Wildlife Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the usage of wild, meaning “of an animal; living in a state of nature; not tame, not domesticated,” can be traced back to 725 c.E. By 1440 c.E., the word wildness, meaning “the state or character of being wild” or “undomesticated,” referred to a particular way of being-a category of behaviors and attributes, but not Kingdom or Phylum-specific ones. The word wildlife (or wild life), meaning “native flora and fauna of a particular region,” dates back only to 1879 c.E., and popular usage of its attributive form (e.g., wildlife conservation) and combinative form (e.g., wildlife park, wildlife sanctuary), began in the mid-1930s and 1960s, respectively (OED). Wildlife, then, originated as a category inclusive of animals and plants. As such, wildlife together comprise biodiversity.

Although wildlife was meant to refer to the native flora and fauna of a particular region, for nearly half a century, television, film, and a number of prominent organizations have privileged fauna. Wildlife as animals dominates National Geographic documentaries, Marlin Perkins’s Wild Kingdom, more recent shows on the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. The U.S. Department of Agriculture describes wildlife as “any living creature, wild by nature, endowed with sensation and power of voluntary motion and including mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles, which spend a majority of their life cycle on land.” The Natural Resources Defense Council describes wildlife as “animals living in the wilderness without human intervention,” while the standard forestry glossary describes wildlife as “a broad term that includes nondomesticated vertebrates, especially mammals, birds, and fish.”

Humans are not counted among wildlife, although anthropogenic processes certainly impact the life forms that are. Prior to the Neolithic Revolution, all human beings relied on undomesticated plants and animals for survival. Thus, for most of human history, all plants and animals would have been considered “wild” by today’s standards. With the advent of agriculture, many species of “wild” plants and animals were domesticated. Over time and through human selection, plants and animals of today’s farmlands and pet shops have become quite different from their ancestors. This contrast between domesticated species and their increasingly distant relatives contributed to the creation of the word wildlife.

More recently, interest in wildlife and wildlife conservation has increased because many species of wildlife have been driven to extinction or near-extinction due to rapid human growth rates and their concomitant ecological pressures. Non-human species have suffered habitat loss and other threats due to agricultural and urban expansion, deforestation, desertification, pollution, and the introduction of exotic species, also called biopollution.

Wildlife Conservation

Wildlife conservation describes various practices to regulate certain species to guarantee their abilities to reproduce and remain plentiful. Conservation goals may be based on ideals of wildlife’s intrinsic value, wildlife’s utility in providing goods and services, or some combination thereof. Wildlife has featured prominently in worldviews, or life-ways, since time immemorial. The majority of the world’s religions-including major faiths such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Islam, as well as thousands of small-scale, so-called indigenous religions-support spiritual interrelationships among all living beings. An ethic of stewardship obligates many religious practitioners to care for other species, as conveyed through stories, customary laws, rituals, and religious figures. Examples include portrayals of Noah’s Ark replete with breeding pairs of all of the world’s animals (Book of Genesis, chapters 6-9; also featured in the Torah and the Koran); the Seventh Generation precept of the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy), which requires that chiefs consider the impacts their decisions will have on the seventh subsequent generation of living beings; the Tsembaga ritual of kaiko, described in Roy Rappaport’s Pigs for the Ancestors, as a homeostatic process, regulating ecological relationships; and the Roman Catholic St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals and environment.

Across the globe, wildlife products have been exchanged within and between communities as parts of tribute and bartering systems. Hunting reserves are a particular form of utilitarian wildlife conservation and date back millennia. As Mulder and Coppolillio describe, historical records indicate that Assyrians had set aside land for hunting reserves by 700 B.C.E. Reserves in India emerged by 500 B.C.E. to provide not only exclusive areas for royal hunts, but also to protect elephants, which served important roles in the war efforts of state expansion. Such reserves connote a utilitarian approach to managing wildlife to ensure the reproduction of certain species desired for elite use and to restrict nonelites’ access to the flora and fauna in those reserves. Furthermore, the species within these “protected areas” became what today would be called natural resources-things to be managed and commodified.

The term wildlife was preceded by game, defined as “the object of the chase; the animal and animals hunted” (traced to 1400 C.E.) or a collective form defined as “wild animals or birds such as are pursued, caught or killed in the chase” (traced to the late 1200s), and later still “the flesh of such animals used for food” (traced to the mid-1800s) (OED). British colonial discourse in Asia and Africa favored game well into the 20th century. There were colonial game reserves by the end of the 19th century, game departments shortly thereafter, and game feasts. As Gibson describes with respect to Africa, meat from wild animals and ivory supported early European explorers and colonial troops, as well as comprised a significant portion of the household budget for colonial administrators and early settlers. More recently, fortress conservation (the locking up of land for the preservation of wildlife) and community-based conservation (attempts to implement utilitarian agendas that permit human habitation in and use of biodiverse regions) have been posed as solutions to the ecological “problem” of wildlife management. Particularly with regard to community-based conservation, wildlife conservation programs fit within the nebulous realm of sustainable development.

Wildlife Conservation Institutions

Conservation efforts began with the creation of protected areas. The formal gazetting of landand thus wildlife-dates back to hunting reserves and royal forests. The dominance of Western conservation can be traced predominantly to British and U.S. models. The English enclosure movement beginning in the 16th century reached its peak in the 18th and 19th centuries through various Acts of Parliament. Communally-held and open lands were reconfigured by a system of private land management, and the landscape was literally divided by fences, hedges, and walls into units of production and residence, while separate areas existed for “nature.” Such divisions of landscape overlapped with 19th-century U.S. westward expansion and its repercussions.

The establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872 inspired a sweeping fortress conservation movement based on the national park model to “protect” indigenous flora and fauna. As noted above, the late 19th and early 20th century efforts at wildlife preservation in British colonially-held territories were often oriented toward protecting certain game species for elite hunters and from indigenous hunters, the latter of whom would be accused of poaching for pursuing those “protected” species.

Wildlife conservation seems to stem from the idea that people destroy nature (i.e., wildlife and their habitat in this case) because economic activity has appeared to be incompatible with conservation goals, and yet people are by default the stewards of wildlife and work to save “it” by making it economically productive. The challenge of defining and overseeing wildlife conservation has led to the creation of a variety of institutions, including game and then wildlife departments, government ministries or “parastatals” to manage parks and reserves, and a rapidly growing number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Regulating wildlife internationally has proven particularly difficult.

The Convention for the Preservation of Animals, Birds, and Fish in Africa was the first international conservation treaty. Signed in London in 1900, it served as the foundation for wildlife policies in British colonial Africa, and it was subsequently adopted elsewhere in the world for large-scale conservation efforts. It provided for the gazetting of lands into parks and reserves, and allowed for spin-off legislation regarding trespassing, poaching of protected flora and fauna, and the manners in which natural resources could be exploited-and by whom. By the time the first World Parks Congress convened in 1962, the majority of 10,000 protected areas were in Africa and North America and totaled two million square kilometers of surface area. By the fifth World Parks Congress held in 2003, there were over 100,000 protected areas, totaling over 18 million square kilometers. Those areas include Biosphere Reserves, World Heritage Sites, and other sanctuaries.

The term wildlife is often deployed by international conservation organizations and legislation to draw attention to issues of biodiversity and the protection of endangered species. The aforementioned World Parks Congress is a regular gathering sponsored by IUCN, the World Conservation Union, formerly the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, founded in 1948. IUCN works with representatives from 82 states, 111 government agencies, over 800 nongovernmental organizations, and approximately 10,000 scientists to oversee wildlife management and to “influence, encourage and assist societies throughout the world to conserve the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure that any use of natural resources is equitable and ecologically sustainable.”

Perhaps the best known international wildlife treaty, CITES, or the “Washington” Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, endeavors to protect certain plants and animals by regulating and monitoring their international trade to prevent such trade from reaching unsustainable levels. The Convention entered into force in 1975, and there are now over 160 parties. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) administers CITES. Plants and animals are classified as endangered, vulnerable, or lower risk species, and monitored accordingly. The World Wildlife Fund lists its primary conservation goals as “saving endangered species, protecting endangered habitats and addressing global threats such as toxic pollution, over-fishing and climate change.” WWF, in conjunction with IUCN, also enforces CITES through TRAFFIC, the world’s largest trade monitoring network.

Another significant international treaty, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was signed by 150 government leaders at the 1992 Earth Summit. The Convention promotes sustainable development while protecting biodiversity, which it describes as “the fruit of billions of years of evolution, shaped by natural processes and, increasingly, by the influence of humans.” The agreement serves as a basis through which to regulate all species, ecosystems, and genetic resources, and it also covers the field of biotechnology. CBD objectives are implemented within the signatory nations through a variety of mechanisms, such as required implementation of national parks and protected areas systems to protect wildlife; green taxes, tax deductions, and/or severe economic penalties for habitat destruction or wildlife poaching; and expansion of the nonprofit sector.

Some indigenous groups have founded explicitly environmental institutions. For example, the First Nations Environmental Network is a national organization of individuals, nonprofit agencies, green technologies and corporations, and Nations working together on environmental issues. FNEN describes itself as “a circle of First Nations people committed to protecting, defending, and restoring the balance of all life by honoring traditional Indigenous values and the path of our ancestors.”

The definition of wildlife as “native flora and fauna of a particular region” does not preclude the possibility that the animals that qualify as “wildlife” can also be domesticated for profit (e.g., ranching, sport-hunting) or pleasure (e.g., zoos, private, or pet ownership). Following this logic, if we understand the definition of wild as “living in a state of nature; not tame, not domesticated,” then the phrase wild animals can have an entirely different meaning from wildlife, even though members of the same species may comprise each category.

For example, ostriches-which live in an east African national park and have not been intentionally tamed by humans-may be considered as both wild animals and wildlife; but, given the above definitions, ostriches raised and tamed by humans, such as those at various ostrich farms throughout east Africa, qualify as wildlife but not as wild animals. The phrase wildlife domestication may sound like an oxymoron, but it is both an implicit characteristic and process of “wildlife conservation” and its conceptual sibling “wildlife resource management”-both of which bear the hallmark of colonial and neo-colonial interests.

Bibliography:

Raymond Bonner, At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa’s Wildlife (Knopf, 1993);
Dan Brockington, Fortress Conservation: The Preservation of the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania (Indiana University Press, 2002);
Jennifer Coffman, “The Invention of Wildlife: Managing a Natural Resource in Colonial and Post-Colonial Kenya,” in Clark Gibson, , Politicians and Poachers: The Political Economy of Wildlife Policy in Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1999);
John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism (Manchester University Press, 1988);
Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and Peter Coppolillo, Conservation: Linking Ecology, Economics, and Culture (Princeton University Press, 2005);
Roderick Neumann, Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa (University of California Press, 1988);
James O’Connor, Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism (Guilford Press, 1998);
David Western and Michael Wright, , Natural Connections: Perspectives in Community-based Conservation (Island Press, 1994).