Is Poverty Relevant to Conservation? (Travels...

Is Poverty Relevant to Conservation? (Travels in Sierra Leone)
By M.A. Sanjayan, Nature Conservancy lead scientist

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Live Web Audio Chat: Poverty and Conservation
You can attend a live audio chat on poverty, the environment, and conservation on Wednesday, May 31, at 2pm, ET / 11am, PT.

Listen as Andrés Ferrer, Country Director for The Nature Conservancy in the Dominican Republic, discusses how he's been leading efforts in his country to bridge the divide between poverty alleviation and environmental protection.
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Have you ever wondered how the other half lives? That is, how do nearly 3 billion people scratch out a living on the equivalent of less than $2 a day?

A few months ago, I traveled to Sierra Leone, the West African nation with the miserable distinction of being dead last three years in a row on the U.N.'s Human Development Index.

When I arrived, a friend who runs a wildlife sanctuary confided that his chimpanzees live longer than the average Sierra Leonean. I set off on foot through a spiderweb of forest paths to find out what the worst poverty in the world means for people and nature. I carried only a few food items in my backpack -- some chocolate, tea, Tabasco sauce, a flask of scotch. My plan was to buy vegetables and meat along the way. After all, in my pockets I carried an ample supply of cash, protected from the penetrating damp by plastic bags.

I paid for this naiveté by losing a dozen pounds in about as many days.

As I stumbled into the village of Yifin on the forested slopes of Mount Loma, the only food I could find for sale was rice. With no means to store or transport food, the villagers can't risk growing vegetables. So they grow staples like rice or yams, supplement their monotonous, nutrient-poor diet with fruit or plants collected from the forest, catch fish in the streams, and occasionally trap the odd cane rat or monkey. This supplemental diet gives each person about 50 grams -- maybe three tablespoons -- of meat protein per day. So they eat from the forest. I slowly starved.

In countless poor, rural communities such as this, people derive much of their daily needs directly from nature: cooking fuel from the forest, drinking water from the stream and other basic needs from their surroundings. These services from nature -- "ecosystem services," as scientists put it -- are essentially free and keep rural communities afloat.

For many people, just six basic ecosystem services provide up to 80 percent of life-sustaining needs. I call these the "Six F's": fuel wood, fisheries, fresh water, fertility of soils, fodder for livestock and forest products.

For many of the world's poor, nature -- not government -- provides the most reliable social security check. Lose any one of these Six F's, however, and most of these people will have no choice but to move somewhere else, pray for assistance or starve.

But the story is not all grim. Just as degrading ecosystem services can disrupt lives, stewarding and restoring these services can sustain people during their transition out of poverty.

In Kenya, the Green Belt Movement has shown how reforesting denuded areas can improve lives by restoring water supplies, providing fuel wood and replenishing soil fertility. My Nature Conservancy colleagues are working at the Meso-American coral reef in Central America, around Komodo Island in Indonesia and elsewhere to sustainably manage fisheries, maintain biodiversity and sustain human needs.

In the past decade, we have seen international agencies, governments and individuals redouble their efforts to combat extreme poverty. Now is the right time for people who care about conservation to join these efforts by supporting win-win solutions that help alleviate poverty while strengthening ecosystems.

The work of those fighting poverty will no doubt be made easier and more lasting with our help. Similarly, it strikes me that as we work to halt the loss of Sierra Leone's pygmy hippo and its forest habitat -- a loss that would make all future generations poorer forever -- our most important allies might be those in the poverty-alleviation business.

Read more about poverty and conservation online in the Summer 2006 issue of Nature Conservancy magazine and join us online for a live web audio chat on poverty and conservation on Wednesday, May 31 at 2pm, ET / 11am, PT.

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Comments: 2

Meryl Johnson May 31, 2006, 10:23am EDT

That's how most of the world lived during most of human history, and they didn't do all that badly, either. Even in my own family, when I was a kid and visited relatives in rural Virginia, families were essentially self-sustaining, and food, especially, was mostly free for the taking. Fish, crabs, oysters, etc. from the rivers and the Bay, vegetables from the garden, milk by barter from neighbors' cows, meat from the Family Pig. They bought flour and sugar and a few other staples. And they ate an awful lot better than I can afford to eat in NYC. In colonial times they'd also spun their own yarn and made their own clothes. At least in some places times change slowly.

Actually, there's a big difference between the "poor" and actual poverty. Poverty is when you don't have what you need to live. "Poor" is when you don't have much to spend and don't spend much.

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Gerry Wass Jun 2, 2006, 10:10am EDT

Although I have long been generally aware of the connection between poverty and environmental destruction, this article puts a new, more positive spin on the situation for me, with the idea that those who work to alleviate poverty might be the best possible allies for conservation work. I enjoyed this article and your close encounter with great hunger; it left me hopeful.

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Is Poverty Relevant to Conservation? (Travels in Sierra Leone)

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