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I'm going to create a clothing and accessory line featuring photos I took during my time working at a wildlife rehabilitation center in Belize and all profits from sales will go to that particular organization. I don't have a projected launch date at this time, however. Belize is super awesome in that it has over 30% of it's land set aside as parks or protected areas. But it's also really small, you can drive the longest distance of the country in about 6 hours, so all that protected forest is pretty piddly in the global scheme of things. But just imagine how much of the world would be pristine if every country did that. It doesn't even need to be the North American Model, either. There's other ways of conserving landscapes without completely banning human use. Often forcing the NAM in developing countries creates local conflict and giving up on traditionally sustainable practices, resulting in unrest and illegal activities when desperate people are trying to support their families and some rich Westerners come in and tell them to knock it off because the land is pretty and they're all just stupid savages wrecking their favourite vacation spot. You can't just go in and tell people making a living off the land that they have to stop and find something else when there is nothing else, there needs to be a balance struck. I did some studies in school about successful alternative park models, I think it's possible to sometimes find a balance between conservation and human use, but it takes really careful planning. I'll go digging through old files and find some good examples.
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Apr 21, 2017 13:23
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Okay, I totally forgot I was going to find some cool examples of conservation using a different model than the North American model of shutting down all human use. Here's a couple a found during my research. Alimentos Nutrinaturales Sociedad Anónima A group of women in Guatemala fighting to protect the rainforest where Maya Nuts grow. The Maya Nut tree requires mature forest to grow and the nuts are harvested after falling from the tree. No damage done and an important local food source, but was at serious risk of being wiped out due to logging and agricultural land conversion. The original team has since expanded their operation to more communities and also work with the Guatemalan government to provide a school lunch program and teach kids about the nutritional value of the nut compared to crops, hoping to inspire future community leaders to carry on their work. http://www.equatorinitiative.org/images/stories/com_winners/casestudy/case_1348067785.pdf Bunaken Concerned Citizen’s Forum This is a group working with the National Park Advisory Board that represents 30,000 residents in 22 communities located within the park. They have collectively partitioned the park into different land use participatory regions. Nature conservation zones are completely protected from resource use and only scientific pursuits and conservation initiatives are permitted. Utilization zones allow for tourism only. Support zones allow traditional livelihoods and natural resources use by local communities, which facilitates the ongoing protection of the other zones. Defying zone usage rules results in heavy fines and jail time, and high impact intrusive fishing practices such as cyanide and dynamite are completely banned. http://www.dive-the-world.com/reefs-and-parks-indonesia-bunaken-national-park.php Wechiau Community Hippo Sanctuary Similar to the Maya Nut operations, this is a Shea Nut operation in Ghana. Also requiring mature forests, the nut is also harvested with no need for habitat destruction. The women in the community prepare the shea nuts into shea butter which then gets sold on an international market, generating income for the community. The resulting habitat protection has ensured that the nearby hippo population, which is only one of two remaining in Ghana, can thrive and there is also a thriving ecotourism industry for the community. They have recently been able to open an ecolodge for tourists and build a school for the kids in the community. Supplemental funding for infrastructure projects is raised by the Calgary Zoo, which I happen to work at so this place is kind of special to me. We sell the shea butter in our gift shops and it sells crazy well. It feels good to support Wechiau like that.  http://www.ghanahippos.com/
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May 24, 2017 02:33
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Wildlife conservation has been a local hot topic here this summer due to one single bear known as Bear 148. She likes the wildlife corridor between Canmore and Banff, but seeing as how this is surrounded by heavy traffic due to thousands of people living recreational lifestyles in the area, she's been having daily encounters with people on foot, pushing strollers, riding bikes, walking dogs. She's charged at people, chased people, and has been shown to be really aggressive around people with dogs. In early July she was trapped and released in Banff National Park but showed up back in Canmore about a week later. A couple of days ago she was trapped again and relocated 450km away, north of Kakwa Provincial Wildland Park. A lot of people who never cared about anything like this have been frothing at the mouth in anger over this decision. And I can see their point, people are intruding on bear habitat, and Canmore is famous for people using wildlife corridors for recreation even though it's prohibited. It would be great if we didn't have to 'manage' wildlife in the interest of public safety. But in order to ensure this bear isn't euthanized because it killed someone's baby or something, she's been relocated to a place where human interaction will be at a minimum. If it saves her life, I support it. Grizzlies in Alberta are a threatened population, and don't often mix with the BC population due to geographic barriers such as the continental divide which is pretty much a solid chain of impassable mountains stretching thousands of kilometers. There are some passes and valleys but these are often occupied by highways and such. So saving as many female bears as possible on this side of the divide is critical.
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Aug 2, 2017 19:39
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pointsofdata posted:Are the Alberta grizzlies genetically distinct from other ones, or is it a recent divide? I looked into it and I was slightly mistaken, it appears that it's the Rocky Mountain Trench that splits the populations, not the Continental Divide. So the Rocky Mountain grizzly population includes southeastern BC, southwestern Alberta, and northern Montana. The different populations is quite a recent thing, when European settlers decimated the grizzly population.    Even more recently there was loss of connectivity with the building of highways, and some of this was reversed with the building of wildlife overpasses and underpasses in national and provincial parks, but these don't exist on every highway and populations that have been recently fragmented in BC, such as the Purcell population, are in steady decline now. Highway 3 which runs east/west has fragmented several populations and there's no over/underpasses on it because it's mostly out of park territory.  Epitope posted:Bless you, Bear 148 She's a cutie and she might be pregnant! Hopefully we'll find out next spring if she's still being closely monitored and not dead.  While looking for a good photo of her I found this map of her movements in one week last June. She is collared so they can track her.  It's neat to see it because I've been on foot in so many of those locations, day and night. I was on the same trail as the points around the blue 1 west of Banff on June 4th, there was a bear warning, it was likely her. Didn't see her though. If you saw my "Look at this awesome bear" thread from a while back, you might be interested to know that her father is Bear 122 aka The Boss. 
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Aug 2, 2017 22:54
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