On African Wildlife Management

Animals, Nov, 1998 by Wendy Williams

Botswana's Okavango Delta, an oasis in the Kalahari Desert, first became commonly known to American readers with Mark and Delia Owens's work, Cry of the Kalahari. The oasis was then safe haven for many living things and was featured in the film The Gods Must Be Crazy.

Now the newly released Life in the Balance: Humanity and the Biodiversity Crisis (Princeton University Press, $24.95) brings Americans up to date on the Okavango--and the news isn't good. Its author, Niles Eldredge, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History, calls the delta "one of the last Edens on earth." Unless things change, he says, we're destroying our last Eden as surely as Genesis claims we destroyed the first.

Ranchers and farmers, he says, are pressing into the delta in their desperate search for more land. Readers interested in the conflicts between wildlife and humans in southern Africa will certainly find this worthwhile reading. Because Eldredge realizes that the southern Africans must eat, much of the book discusses sustainability issues.

Eldredge takes a pragmatic approach, while outlining the need for a stewardship model of wildlife management. But he's no advocate of extensive development, and every once in a while he'll surprise readers with such statements as, "To drive a species like the giant panda to extinction is, in my book at least, to commit a form of genocide."

For another viewpoint on wildlife management, try Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants (Simon & Schuster, $25). In this book, naturalist Katy Payne, a visiting fellow at Cornell University, tells of her close personal relationship with several groups of African elephants. She also details her deeply emotional response when Zimbabwean wildlife management officials decide to cull one of these herds.

Payne was a coauthor of "Infrasonic Sounds of Asian Elephants," published about a decade ago in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. Her new book discusses some of that research, which proposed methods by which elephants may communicate with each other over long distances.

The science, however, takes a back seat to Payne's personal struggle to come to grips with Africa. She works hard, trying to understand the intricacies of several different African cultures, and then attempts to come to terms with how these cultures interact with wildlife.

Two other substantial books on the history of human interaction with African ecosystems are also worth noting: Adam Hochschild's very readable King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, $26), on the destruction of the Belgian Congo's natural resources, and John Reader's Africa: A Biography of the Continent (Knopf, $35), dense but a good reference to have on hand.