Let Them Run Wild

• Share

A light morning mist hangs over the jungle as Peter Taggart sets a hornbill on a tree branch. Taggart runs an antipoaching station in the Cardamom Mountains in southwest Cambodia, and the hornbill, a black bird with a white breast and an oversize yellow beak, has been confiscated from a local villager. "The guy was keeping it as a pet," says Taggart, who works for Washington-based Conservation International. "He said he didn't know it was protected, but they all know, really."

The locals are hearing a lot about protecting the wildlife and the forests these days. For years the 2.5 million acres of rain forest and the wildlife that lives in it--including tigers, leopards, barking deer and gibbons--were left alone while Cambodia was at war. The Cardamoms were used as a sanctuary by the feared Khmer Rouge, who laid land mines and booby traps to keep people out. But when the civil war ended in the 1990s, loggers, hunters and farmers started moving in, slashing and burning the forest and eventually prompting environmental groups to scramble for a strategy to protect the region, one of the last wilderness areas in Southeast Asia.

Wilderness, in the elegant words of the 1964 U.S. Wilderness Act, is land "where man himself is a visitor and does not remain." Wilderness areas are critical for protecting biodiversity: tropical rain forests alone, which cover 6% of the planet's land area, are home to more than half of all known species. But many wild regions suffer from human encroachment, and species are vanishing at a rate not seen since the demise of the dinosaurs. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, along with Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly and Stewart Brand, who set up the Whole Earth Catalog, among others, are raising money for a 25-year, $5 billion effort called the All Species Initiative to catalog every species on earth--perhaps 80% of which are still undiscovered. "Surely the rest of life matters," Wilson writes in The Future of Life. "Surely our stewardship is its only hope." Natural habitats provide priceless services to humanity, from climate control to water purification to the supply of our medicines. And what if future generations never have the opportunity to see a panda or humpback whale?

But all is not lost--at least not yet. Even as Wilson and others warn of an impending Armageddon, conservation groups and scientists are devising innovative strategies for preserving broad swaths of rain forest, grassland, tundra and coral reef before they are swallowed by the global village. All face the fundamental dilemma: how to balance man's economic urgency with nature's ecological vulnerability.

"It sounds counterintuitive, but you have to build economies around protection," says Gustavo Fonseca, senior vice president for science at Conservation International. With 6 billion people and counting, the world is too crowded to fence off wilderness areas and ignore the impact on human livelihood. Communities must be able to prosper alongside wilderness without encroaching on it. "The future of conservation can be described in one word: zoning," says Eric Dinerstein, chief scientist for the World Wildlife Fund-U.S. "We cannot stop development, nor should we. The most we can do is have it in places where it does the least damage."