No 147 - The end of our wildlife?

 

Habitat I. All acrylic/oil on board, 103x61 cm.

On 8 March the government gazetted a revised National Biodiversity Economy Strategy (NBES). They gave the public two extra weeks to respond. On 18 March a punchy Daily Maverick article by Don Pinnock raised a number of red flags.  Pinnock questioned the absurdly short time-frame for public response, and berated in particular the encouragement of game-farming and trophy-hunting. Is the article over-alarmist? Are we about to see our natural resources entirely sacrificed to Mammon?

The 60-page NBES document would require as many pages for a comprehensive response, but I have a few thoughts. Firstly, the NBES needs to be evaluated in relation to other existing conservation legislation. It is neither a stand-alone document, nor the whole of conservation policy. It is a set of guidelines, not law as such. Broadly it relates to the White Paper on Conservation, gazetted in Parliament on 14 June 2023; this was years in the making, and states its Mission thus:

To conserve and manage South Africa’s biodiversity, and ensure healthy ecosystems, ecological integrity and connectivity, with transformative socio-economic benefit to society … (p.11)

The NBES itself has also been around for a while; this is a revision responding not only to the White Paper, but also aligning itself with the goals and recommendations of various international biodiversity agreements to which South Africa has signed up. These include the 1996 Convention on Biological Diversity and the Kunming-Montreal framework agreed at COP15 in 2022. Whether or not one agrees with the precepts of the Global Biodiversity Framework is another question, though as laid out in brief in the NBES they seem to me largely laudable.

The point is this: the NBES explicitly focuses narrowly on the business-opportunity aspect of our wide variety of wildlife, aka biodiversity.  It’s therefore unsurprising that the document is saturated with ghastly commercial jargon – ‘consumptive use’, ‘leveraging’, ‘beneficiation’, ‘value chains’, etc. If you accept that commercial utilisation of our natural wealth is to some degree inevitable, the kind of policy guidance envisaged in NBES is also inevitable and necessary. Much of what the document covers is happening already. These ‘opportunities’ range from trophy hunting to recreational fishing, from traditional medicinal-plant harvesting to Big Five tourism – a daunting complexity that makes any overarching strategising pretty tricky. Does this effort succeed?

Before going on, it will be useful to cite the NBES itself on what it’s trying to do. The grand aim

Habitat II

is to optimise biodiversity-based business potentials across the terrestrial, fresh water, estuarine, and marine and coastal realms, and to contribute to economic growth with local beneficiation, job creation, poverty alleviation, and food security, whilst maintaining the ecological integrity of the biodiversity resource base, for thriving people and nature. (p.4)

This is refined into a number of more specific goals, with associated Actions. These include expanding the hectarage of conservation areas, collaborating with the private sector, and ensuring that benefits are equitably distributed to the Previously Disadvantaged (their capitals). The document lists four obvious so-called ‘Enablers’, perhaps better termed pre-conditions: effective monitoring and implementation, increased capacity and innovation, financing, and market access. All this, it is confidently asserted, ‘will’ add a whole lot more boodle to the GDP over the next ten years (or by 2036, or 2040, or 2050, depending on which bit you’re reading). Ten years, the NBES feels, is ‘relatively long-term’ (p.15)! Is anyone projecting for the next 50 or 100 years (within the purview of our present youths’ grandchildren) – the time it actually takes for conservation restoration, wildlife population recovery, and healthy ecosystems to build up? In achieving this, the document places repeated emphasis on ‘co-operation’ between ‘stakeholders’, job creation, equitable beneficiation, and ‘innovative’ solutions.

            To its credit, the NBES recognises a number of problems (sorry, challenges), among them the inherent fragmentation of the conservation realm, the increasing instability of climatic impacts, already pressing over-exploitation, alien-species invasions, inadequate financing, ‘uneven governance’ and weak implementation. Perhaps most importantly, it notes that the existing slew of conservation-related legislations is already a ‘contradictory’ patchwork that needs to be sorted out. Given that multiple government departments are necessarily involved, and given the snail’s-pace at which Parliament usually works, that alone will take a good decade. Meanwhile, I fear that this policy statement will only add to the confusion, or worse.

            Many of the goals of the NBES seem, in and of themselves, laudable. Overall, the idea of setting up a ‘positive feedback loop’ between expanded biodiversity resources and expanded derivative business sounds sensible enough. It is at least recognised that ecosystems need first to possess the resources that are destined for exploitation. It nods in the direction of ‘ecosystem restoration’, and notes that there exist a number of successful models that might be emulated. As is shown by the tabulated projects detailed over several pages at the end of the NBES, some of the projects envisaged are already under way or at advanced stages of planning. Nothing too startling to panic about there.

           

Habitat III

All that said, there are aspects of the NBES I find disquieting.

            Although the document explicitly omits definitions in order to save space, there seems no real comprehension of what ‘biodiverse ecosystems’ are, or what they supply. As it is, South Africa is already so fragmented, overrun with roads, fences, mines and towns, there can hardly be said to be a functioning ecosystem anywhere except at very restricted levels. Even then, the NBES makes no mention of the vital health of ecosystems such as river catchments, estuaries or wetlands. All these, as in so many parts of the world, are already seriously degraded and threatened; many will require at best decades of well-resourced dedication to be restored, especially taking into account the burgeoning human population. The projected expansion of conservation areas, at first blush laudable, is in practice utopian; the stated figures of projected revenue are wild thumb-sucks; the ideas for raising finance to get it all going look patchy and speculative. There seems no recognition – and it should be an absolutely foundational assumption – that natural systems do and must continue to supply the indispensables: oxygen from plant life, potable water, and self-sustaining soils. I loathe the term, but without these priceless ‘ecological services’, we’re all toast. The compilers of the NBES seem to believe that ecosystemic ‘integrity’ can be restored and maintained even as human consumption – and therefore physical intrusion and infrastructural impact – is increased. This is a dangerous fantasy.

            Rather, the thinking appears to be governed by the ‘If it pays, it stays’ school. All is ultimately subordinated to capitalistic offtake: the emphases are on game-ranching, aquaculture, herbal harvesting, the number of tourists seeking the ‘Big 5’, the revenue from trophy-hunting, and the like. All of these can in sundry respects be arguably as damaging to ecosystemic health as they are profitable to their practitioners. All of them skew land-use towards a few money-earning species, often to the detriment of the subtler inner workings of truly functional ecosystems. More tourists mean more pollution, trash, sewage, building, roads, disruption of non-human creatures’ safety and health; there is no hint here of curbs on all this, of the kind that other destinations, from Venice to Bali, have been forced to implement.

            And sorry to say, where there’s money (exacerbated by deep inequality), there’s corruption, an inescapable systemic problem that the NBES studiously ignores. The public-private-community co-operation the document rightly valorises is not immune; indeed, it all too frequently mutates into downright criminality and gangsterism. (Look at what’s happened to coal-trucking into Richards Bay.) This is especially uncontrolled in the wildlife trafficking arena – The Extinction Market, researcher Vanya Felbab-Brown calls it. By advocating an expansion of hunting and trade in wildlife ‘products’, from killing trophy leopards to eating insects, the NBES threatens to open the floodgates to further unregulated extirpations.

At the other end of the scale, Don Pinnock rightly avers, by subjecting wildlife to an agricultural mindset, it threatens to exacerbate the problems associated with existing breeding programmes, whether for pseudo-trophies or meat. (The canned-lion hunting enterprise, which Minister Barbara Dallas Creecy seems reluctant or unable to can for good, is only the most egregious example.) Anyone who thinks that this government has the means and will to monitor, audit and police ten thousand scattered and radically different wildlife-utilisation enterprises, let alone prosecute offenders, is deluded. Witness the signal failures to curb the perlemoen, cycad and pangolin trades. Among the few ‘successes’ the NBES disingenuously lays claim to is the rescue from extinction of the rhinoceros; lay that against the fact that 307 rhino were slaughtered by poachers last year in Umfolozi alone, enabled largely by the government’s inability to decisively solve a fencing contract dispute.

            In the last analysis, I think the NBES in its current form is fatally self-contradictory in its assumptions and aims. Though it purports to promote a system beneficial to both people and nature (what others call a ‘circular economy’), in practice it buys into an open-ended extractivist model of human motivations, a profiteering form of capitalism that, as Naomi Klein argues in her book This Changes Everything, is simply incompatible with the health of natural systems. It is not based on promoting what humans can give to sustain ecosystems, only on what can be taken. It conceives of nature not as habitat, only as resource. The cynic can be forgiven for suspecting that an element in government is really focussed on creating another cash cow for its own benefit, with the same disasters likely to follow as have trashed other state-run enterprises. Narrow, short-term extractivism is a global as well as local issue, of course, with no clear solution anywhere. The NBES calls repeatedly for innovative ideas, but in itself is the opposite of innovative. It is effectively derivative of and dependent on outdated notions of, among others, 'conservation' and 'community'. It appears bent on entrenching rather than ameliorating the worst aspects of a one-sided, domineering mindset that estranges humanity from nature rather than valorising co-dependence. One foundational ‘enabler’ – the necessity to educate our population, from littl’uns to ministers – is confined to one brief mention (p.37), and there it appears to mean education in the skills of utilisation, rather than into an attitude of respectful understanding and co-existence. This just one element of long-term groundwork that surely needs to be laid down on a national scale before anything like a NBES plan can become workable.

            The contradictoriness and confusion is evident in the very language. The policy is at many points simply badly written, with ambiguous concord errors, incoherent sentences, and meaningless statements. It trades heavily on the common oxymoron of ‘sustainable development’, itself now widely recognised as an unsustainable mask for rapacity. That’s echoed in this document’s very title, the ‘Biodiversity Economy’, or the phrase ‘ecological infrastructure’: there is no such thing. Contradiction is also inadvertently encapsulated in the idea of ‘cross-cutting imperatives’, these being essentially so-called social (read racial) ‘transformation’ and ecosystemic integrity; the discussion indicates that these are to be read as equally necessary and mutually beneficial. But they are cross-cutting, which is to say arguably entirely incompatible. That’s just one of several weirdly inapposite terms used. The tedium of the aforementioned business-speak is amplified by some resonant-sounding and ambitious but vacuous phrases like ‘mainstream[ing] into cross sectoral planning’ or ‘mega-living’ (which apparently means creating a ‘mosaic’ of some sort, as if we aren’t already in a mosaic).

           

Habitat IV

I could say more, obviously; each individual aspect is highly complex and subject to conflicting arguments. All the initiatives listed need to be tackled on a case-by-case basis. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not so romantic a lover of wilderness that I believe monetary utilisation can or should be shut out of the picture. It would be churlish to quibble with the broad aims of job creation and historical restitution – the question is what kind of jobs, to what ends. And I do not mean to impugn the wonderful work that a horde of devoted conservationists do achieve, even as they may profit by it. We unquestionably need a Biodiversity policy of some sort. Though there are encouraging aspects within it, I don’t believe that this NBES is quite it.

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A copy of this has been sent to the government contact. It is a personal view, representative of no institution or organisation.