Conservation in Africa: Peoples, Policies and Practice

Front Cover
David Anderson, Richard H. Grove
Cambridge University Press, 1987 - Business & Economics - 355 pages
This book provides a new inter-disciplinary look at the practice and policies of conservation in Africa. Bringing together social scientists, anthropologists and historians with biologists for the first time, the book sheds some light on the previously neglected but critically important social aspects of conservation thinking. To date conservation has been very much the domain of the biologist, but the current ecological crisis in Africa and the failure of orthodox conservation policies demand a radical new appraisal of conventional practices. This new approach to conservation, the book argues, cannot deal simply with the survival of species and habitats, for the future of African wildlife is intimately tied to the future of African rural communities. Conservation must form an integral part of future policies for human development. The book emphasises this urgent need for a complementary rather than a competitive approach. It covers a wide range of topics important to this new approach, from wildlife management to soil conservation and from the Cape in the nineteenth century to Ethiopia in the 1980s. It is essential reading for all those concerned about people and conservation in Africa.
 

Contents

Early themes in African conservation the Cape in the nineteenth century
21
Chivalry social Darwinism and ritualised killing the hunting ethos in Central Africa up to 1914
41
Colonialism capitalism and the ecological crisis in Malawi a reassessment
63
Conservation with a human face conflict and reconciliation in African land use planning
79
Wildlife parks and pastoralists
103
Introduction
105
Pastoralism conservation and the overgrazing controversy
111
Pastoralists and wildlife image and reality in Kenya Maasailand
129
Local institutions tenure and resource management in East Africa
193
Conflicting uses for forest resources in the Lower Tana River basin of Kenya
211
Environmental degradation soil conservation and agricultural policies in Sierra Leone 18951984
229
Managing the forest the conservation history of Lembus Kenya 190463
249
Consequences for conservation and development
269
Introduction
271
The political reality of conservation in Nigeria
277
Settlement pastoralism and the commons the ideology and practice of irrigation development in northern Kenya
293

Integrating parks and pastoralists some lessons from Amboseli
149
The Mursi and National Park development in the Lower Omo Valley
169
Conservation priorities and rural communities
187
Introduction
189
Approaches to water resource development Sokoto Valley Nigeria the problem of sustainability
307
State policy and famine in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia the lessons for conservation
327
Index
345
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Page 4 - The problem is rooted in the nature of the colonial relationship itself, which allowed Europeans to impose their image of Africa upon the reality of the African landscape. Much of the emotional as distinct from the economic investment which Europe made in Africa has manifested itself in a wish to protect the natural environment as a special kind of 'Eden', for the purposes of the European psyche, rather than as a complex and changing environment in which people have actually had to live.
Page 5 - Men are easily inspired by human ideas, but they forget them just as quickly. Only Nature is eternal, unless we senselessly destroy it. In fifty years' time nobody will be interested in the results of the conferences which fill today's headlines.

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