Man, beast, and clashing values

A peculiar news item has recently surfaced which illustrates how differently different cultural groups perceive the relationship between humanity and nature.  You can read the story in detail here.  In brief, the government of Botswana is threatening to send twenty thousand elephants to Germany, in a weird sort of African parallel to DeSantis's schemes to transport illegal aliens en masse to blue states.  The reason is that Germany is considering banning the import of hunting trophies from Africa, to discourage the hunting of wild animals in Africa by German tourists.  This offends Botswana, which makes money from the hunters who visit there.  Botswana claims to be suffering from elephant overpopulation (it has been trying to get other African countries to take some of the surplus pachyderms off its hands), and the huge animals are dangerous, sometimes attacking villages, crops, and people.  The message is, "If you're so keen on there being more and more elephants, let's see how you like it when they're rampaging around your country."

Animal conservation, and in general the preservation of nature for its own sake, is notoriously mostly a fixation of upper-middle-class people living in safe urban areas (mostly in the West) who have been so far removed from nature for so long that they've completely lost touch with how horrible it is and hold an irritatingly naïve, "picturesque" view of it.  Beautiful professional photographs of charismatic wild animals in exotic undeveloped landscapes do not convey the reality of predation, parasites, untreated injuries and disease, the struggle to get enough food to fend off starvation -- the natural life that our own ancestors escaped from, thousands of years ago.  Even less do they acknowledge that the local people in these places usually have a very different view of such things than the intended audience in Manhattan or Berlin.

Prosperous people care about nature for its own sake because, to be blunt, they can afford to.  Most people in tropical countries (where most of the "wild" is) are living a lot closer to the edge and have little choice but to assess everything around them based on whether and how it can be exploited to make their lives a little better.  Consider the West's own past.  Europeans during the industrial revolution accepted levels of pollution, deforestation, and other environmental damage we would never tolerate today, because that was the necessary price to be paid for escaping the grinding poverty of pre-industrial life.  After industrialization and advancing technology had made the West rich, one of the luxuries that it bought with its new wealth was a cleaner environment.  People in poorer countries today don't like pollution or environmental damage either, but achieving prosperity is simply a more important concern.  As for fetishizing useless and dangerous animals, that's another luxury which most people in Germany can afford (at a safe distance) and most people in Botswana can't.

The Botswana story reminded me of this item I posted a while back, apparently a letter published in a newspaper in India which I found on an Indian blog:

He speaks for billions, I suspect.

An interestingly parallel situation has been unfolding recently in Colorado.  A few years ago that state held a referendum on re-introducing wolves into the rural western area from which they had been exterminated generations ago.  The measure passed (barely), thanks to votes from the urban central part of the state.  The ranchers and townspeople of the region where the wolves were to be unleashed voted overwhelmingly against it, recognizing the obvious danger to their livestock and perhaps to themselves and their families too.  This week the first killing of a calf was confirmed.  I suspect that gun sales in the region have risen sharply -- although the people in that area are probably well-armed already.  They'll need to be.  It seems to me that a win-win solution could be achieved here by releasing the wolves, not in western Colorado which doesn't want them, but in the precincts in Denver which voted most enthusiastically to bring them in.  I suspect the Botswanans would concur, but oddly enough, nobody seems to be considering this.

As I discussed in this post, when stone-age humans spread into the Americas and Australia for the first time, they quickly wiped out all of the really large animal species which had formerly existed there.  To primitive hunter-gatherers, a woolly mammoth could be one of two things -- menace or feast.  It was not picturesque.

The people of the tropics will probably develop the same attitudes toward nature as the West has when they achieve the same level of prosperity as the West has.  Until then, efforts to impose the values of the Western upper-middle class in regions where those values have no roots or logical basis must expect to encounter a lot of push-back.