Parks, people, and conservation - how do we know if parks work?

Dr. Stoner started the class of with a great presentation on conservation and park management in Africa. She provided a background on global biodiversity. There is a definite link between the growth of the human population and the decline in species. This is probably due to the fact that humans have encroached on more and more land, decreasing the amount of land for wildlife to survive on. Furthermore, people have degraded the few habitats that are left. It is clear that species need to be conserved. But why and how should we do this? Dr. Stoner discussed two reasons that are on the opposite ends of the spectrum of why people should conserve species diversity. The first is that species have intrinsic value, meaning, they have the right to exist. Granted, this reason may not persuade the majority of people to conserve species. However, if those species served some kind of useful purpose, humans might be more inclined to want to save them. This is the second reason people might want to conserve biodiversity. This brings up the issue of how we should go about conserving biodiversity. One way is to protect large areas of land. The “Yellowstone Model” was brought up in the presentation as an example of how parks were first protected. In its early years, Yellowstone was protected vigorously and people were kept out or the park. Even American Indian tribes that were known to inhabit the park were relocated. In Africa, this type of enforcement has been hard to keep which has lead to so called “paper parks.” These are areas of land that are supposed to be protected but actually have little enforcement. Another problem in Africa is that large areas that are protected are not always very high in biodiversity. Also, only small areas of land that are high in biodiversity are protected. This is probably because these areas are also high in human populations. Dr. Stoner discussed that since there are new approaches to conservation that involve the support of the local people and give biodiversity an economic value. Data to determine whether any approaches to conservation are working is hard to come by. There have been studies to show that protected areas experience fewer declines than non-protected areas. However, protected areas still experience decline. The question was asked in class as to whether we really needed data to protect these parks. It seems like the data are necessary to show that protected areas are improving the status of biodiversity. Also, funding sources might be more likely to fund conservation if it could be shown that their money is not going to be wasted on something that is not going to solve the problem. Something needs to be done about the lack of monitoring in protected areas. One reason protected marine areas are doing well may be because they are constantly being monitored (for fisheries). A possible solution for land based parks may be to have tourists and rangers record what they see. This would provide more data for protected parks even if it were not perfectly accurate. Another big topic discussed was how to change the behaviors of the people that live around protected areas. What is needed to change attitudes and behaviors? Is it community outreach, incentives, ownership of the land? I think there is really no way to tell this because programs are started and when it seems like it might not be doing well all the funding pulls out. We will not be able to tell if a method works if it is not allowed to be evaluated over a long period of time. There were many other topics touched on in class, such as religion, economics and politics. It seems that these topics are always going to tie into what we discuss in class. However, I found the discussion on religion to be interesting. On one hand, should we discuss conservation with religious people in a bible friendly way so that they might be more inclined to preserve the environment while still respecting their beliefs? Or, is that approach dishonest because it leaves out major scientific contributions like evolution and manipulates people to get a desired effect? What do you think?