Fiona Macleod:A Second Look
During the debate in the past fortnight about whether the resumption of the ivory trade has led to an increase in poaching of elephants, both the Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Pallo Jordan, and his deputy, Peter Mokaba, have come out in favour of “sustainable utilisation” of natural resources as a conservation strategy.
In simple terms, “sustainable utilisation” is the theory that natural resources must be used and developed on a sustainable basis for the benefit of mankind. The saying “it must pay to stay” best sums up the theory when it comes to wildlife.
On the face of it, sustainable utilisation may seem to make a lot of sense. The danger, however, is that in their support for it, the minister and his deputy may be perceived to be lying down with some strange bedfellows: a powerful coalition of right-wing organisations whose agenda includes the cheap, unregulated exploitation of natural resources and the destruction of the environmental movement.
This coalition is known as the Wise Use movement. It came into being in 1988 in the United States, where it includes organisations representing ranchers, pro- gun lobbies, hunters, miners, loggers, trappers, off-road-vehicle users, industries and corporate front groups. It has since spread its tentacles internationally, and includes at least two Southern African conservation groups.
Ron Arnold, executive vice-president of the US Centre for the Defence of Free Enterprise, is considered to be the guru behind Wise Use. “Our goal,” he is on record as saying, “is to destroy, to eradicate, the environmental movement … We know how to lobby better than they do and we’ve got coalitions that can overwhelm them.”
High on the Wise Use wish list in the US is the opening up of national parks and wilderness for exploitation, the harvesting of ancient forests and the repeal of the Endangered Species Act.
In the process of furthering these aims, the movement has slotted in to a broader right-wing political backlash that portrays environmental regulation as government oppression.
“The political right has been working against environmentalism since the late Eighties,” writes Andy Rowell, author of Green Backlash. “With the demise of communism, the right was looking for new scapegoats, and environmentalism, which represented a growing political threat, fitted the bill.
“As millions celebrated Earth Day in April 1990, Human Events, the National Conservative Weekly warned that `Earth Day is a creation of the left, a pagan holiday devoted to fashioning a socialistMarxist world …’ Many Wise Use activists have taken up the message, calling environmentalists `watermelons’ – supposedly `green’ on the outside but `red’ on the inside.”
Marginalising environmental activists and portraying them as extremists are deliberate Wise Use tactics. So is dismissing environmental science. “The ozone hole is a manufactured doom,” claims Ron Arnold. “If CFCs really destroy ozone, why isn’t there a hole over CFC factories?”
Researchers tracking the more militant tendencies of Wise Use report an upswing in violence against environmental activists in the past decade. “Perhaps the most serious angle,” writes Rowell, “is the attempt to tar peaceful activists as violent terrorists. The more a group is scapegoated and marginalised from the mainstream of society, the less public support it attracts and the more it becomes acceptable for violence to be used against it.”
In the early Nineties a researcher working on a study of violence against environmentalists in the US reported that he had “discovered a pattern of death threats, fire-bombings, shootings and assaults targeting green activists”.
It is a pattern that is becoming recognisable in South Africa as the seamier side of conservation is exposed. An example is the exposure of the “canned lion” industry, where lions are kept in small enclosures and sometimes drugged for hunting purposes. Individuals involved in investigating the industry, including a member of the Endangered Species Protection Unit, have received death threats, and the car of one of them has been forced off the road on three occasions.
Ironically, given its right-wing allegiances, the Wise Use movement has managed to capitalise on the often legitimate concerns of indigenous communities to further its economic and political agendas, and to give itself grassroots appeal.
In the US, Canada and Australia, it has gained a major toehold among logging communities by concentrating on their anxieties about employment and long-term timber supplies. Pro-whaling communities in the Arctic coastal regions have received international support for their attempts to overturn the moratorium on commercial whaling.
Pro-hunting groups have found an influential voice in the International Wildlife Management Consortium, which is based in Switzerland and has a membership of at least 60 organisations worldwide. The consortium was set up in the mid-1990s to counter environmental and animal-welfare organisations at forums such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites).
It is within this fold that two Southern African operations have found a home: the Africa Resources Trust and Campfire, both based in Zimbabwe. Both organisations are in favour of hunting and trading in ivory, and both champion the rights of local communities to utilise their natural resources as they deem fit.
One of the most effective tactics of the Wise Use movement has been to present itself as the voice of moderation, while portraying environmentalists and others who disagree with it as traitors and terrorists. But Pallo Jordan and his deputy should know that the voice of moderation is not necessarily the voice of reason.