Elephants vs Locals: Ignorance is Bliss?

This has indeed been a great week in the world of everything environment and wildlife! On 3rd March we celebrated three events in one day! The first was the second year celebration of World Wildlife Day which was made official during the UN General Assembly Session in 2013 in commemorating the adoption of CITES. The second event, Africa Environment Day also falls on the same day and in honour of Wangari Maathai and the contributions she made in the protection of the environment, allocated that day as Wangari Maathai Day; making it the third celebrated event.

The highlighted issue that stood out this week was that it was time to get serious about wildlife crime. This was the message given by the UN Secretary General and echoed by the Secretary General of CITES. WWF also came out clear on recognising the importance of wildlife especially those endangered and threatened. Another issue raised was the increasing loss of habitat and its destruction in many African ecosystems. It has been realised that most African economies are being grown at the expense of the environment. With mining and exploration activities on the rise, we are slowly losing our environment to the gutter. Deforestation rates have increased and over-fishing has become a common problem. Do i even need to discuss what climate change is doing to our nations?

Its come out clearly over the past decades that things are getting worse in our world. With major technological and developmental discoveries, man is each day finding ways to survive. This however is affecting our environment many ways than it can handle and elephants are right in the middle of this. I've spoken a lot in my past posts on how elephants are being affected by man's destructions. Being the intellectual beings they are, their loss is felt far more than we can imagine. It is however even sadder to know that these elephants survival is tied to those whom they live close to as reported in 'The Guardian'. As 'harsh' as this writer may sound, i have to agree on his thinking, locals living around these animals have the power to protect them, but only if they knew why.

Its easy to put the blame on the government for bad governance, the wildlife organisations for not doing enough and the poachers, well for poaching. But have we stopped to consider the people at the grass root level? Elephants destroy their farms and kill them by the hundreds; would you protect an animal that does that if you didn't know why? No? Exactly! These locals need to be educated why elephants are important to them otherwise we will continue to face more elephant deaths by their numbers. Equally, those people living in forests who depend on it for their survival and cut down its trees unknowingly of the destruction they do will only continue to do so unless they know why they shouldn't. I believe that creating awareness to the locals living close to these ecosystems as well as these wildlife will go a long way in protecting these animals.

We may continue to celebrate these world events and remind ourselves how we are to blame for the loss of our environments and wildlife but if we continue to let these important people continue to live in their ignorance, we may be to blame far more than we are now. Let's think about that, shall we?