Edition Nr. 2
November 2012
Special
gazette
about this gazette
All articles in this gazette are connected somehow to our projects in the KD2 concession area in the South/West of Botswana. In March 2012, Comanis sponsored a jewelry workshop for the women of Zutshwa village, to improve the quality and marketability of their crafts. At the same time, Comanis had managed to get into the flagship shop of Mambo Camp (Wilderness Safaris) Botswana for exclusive rights to sell the women’s jewelry in a fair and transparent manner. Additionally, through the efforts of Comanis Trustee Derek Keeping, a number of Zutshwa’s expert trackers were hired to work on a predator inventory in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
Corinne Itten Comanis President and Partner of Gauer Itten Messerli Architects Switzerland. GIM founded Comanis and has been the main supporter for the last 10 years.
the urgency of conservation
Derek Keeping PhD student, Comanis Trustee, and passionate conservationist, he leads the Kalahari Wildlife Assessment. The overarching goal of this research project is to highlight threats and identify and evaluate solutions to conservation of the magnificent wilderness areas surrounding Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park.
visit our website www.comanis.ch
There is an ongoing plan to develop a series of wilderness campsites within the Zutshwa area, catering to the adventurous self-drive tourist, as well as the long-term potential for other ecotourism ventures, such as cultural tourism and walking safaris. All of these projects can provide varying degrees of income and meaningful employment for the community of Zutshwa. Comanis has reason to believe that through careful community and other stakeholder engagement, growth of wise ecotourism development is possible; there is a chance to give tangible value to this magnificent wilderness, and alongside continued subsistence livelihoods, ultimately assist steering this area towards a future rich in opportunity. We hope an example can be set, a model, that can be taken up by other districts in these arid regions, and culminate in a larger vision of regional conservation for the Kalahari ecosystem. We hope you‘ll join us. As a research scientist, focused on a necessarily limited scope of study in an astoundingly complex world, I’m familiar with a sometimes constraining feeling of the limits of reliable knowledge. Research leads to an ever-branching tree of further questions. Our collective accumulation of scientific knowledge over the last centuries barely scratches the surface of what there is to know about the natural world. Yet when it comes to conservation biology, a truly normative science, the implications of the knowledge we do have are actually pretty straightforward. We know enough. A great Swiss psychologist held the steadfast conviction that any increase in awareness demands a proportional increase in moral responsibility. We already know what it takes to save most species. Populations, communities, ecosystems need SPACE to survive. It’s only that the implication of this knowledge conflicts with an exponentially growing, resource-hungry, and increasingly consumer-driven human population. On a finite planet with a finite biosphere thinly veiled on its surface, the end result of global economies stuck in a paradigm of sustained growth ultimately rooted in resource extraction is highly predictable: fragmentation and disappearance of wild landscapes, loss of species, and unravel-
ling of ecosystems. The largest megafauna are usually first to go, but how this all happens exactly is highly uncertain, and likely to be punctuated with surprises. Of course this is a simplistic view, but the fact is most species threatened with extinction are so because of habitat loss. Large spaces free from conflict with humans are required for their populations to sustain themselves. Wilderness areas have passively persisted because they were difficult environments for people to live in. Modern technology makes such places increasingly accessible, and we now need a more active approach to their conservation if they are to survive. In many places around the globe today, human beings and their domesticates are the largest megafauna remaining. It’s just sometimes I share a feeling among fellow ecologists that perhaps we ought to devote less effort towards studying the multitude of impacts humankind is having on the natural world, or as one ecologist put it “monitoring our extinction research”, and more towards doing something to prevent it. We’re fast approaching limits and thresholds and last opportunities to ensure wilderness untainted by the industrial endeavour has a place in the future, as a “. . . blueprint of what life was originally intended to be . . .”
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