Saving Wildlife Starts at the Community Level

Excellent article in The Guardian.  Saving wildlife starts at the community level.  Native poachers are mostly the poor, but the real profits from their work goes to international criminals.  In Kenya community activists are working to find ways to rob these international criminals of the first link in the chain that stretches from the killing fields in Kenya to the shops in China and Vietnam.

“She got me out of a mud pool and into a pool of light,” Lotak said of Josephine Ekiru, the chair of the Nakuprat-Gotu conservancy, a community-run conservation area in northern Kenya where the two former poachers now work.

In a pastoral community where women are traditionally expected to defer to their husbands and keep their opinions private, a 16-year-old Ekiru insisted on attending community meetings that were normally the preserve of men, and began trying to reform the men she knew were poaching. But confronting the poachers put her own life on the line.

“First they wrote a letter to me threatening me. The second time, they called in [five men] to me and threatened me. That time they were pointing guns at me. I said I was ready to die but can I tell you some reasons [why she was trying to persuade them],” she recalled.

For 20 minutes she told them they were being used, that they were creating conflict between ethnic groups and were destroying the “treasure” that was their local wildlife.

“One of them said: ‘Don’t kill her’, he dropped his gun. He said, ‘Nobody has ever told us about this.’”

To Ekiru, the answer lies in having local people run the show. “The only future we have for this wildlife is in the hands of the communities living with this wildlife.”

Of course to really end this trade the chain must be broken at every link.