Excellent article, Paula, but where it says, conservationists often point out that the most profitable use of wildlife is to leave it where it is, where it can generate sustainable incomes from wildlife tourism. I would add that the greatest sustainable value (seldom expressed in dollar terms) is the role elephants play as eco-system engineers, mega-gardeners of the forest and savannah. Each elephant produces about a tonne of manure every week, enriching soil fertility and ecosystem productivity; after eating fruit, their dung is packed with seeds - they disperse more seeds of more species of plant than any other animal, sowing the next generation of trees that will stabilise our climate into the future - if we let them live. And they do this whether or not a tourist lens has ever been focussed on them, so tourism dollars are just a bonus to the true value of elephants and other keystone species.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 11:49:26 +0000
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