The Year of the Rabbit, with associations of calm, peace and good luck, follows that of the Tiger in 2022. For the present feature in the Conflict, Post-Colonialism and Conservation series, ECOS is very fortunate to have a review by Hannah Timmins of the World Wildlife Fund’s 2022 major report on Living with Tigers (How to manage coexistence for the benefit of tigers and people), for which her colleagues Sue Stolton and Nigel Dudley founders of Equilibrium Research, along with Smriti Dahal and Mike Belecky of WWF, were lead authors. Hannah also provides a broader perspective on coexistence with predators in a second article, Retrofitting Carnivores into British Culture, in which she draws lessons from over a decade’s professional field work in Africa, Asia and Europe.
ECOS has explored issues arising from potential re-introduction of large carnivores in to Britain’s landscapes as part of longstanding coverage of rewilding. A special edition in December 2019 highlighted the importance of rewilding’s ‘Golden Rules’ or so-called 3 C’s – Cores, Carnivores and Corridors – to which was added a fourth: Compassion.1,2,3 The evolution of the 3 principles into ‘Cores, Connectivity and Coexistence’ was further discussed in a 2021 ECOS article.4 However, the importance of Culture was perhaps insufficiently acknowledged given some rewilding projects have generated both conflict together with charges of ‘eco-colonialism’ in parts of the UK.1,5
Both Hannah Timmins’ article on Retrofitting Carnivores into British Culture and her review of WWF’s Living with Tigers emphasize the significance of culture in nature conservation and restoration, along with community-based approaches to large predator management. In a separate interview for ECOS, Nigel Dudley and Sue Stolton highlight too the importance of social equity considerations to ensure that costs and benefits of conservation are properly acknowledged and, wherever appropriate, remunerated.6 Emphasis on the cultural locus of conservation and restoration points to the spiritual, or numinous, associations of charismatic wildlife, particularly larger carnivores in countries where these survive, where re-introductions succeed and even where animals inhabit the collective consciousness.7
Last year saw a ‘2nd International Tiger Forum’ in the Russian Far East city of Vladivostok to review implementation of “the Global Tiger Recovery Programme for the period from 2010 to 2022”.8 Whilst emphasizing significant tiger conservation successes, the forum’s lead sponsor was unfortunately a reminder that the Year of the Tiger also brought continuing and new deadly human conflict to many parts of the world, including large areas of Sub-Saharan Africa.9 In this challenging context ECOS would like to draw attention to the work of the Marjan Study Group, part of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, which focuses on the impacts of armed conflict on biodiversity conservation.10,11
References
1https://www.ecos.org.uk/ecos-406-editorial-rewilding-connections-and-perceptions
4https://www.ecos.org.uk/time-to-put-the-wild-back-into-rewilding
5https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2020/01/21/environmental-colonialism
6https://www.ecos.org.uk/ecos-interviews-nigel-dudley-sue-stolton/
7https://bigcatconversations.com/ep12-secret-lynx-soft-rewilding
8https://tigerforum2022.com/en/news/itogi-ii-tigrinogo-foruma-i-plany-na-budushchee
9https://www.iiss.org/blogs/analysis/2022/11/acs-2022-sub-saharan-africa
10https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/marjan-conflict-biodiversity-and-military-sustainability-study-group
11https://www.chathamhouse.org/events/all/members-event/war-and-biodiversity