Relevant Dan O'Brien Article

Greetings Everyone:

In the future, I'll be looking to add and properly cite other articles and write-ups related to Namibia and the conservancy system to help supplement my blog. There is so much to be said about Namibia and its unique conservation system, and its way beyond what I can feasibly do while working. So I will call on my friends and colleagues in the future for relevant documents to help tell this unique story.

A good start to this process is Dan O'Brien's recent write-up of his Northern Great Plains World Wildlife Fund tour here in Namibia my ranching neighbors the Switzer's were also a part of. One of the first things my boss Chris Weaver and I talked about upon my return, was if I read Dan's new article. I was happy to hear he wrote something up and finally found it on the internet.

I want to share this article for various reasons, but the main one is because I was able to participate in a few of the WWF NGP tour events like Dan. Plus, Dan has seen the before and after picture of Namibia's apartheid history, and shows renewed enthusiasm for Namibia's conservation successes and possible applications in the Great Plains.

I truly feel like Dan clearly states in his article, that there is so much the mighty United States can learn from Namibia's conservancy system and apply the lessons to help restore our Northern Great Plains ecologically, economically, and its native culture.

I honestly think this is a model the Obama Administration and other federal agencies need to seriously look at in the short-term when dealing with development issues in Africa and sustaining communities in America's Heartland. Our working landscapes need to be able to incorporate conservation models to protect our ecosystems-bottom line.

Whenever I read about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton preparing to tour Africa in the media and other various columnists articles, I always commented about how she needed to stop in Namibia and see the results of positive community based natural resource management practices. Hopefully, there will be future possibilities.

Once a week I write a postcard to my friends who live in Delvin, Ontario, Canada on a reservation. We use to talk on the phone regularly, but its too cost prohibitive for both parties, and they don't have regular access to the internet. But I always pick a postcard that showcases an area where I've visited or a tribe I was able to interact with and I write brief notes on the card. I always find myself telling my friends about how I think community based conservation could work on their reserve or in the Great Plains frequently.

What's fun about living in a capital city like Windhoek, is driving around and seeing all the various embassy buildings. WWF use to share a building with the Kenya Embassy. The Angola Embassy is by the Craft Center which houses my favorite health drinks. There are embassy buildings in the Luxury Hill district where I live, but have no idea which ones are my neighbors.

Every time I walk to the post office, a short three block walk toward a business area, I walk right by the U.S. Namibia Embassy. To be honest, I didn't realize it was our embassy till shortly before I left. Its not clearly marked, but the heavily guarded entrance could have been a sign.

At the Cheetah Conservation Fund's "Roaming Wild" fund raising event, I met the U.S's Namibia Ambassador, Dennise Mathieu. She gave me her card and said to stop by sometime. I will. I'm hoping she can pull on my administration's ear to take a closer look at the success stories of conservation in Namibia. Dan's article will assist me in this process too.

Hope all is well with everyone.

Thank-you for reading!

Cheers,

Aaron




Here is the link to his article with a video:

http://wildideabuffalo.com/blog/african-sadness/

And here is the full text Dan wrote [in bold]:

In September of 1988 a blast of cold rain sent a friend and me scurrying back to a shallow cave we had noticed in an African canyon wall. We had not seen anyone for days but now three young men with a kudu hung over a pole were scurrying from the other direction and we came suddenly face to face at the cave entrance. Their dogs raised their hackles and growled and we all stood frozen in the rain. I had not thought of the insurrections, murders, and mayhem that were going on throughout southern Africa for days, but now it was in all of our minds. Thankfully, it was cold and finally we all, white men, black men, dogs, and kudu pushed into the rock and out of the wet. No one spoke but after a few minutes I took a partial box of saltine crackers from my backpack and held a few out to the young men. We sat in the thick humidity with our backs against the rock and ate saltine crackers. It made me terribly sad for Africa.

In Namibia the South Africans were just giving up control to the United Nations and their war against communist insurgents based in Angola and assisted by Castro’s Cubans. Namibia was interesting to me because it is a dry, sparsely populated land not unlike the Great Plains America. Of course they had the Kalahari Desert, ostriches, lions, elephants, cheetahs, several kinds of antelope, and the still-smoldering remnants of a decades-long civil war. One of the enduring – if not endearing – reminders of apartheid South African rule were concentration camps, called Homelands, that were not unlike the reservations of my home state of South Dakota.

The black faces in and around those Homelands were hollow and haunted. We drove to the Skeleton Coast which was deserted for miles and miles. We drove for hours without seeing a building. Somewhere we stopped and I bought a wire sculpture of a man riding a bicycle from a small boy who sat in the ditch with only scraps of wire and a broke pair of pliers. It was the only thing we found that was for sale. The only road signs were political signs and we rolled our eyes to imagine what sort of government and society could rise from these ashes.

In 1988 Namibia was a mess. Socially and environmentally the land was shelled out. Though the breathtaking beauty was still intact it was hard to see how this land could avoid a further down-hill spiral. We finished our loop through the country and back to Johannesburg where we dropped off the Land Rover and caught our flight back to the States. But the memory of Namibia never left me. When asked about my experiences in Africa I never failed to say that, despite the malaise of the country, I loved Namibia best. It was like stepping back to the 1840’s on the Great Plains of America – when the land was still pretty much in tact, the natives – though devastated – were still the major human component, and the vast suite of species was stressed but extant.

Even with a functioning government, strong institutions, great wealth, and America’s famous can-do spirit, the Great Plain’s decline had pretty much continued along the path established in the 1840’s. The land I knew was battered and industrialized, poverty and dysfunction among our Native Americans was a national disgrace, most of the iconic species of the Great Plains had been reduced to curios. When I left Namibia in 1988 I had no hope that a war ravaged third world country could find a way when America had failed. As we climbed skyward from the Johannesburg airport and I caught a glimpse of the Kalahari Desert and was sad beyond reason. The fact that Namibia was so unique only made my sadness worse.

That is why I had mixed feelings when the World Wildlife Fund offered to take Jill and me to Namibia. They wanted to show us how our little prairie ranch house could generate some money as an eco-tourism facility. I was skeptical that Namibia could show me much about conservation or how to make our little sliver of the Great Plains a destination for people interested in the same things that Jill and I are interested in. I was skeptical and I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what had happened to Namibia in the preceding twenty years. I couldn’t imagine that I would enjoy what I would see. The last thing I wanted was to destroy my marvelous memories of Gemsbok moving across the road ahead of us or the silent, white-sand beaches stretching to infinity. The assurances that, from a conservation and cultural point of view, Namibia had become a model for Africa were not heartening. I didn’t say it but I thought “a conservation and cultural model for Africa is not what I have in mind for my ranch.”

That turned out to be an embarrassingly arrogant assessment. The fact is that some combination of respect for mankind, love of the natural world, common sense, and a startling vision of what is possible has come together in Namibia. In fact, in almost all ways they have done better deserts than we have done with our Great Plains. With a little outside money, help from a few dedicated NGO’s, and a will to move ahead, Namibia seems to be rejecting the destructive western ideas of “developing” their Great Wide Open in favor of a more natural and permanent approach. Unlike the official and unofficial policies that have driven management policies on the American Great Plains, Namibia has stepped back from the supposed imperative of domesticating the wild lands and is encouraging wildness. Visionary land holders, politicians, and NGO’s like WWF have rejected many western notions of progress and – sorry to say, America – employed a species of creative thinking that exists nowhere else that I know.

What they have done is far more nuanced than can be expressed in these few pages but the basic tenants are these: Cooperation among landholders, limited privatizing of wildlife, understanding that a healthy eco-system is salable, commitment to large-scale land management, and an honest belief that all races must be included. These are all ideas that have, sadly, never had much purchase on the American Great Plains. Add to these basic ideas the obvious but often absent notion that the quality of the amenities adds great value to the already salable ecological experience and you come up with Namibia’s stunning and profitable eco-tourist industry. The Namibians have created a major, non-consumptive industry from what, in other cultures, has been rejected as desolation.

WWF designed our tour of Namibia to spotlight what might be done in a beautiful landscape suffering from a centuries-long inferiority complex. We traveled to a half dozen venues in Namibia – some completely “off the grid”, where we found comfortable accommodations, excellent food, fabulous service, a healthy landscape, and happy people. They have formed legal entities called conservancies consisting of very large tracts of privately, publically, and communally owned lands. These are huge expanses that do justice to the natural scale of south western Africa. Their size allows for precious differences in rainfall across these legal entities that make livestock grazing and managed hunting more successful. The likelihood of green grass is much higher when entire landscapes are involved and the fact that the barriers of ownership have been dissolved gives the wildlife a chance to move to that grass. Ranching and hunting are more successful than they once were because of the landscape scale, but the surprising economic star of Namibia’s conservancy system is eco-tourism – people traveling for the main purpose of experiencing a healthy, large-scale ecosystem.

While it is true that Safaris are beyond the budgets of most people, it is also true that this sort of economic development brings serious hard cash into a region without leaving a discernable negative footprint. Experiencing the Namibian landscape – taking it in with your eyes, or camera, or even shooting a few completely renewable kudu for food, leaves no scares. It’s most evident trace seems to be the smiles on the faces the Namibians who own, live around, or work in these camps and conservancies. That sort of smile is as rare on the American Great Plains as Whooping Cranes or large herds of buffalo. They are the sort of smile that I saw almost none of in 1988.

Of course there have been problems and continue to be problems to be worked out in Namibia’s transformation. There would be problems on our Great Plains. Changing the course of any mammoth and mindless vessel is not easy. During the first week of my return trip to Namibian my natural skepticism took the form of grumblings such as “Our game laws would never allow the landowners to manage the animals,” “You have huge landscapes populated with herds of exotic animals,” “Your labor costs are a fraction of ours.” I was answered with, “America is the great democracy – laws can be changed,” “Your landscape is bigger than ours and we brought those herds from the edge of extinction – the same way you could,” “Labor? Didn’t you tell me that the unemployment rate on the Pine Ridge Reservation is 85%?”

I still grumble a little but I have been shown that adding an eco-tourism component to the economy of the Great Plains is not only a good idea but a possible idea. Not easy, but possible. WWF has been working for twenty-seven years in Namibia and it would take all of that to make a similar change on the Great Plains. We would have to change some minds, we would have to control agri-business, we would have to truly reach out to the Native populations, and we would have to be prepared to actually think out of the box that our smugness has landed us in. But it would be possible, and it would be worthwhile for our future, perhaps vital for our survival.

I think back on the sadness that I felt for Africa in the 1980’s with some embarrassment. The political turmoil and the threat to the environment and the species that made Africa so special were real enough. But was my sadness another form of paternalism? Was my belief in America so blind and my belief in the abilities of Africans so weak that I thought Africa would surely come up ecologically short? Why did it take this second trip to Namibia for me to see that it was America that was slipping behind?

I look at it as a wakeup call. My belief in America is still very strong but it is no longer blind. We’ve made some tremendous mistakes in the last two hundred years. We’ve decimated the treasure that is the Great Plains and the people who once had it to their selves. Both are on the verge of extinction. But if small, poor, politically nascent Namibia can find a way to bring the natural things back to balance and find a way to reconcile two races that in my memory were brutally killing each other, then big, wealthy, politically sophisticated America can certainly come to grips with the fact that all we really have is our eco-system. We should be able to realize that people, the world over, will go to great lengths and pay dearly for the privilege of seeing the Great Plains eco-system function as it once did.

Finally Back in Windhoek

August 20th, 2009

My internal time clock is slowly catching up.

Its now 4:30 AM Namibia time and I can’t sleep, but this is pretty typical for one’s first week of jet lag. You’ll feel extremely tired around 8 or 9 PM and will be sleeping away, then something inside says, “Wait! Something is not right here! Wake UP!” And there you sit on the bed looking at your watch and anticipating when you’ll see the first sunlight crease its way across the floor through bedroom windows.

There are some benefits. It allows one to see some nice sunrises and slowly wake up with chirping birds normally missed from normal sleeping schedules. I also kept thinking about my short time back in the states and how much fun it was to be back. So I decided it was a good time to blog.

Last time, it took me about 4 days to finally have a normal sleeping schedule, which was substantially helped by large amounts of caffeine. This time it doesn’t appear I’ll have to go on any large caffeine benders. I did purchase my favorite green tea just in case.

The Journey: [Omaha => Detroit => Amsterdam => Johannesburg => Upington => Windhoek]

I spent a total of 60+ hours of traveling when one combines both plane rides [to the states and back] and my bus ride from Johannesburg to Windhoek. Totally exhausting.

And in a two-week period, this almost pushes the limit.

The bus ride and spending extra time in Jo’burg allowed me to rest up and slowly adjust. It almost kills me to be 6 foot 6 inches and have to be balled up in coach for hours on end. Luckily, the guy seated by the window on the Amsterdam to Jo’burg flight had some type of stomach issue and was relieving himself frequently. It gave my legs a chance to feel blood flowing again.

But its good to finally be back, united with my colleagues again, and meeting some great new room mates from Germany. Two are doctors finishing up their in-house practice requirements in the state hospital in Katatura. To pick Katatura shows a lot of passion about their field of work. I’m going to help volunteer on the weekends with them when I’m not in the field.

The Flights:

I was a little disappointed I couldn’t explore Europe when I landed in Amsterdam’s airport! It was all I could do to just go buy coffee and not look at the Amsterdam calendars and postcards showcasing the city’s beauty. All the promotional films in the plane didn’t help either, especially seeing people renting bikes and just cruising around. I only had 3 hours and wish I had at least two days!

There will be another day Europe! And I will explore my family’s roots and all the history soon!

Johannesburg was such an interesting experience for me. I’ve never been in a city that can completely scare the sh!t out of you, yet strike such wonder and curiosity. You have to be totally aware of things at all times. I shot some great HD video with my Flip, but sadly it will probably have to wait till I return to the states to upload all the files to youtube and the blog.

[Just a little side note pitch for Flip: totally amazing machine. Its so small it looks like a cell phone and allows one to shoot more candid shots without people knowing they’re being filmed. And from a journalism standpoint I see big things happening now when people can carry around their own cameras and produce high quality footage. If you’re traveling anywhere, you should purchase one of these and you won’t regret it!]

My first time through Jo’burg was such a surface attempt at experiencing the city, and this time around I was not going to pass up the opportunity to go out and explore.

It never ceases to amaze me about the various reactions people have when you start talking about this city. Many immediately chop it off as a dangerous place [the statistics do place it as one of the most violent cities in the world] where one should never leave the airport. Others, feel its perfectly fine if you play it safe and take proper precautions. I tend to fall in the second camp.

There is some concern about the World Soccer Cup being hosted and the safety of fans. I’m not sure what is going to happen. Its too late to rebid the hosting country and the stadiums are already built and ready to go… Sadly, it still feels like apartheid is well and alive in this city. Segregation is still easily seen and the wealth distribution is also extreme, so crime is going to happen with these extremes.

I hope for South Africa’s sake that the World Cup still occurs and that its safe for people. It’s a great opportunity to showcase a beautiful country.

Touring Jo’burg:

Cab fair is pretty outrageous in that city and drastically cut down the places and ect. where I could go in two days time. One of my big goals was accomplished and that was going to the world famous Apartheid Museum. Sadly, one still see’s large traces of segregation in Jo’burg’s society, especially when one compares the different township living conditions.

One of the strengths in this museum was making the “human experience” of apartheid the first step one takes upon entering the building. Its so easy for one to just purchase a ticket at other museums and not have a clue or context about what you’re going to experience.

At the Apartheid Museum, you walk by pillars with pictures of living relatives who’s families were impacted by apartheid rule in negative ways. The mirrors in the pillars positioned behind the life size photos places the contemporary history right at your feet before you walk in.

Once you enter, many ID cards fill the area showing how people were classified and terms and law were defined that allowed apartheid to occur. It was a moving experience to start a museum tour in this fashion. The original signs also added to the intensity with the words “whites” and “colored” leading you into the building.

The Bus:

For 100 US dollars, I can’t complain much about taking 20 hours to make it from Jo’burg to Windhoek.

Upington, ZA is a nice little community with amazing wine and grape fields. Luckily, I was able to see lots of ZA during the day on this trip and a large part of Jo’burg leaving for Upington. Now, I just need to travel to Cape Town for a nice Rugby football weekend when time allows me to go.

Customs was a pain this time and took forever to work through the system. There were five guys from Pakistan who were traveling with us. They were profiled quite extensively and held up the border transition, but everything eventually came through for them and we were all on our way.

I had the privilege of sitting by one of them and piecing together his story. Luckily, that morning I bought a condensed World Atlas book, so I showed him where I was from and he showed me where in Pakistan he was from. He told me many stories about traveling around in the region, what life is like in his homeland, and the struggles his family faces there.

Initially, I figured they were from the Afgan border region. I was right. They’ve been on the run for 25 years now avoiding all the conflict. I couldn’t imagine being away from home and family for that period of time. Yet, they were extremely friendly and open about their culture and country with me. It would seem to me it would be painful to talk about certain things, but maybe all my questions takes them back to that place in their minds and heart they call home.

The wreck:

And until yesterday, I could say I was never involved in a motor vehicle accident. Now, it’s a badge I can wear. Our bus rear-ended a van full of 20+ people in the wee morning ours just outside of Windhoek. I’m not sure what happened. I only heard the bump noise and the screeching impact. Luckily, everyone appeared to be fine from the accident.

I immediately exited the bus and went to the back where all the luggage was sitting and dug around till I found my two bags and immediately called Helge to come and pick me up. Things were turning chaotic fast and I just wanted to go to my hostel apartment.

Regardless of the rough start in Windhoek, I’m excited about my new roommates, being relocated to my first hostel apartment again, the survey, and the 4 months I have waiting in front of me.

Thank-you for reading and I look forward to talking more about the conservancy system in Namibia, my research, and ect. in further depth. There is so much to be learned here about community development and working landscapes incorporating wildlife and other ecosystem goals into the management plans. Rubber is hitting the road with the survey and I can't wait to share my experiences and stories from the freehold land farmers.

Cheers,

A.E. Price

PS: Here are some photos from Jo'burg. Enjoy!

The World Cup Soccer Stadium:



Driving Around To Park Station: