The learning curve of governance for more than one species

We are on a gigantic learning curve in living alongside other creatures. For example in Africa, it seemed fairly simple at first to designate game parks to protect wildlife. Just post some guards and leave the animals alone. But actually, managing these parks grew devilishly complex. It was not just a matter of controlling the poachers, or dealing with evicted local people, or coping with attacks by park animals on the surrounding villages. Within the parks, the wardens found themselves responsible for managing imbalances and conflicts between the animals themselves. To keep an environmental balance over time, the managers felt they had to intervene, responding to booms and busts in animal populations. To do that, the rangers had to concoct ecological policies, as if trying to keep gigantic aquariums from going toxic. The delimited parks were inevitably smaller than what the animals actually needed. Parks were just potential bases of operations, and the semi-protected lions, elephants, zebras, or buffaloes needed to range more widely, through an ever-more densely populated human landscape. The realms of protected wild animals and human communities had to interpenetrate, with the multiple needs of each creature somehow accommodated. It was as if the animals had acquired a kind of citizenship—as if they were ethnic minorities, and an animal’s need could now sometimes trump a human’s greed. This was governance not just in obedience to a central authority or to the popular will of a certain human community. It was an attempt to meet a more basic challenge—how to manage the conflicting interests of all the life forms of a multi-species community within a limited space. To handle it involved a steep learning curve, full of dramatic trials and errors. It was a challenge that took the co-evolution of humans and beasts to a new level. -- War and Peace with the Beasts