomists, policy makers and farmers.

We are currently experiencing the 6th great extinction of the world and agriculture is playing a central role. It is important to make sure that agriculture is on the table in talks about how to solve the climate crises and the crises of ecological destruction. However, I'd like to point out a mistake they making in this question: You might remember from statistics class that correlation does not imply causation. This conversation points out a correlation between population growth and ecological decline as a central part of the argument. This correlation does not mean that population growth causes the ecological decline. If you look at the Gapminder Graph of countries with the highest GHG emissions you will see that the rate of population growth of these places is decreasing while the ecological impacts of those populations is increasing. The problems that we need to address are hidden behind this veil of misinterpreted data.

Armed with this knowledge we might start looking for real solutions to the problem. We need radical transformations of the way we interact with the natural world. Rather than looking at the staggering numbers of people being born every day into poverty and despair as the problem we should spread the resources equitably to all those people as a solution. We should also find a way to include the rest of the species in our equitable distribution.

We need radical shifts of economic paradigms e.g. ecological debt reparations where wealthy nations and multinational corporations have to pay for the damage they have caused.

If you are not familiar with Gapminder organization recommend checking them out and watching Prof. Hans Roslings talks on TED.com. See FAO STAT for the populations and Our écological footprint: reducing human impact on the earth By Mathis Wackernagel, William E. Rees for the rest.

Check out 350.org to help come up with real solutions.

The Right To Choose Healthy Food In the US

These are sad and difficult times for small-scale farmers and local food in the US. - Senate bill S 510 was passed last week, with support from agricultural giants, making it illegal to save seeds, give produce to neighbors or sell at farmer's markets without meeting stringent criteria. Now another bill S3767 will expand FDA regulations on all persons who manufacture, process, pack, distribute, receive, hold or import food to the US. This bill puts new enforcement provisions into FDA law, offenders could be fined or imprisoned for up to 10 years. It gives FDA expansive rule-making capability over the way food is produced and creates compliance burdens for small farmers; it will govern how farmers can grow and harvest their crops and make safety controls for all farms and facilities that process foods. 

What can we do? We can Vote Track S 510 to see who voted where and send them a letter accordingly.

Vote track S3767 and make sure that your representatives are voting for small-scale local food. We can contact our representatives and contact our senators. We can read the Agriculture Society and take part in Action Alerts. Finally we can get inspired to take action by watching the Farmageddon trailer on the Richmond Food Collective Blog.  

Radical Raw Milk

Back in Germany now in the darkest shortest days of the year. I am trying not to get too distracted from writing my thesis. - In between bouts of writing I find myself in the kitchen and in the pantry looking at ways to make more fermentation and preservation experiments. Food has certainly become the center of my daily life.

I just read this article about raw milk politics in the US. The author, Ryan Parker, is an old House of Representatives guy. Now he has a 'beyond organic'  small family farm in Newport, Maine.

The article Milking the Corporate Cow can be read in the Bangor Daily News.

Outward Bound - Off to See the Tiaga and Tundra

I will not be blogging for a while now as I am off to do ethnobotanical research in the Taiga and Tundra subarctic regions of the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland on my way back to Maine.

Meanwhile here is a quote from Walt Whitman

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

The Generous Man by Tor Nørretranders

While I was in the Klimaforum in Copenhagen this winter I heard the Danish Mathematician Tor Nørretranders give a speech about sociology and evolution.

I have just finished reading his new book 'The Generous Man' wherein he debunks the popularly accepted idea of a selfish homo economicus. He draws upon the sciences to introduce the idea that instead we are homo reciprocans and are naturally inclined to cooperate. I am inspired to go on reading about links between sociology, biology and philosophy.

My follow up books are 'The Nature Of Design' by David Orr and Environmental Sociology by Scottish Sociologist Phillip W. Sutton.


Read more about Tor Nørretranders on Edge

Beyond Edge:Tor Nørretranders' Blog