We humans have arrived at a point in our developmental history in which we have now to pump the brakes. We are forced to promote stops to our previously unfettered endeavour. If we want to see, tomorrow, a world that we are happy waking up in, we now need to curb human activity rather than let it soar.
The necessity of the national park might still be lost on older members of certain societies around the globe. The need to protect certain areas of wildlife, for the organic use by wildlife did not, until very recently, exist as a concern for some. In fact, the first national park ever created was the USA’s Yellowstone park, and it was created in 1872.
Since Yellowstone’s demarcation as land prioritised for the natural modes of existence and behaviour of wild plant and animal species, protection of lands has spread to cover nearly 14.7% of the globe’s land surface.
The fact that we have arrived at that nearly 15% spread, less than two hundred and fifty years on from the conception of this idea of protecting land for conserving wildlife is extraordinary in it’s own right. The global population has managed to find the collective agenda, the time and funding, to do this despite that the last two centuries have also been spent in the lengthy and costly process of modernisation.
But there are still elements of certain societies around the world that would find this notion anathema. Development, indeed, is still so needed in certain societies that any plans to curtail it’s freedom to manoeuvre are criticised. Even in better developed countries, those well-adorned with the infrastructure necessary to promote the wellbeing of millions, certain critics still argue vehemently against protecting lands.
Where would we be without our national parks?
It is a question that is central to the Netflix docuseries hosted by former US president Barack Obama. In the series first episode, he extols the value of the national park. They are “a place to escape the everyday burdens of life, an inspiration for our children, they’re a haven for endangered species, a hotbed for scientific research”.
The docuseries couches the importance of these protected lands, at points, within what protecting them will give us, as human beings. Obama’s presidential tones describe of what we would lose if the parks were forsaken. He describes what we stand to gain from further research into how they operate without our involvement.
That we would lose the privilege of enjoying the world’s natural spaces and that we may stand to lose future research or medicinal marvels presently hidden in the world’s wild spaces are two very good arguments for the protection of nature. This writer is not so naïve as to argue, idealistically, that we should not have to think of these areas as they relate to us in order to find reasons for why we should protect them.
That is, unfortunately, the nature of human hegemony over this planet. If we are to protect something, we must first ascertain as to it’s value to us. Many of the world’s protected areas also “regulate our climate, clean our air, purify our water”, and these considerations, also, might be read with regard to how they affect us.
In short, and as an answer to where we would be without national parks, we would live in a drastically different world that, despite its unknowability, would be most obviously shaped by its being one worse off for the human experience.
Gabon: a haven to the African Forest elephant
However, we here at the Tsavo Trust, with our localised, agenda-specific readership know that we can answer this question more narrowly. We have the privilege of looking at the issue of a world without national parks and considering it from a different point of view, safe in the knowledge that those who read this article are interested in that different perspective.
So, as a case study, we would like to consider the curious case of Gabon. The Central African country is home to the largest population of the recently reclassified African Forest elephant.
Last year, the IUCN, redefined the Forest elephant as a distinct species in its own right. In so doing, it separated the smaller, straighter-tusked creature from its relative, the African Savannah Elephant extant here in Tsavo. The reclassification also came with a new IUCN endangerment category.
The African Forest elephant is critically endangered. Compared with figures from 32 years ago, the African Forest elephant’s population has decreased by 86% in comparison to the African Savannah elephant’s drop-off of 60%.
Furthermore, where conservation efforts have been witnessing some success in the territories dominated by Savannah elephant, the Forest elephant still witnesses heavy persecution.
Central Africa is home to 11% of Africa’s elephant population but it and with West Africa are the regions most prevalently affected by poaching. What’s more, Central Africa, with it’s less robust tourism industry, is more obviously at threat to habitat loss as a result of commercial logging. It is also, in parts, historically unstably governed and internecine conflicts between people put the elephant there at huge risk.
This is, however, a generalised, regional reading of Central Africa and, in Gabon, the trend is largely bucked. Gabon’s Congo basin is considered a haven for the African Forest elephant and that is only because of it’s network of quickly created national parks.
Obama’s Netflix series opens on Loango National Park in the Gabon. It is a section of land that incorporates dense forests and cleared glades but it also pushes onto the Central African coastline. The first episode of ‘Our Great National Parks’ allows us witness to a hippopotamus that takes to the Atlantic Ocean in order to travel up the beach with the current.
It’s an incredible insight into behaviour not seen anywhere else on the earth and it shows how incredible the national park is in allowing for wildlife to do what it can, when left to its own devices.
Shots like this one captured by the ‘Our Great National Parks’ team would have been impossible, however, if certain biologists hadn’t managed to convince the former Gabonese President, Omar Bongo, of the beauty in his own country.
The story goes that biologists working in the Gabon’s Congo basin, dismayed at the habitat loss through commercial logging and worried that they would lose the ability to study the fauna they’d settled their to study, convinced the Gabonese premiere in 2002, with a series of photographs indicating the country’s natural beauty, that there were lands there in Gabon that needed protection.
A month after the photographs were shown to Mr. Bongo, 13 national parks had been created. Today, the African Forest elephant population of the Gabon stands at 95,000, up from 60,000 when the national parks were created in 2002. What’s more, in 2021, Gabon was the first African country to receive a payout from the UN-backed Central African Forest Initiative, designed to protect forest lands and reduce emissions.
So, the national park does indeed give us everything that the former president outlined in the introduction to his Netflix series (which we recommend you watch) but it also, from a very different perspective, given a critically endangered species of megafauna a chance at a prosperous life.
As a post-script, we’d also like to add that the Netflix docuseries also does an episode on elephant in Kenya. We know that all our readers will be interested in that one.