Sacrificing human needs on the altar of conservation is wrong

On February 14, 2013, I invited some friends to a ranch I worked in for a weekend charity event that involved building a classroom for a community that bordered the ranch. We enthusiastically set out and assembled everything and everyone we thought we needed for the task. 

The community members, male and female, enthusiastically joined in, men loading the tractor, and women fetching water while the fundis worked on setting up the classroom. 

It was a simple structure, set up with treated wood poles, and wire mesh and then filled with stones and plastered with sand and cement. 

We worked hard, and the classroom for 42 community children was ready after three days. We all enthusiastically took pictures of our collective achievement, my village and city friends who had joined hands in what we considered a milestone. We went home happy and fulfilled, and the community members were thrilled.

Three days later, I received an angry call from a tourism operator from another ranch complaining that whatever we had built had introduced visual pollution to the detriment of his guests’ experience and their appreciation of conservation. 

Remember, the classroom was on land owned by the community.  

I was inches away from saying some very unChristian things to him, but I prayed for grace and asked him what he would have done differently for a community that needed an early childhood learning centre that gave children a chance.

He stuttered and said he didn't care about that and that we should paint the building jungle green or bring it down. Then the unChristian things I had bottled up came out. 

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To him, conservation and tourism didn't have a place for a mabati-roofed classroom in the middle of the “wilderness.” And this on land he didn't own. I started to question my conservation training.

Conservation is a loaded word. Loaded with pain and promise. The pain has come chiefly from what we have often called the fortress conservation. This colonial-era ideology views nature as a pristine wilderness to be walled off from human activity even when those humans own the land. 

For decades, conservation efforts have operated under the flawed premise that protecting biodiversity requires sacrificing human needs. This construct has stubbornly stuck with us and needs to go. We have erected fences and displaced communities – as late as last year in Ngorongoro, Tanzania – that have been stewards of forests and rangelands and banned many practices to safeguard ecosystems.

And yet, these approaches have constantly backfired and fueled resentment, and the very conservation outcomes they were meant to achieve have often fared worse. One scholar eloquently summarises this conundrum: “Protected areas are controversial because they are so important for conservation and because they distribute fortune and misfortune unevenly.” Like any other endeavour, conservation cannot succeed unless it actively improves human lives. 

A close friend works for an association of conservancies. In a recent conversation discussing the future of conservation in Kenya, we eventually reached a point of asking what happens after every land that can be a conservancy is registered. I argued that conservancies must transition from ecological units to economic units of organising production.

It must be a unit of organising people by intertwining ecological health with economic and social well-being. Conservation is not an altruistic endeavour divorced from human realities. Over 70 per cent of Africa’s wildlife resides outside protected areas, often alongside impoverished communities.

When conservation ignores livelihoods, it risks alienating the people whose cooperation is essential. Conversely, initiatives that generate income, jobs, and social benefits foster local ownership, turning communities into investors and partners rather than adversaries. 

This alignment of interests creates sustainable outcomes: Ecosystems thrive when their survival is tied to human well-being. 

A 2023 forum organised by Maliasili and bringing together 170 community-led conservation leaders across Africa eloquently articulated this. Communities are not passive beneficiaries of government or NGO largess; they are partners, investors, and owners of enterprises. We need to treat them as such.  

As Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom argued that communities are best positioned to manage shared resources when they directly benefit from their preservation.

This highlights the central place of livelihoods in this century's conservation thinking. Our approaches must consider how human well-being will eventually improve due to our choices today. It is not all doom and gloom, though. 

Some excellent organisations are helping dismantle this approach by organising and assisting communities to self-organise to reclaim their rights and design incentives that lead to better livelihoods. 

Simple techniques like occasional closures of fishing in some areas have resulted in better fish catches in subsequent seasons. Communities have always known this but the laws and policies criminalising access to certain areas have often led to over fishing. 

Coastal and Marine Resources Development, a local organisation working on the Kenyan coast, is helping communities organise and govern their marine resources, leading to more money in their pockets.

There are many other examples of mould-defying approaches that demonstrate that livelihoods and conservation are not mutually exclusive. In fact, conservation that doesn't contribute to the well-being of people eventually fails. Like my neighbour in the story I opened with, we must accept to be confronted with a different picture of what conservation looks like in human-dominated landscapes.

As a start, communities must have secure tenure that empowers them to manage resources sustainably. We must also ensure that resources reach communities that do the most critical work of keeping our human survival system in balance.