IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Seidensticker, J. | |
| Ecological and Intellectual Baselines: Saving Lions, Tigers, and Rhinos in Asia | |
| 2008 Book Chapter | |
We can move forward in an always uncertain world by setting biologically defensible recovery goals and managing for survival rather than engaging in hospice conservation in which we dutifully record events as we watch species slip away. The conservation of large carnivores - lions (_Panthera leo_) and tigers (_P. tigris_) - and of other demanding species, such as the greater Asian one-horned rhinoceros (_Rhinoceros unicorni_), in the human-dominated landscapes of Asia requires great commitment on the parts of conservation biologists, activists, land managers, and political leaders. It also requires a good bit of tolerance on the part of people who live and work in the places where these splendid great animals still live, and where we would like them to live in the future. What I have always found thrilling about working on conservation issues in Asia is that this commitment is as important an assumption in endangered species recovery as the issue of ecological amnesia. From a North American's perspective, with our limited understanding of our own environmental history and our myths of a nature untouched, we look at an Asian situation and the prospects look bleak. We see little hope that restoration is possible. I think we are overwhelmed by the heavy human footprint; we don't usually see people as part of the solution to ecological restoration even though people dominate landscapes. An Asian, on the other hand, would point out that we have always lived here. People are a fact of life. Change happens. Now let's get on with what we are trying to do and ask: "What useful ideas and tools do you bring to help us keep our wonderful wildlife ?" Establishing baselines is one such idea and a tool that is essential in endangered specie s recovery. Lee M. Talbot's ecological reconnaissance of South Asia in 1955 established baselines that we can use to measure both the ecological and intellectual changes in the landscapes he visited and the way we think about the conservation of those landscapes and species he profiled. in this chapter, I examine two areas where Talbot established baselines in 1955: the Gir Forcst in India and the Chitwan Valley in Nepal. A half century later, much has changed in the social, economic, and natural landscape-conservation matrix that supports the large, charismatic, but extinction-prone species that Talbot championed. Using these baselines, and from my experience in these human-dominated landscapes over that last thirty years, I see a future for wildlife on the Indian Subcontinent, rather than a continual deterioration and decline. Without Talbot's baselines, established a half century ago, we would be challenged to gauge how much ground has been gained and how we can use the past to inform the future. |
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