Bertarelli Summer2024 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 70
CO M M UNIC AT IO N
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RE W I L D I NG
we act as a neutral third-party in highly complex, controversial conservation conflicts. Second, we build other people’s
capacity to do what we do. We’ve found that conservationists,
ranchers, tribal government, environmentalists—they are
better advocates and better placed to engage their communities and transform their own conflicts.
to show our approach
in action. My colleagues were working in a conservancy in
northern Mozambique, and every night they heard semiautomatic gunfire and then in the morning, they woke up to
dead and defaced elephants. In one year, they found 2,000
elephants killed. They came into our conservation conflict
transformation workshop and they were like, “this is not
how we were taught to do conservation.” But they tried our
approach and they radically changed everything they did.
They changed their relationships, their processes, and the
outcome. The next year, they found only eight dead elephants.
Then later on in Hawaii, we had another success story.
We taught a group there how to use conservation conflict
transformation in their work, and they were able to develop
public-private partnerships to successfully reintroduce the
Hawaiian crow.
Meanwhile, in Tanzania, we
had a workshop and a Maasai
gentleman came. What had
happened was that the Tanzanian government had taken this large
chunk of land and split it in two and said,
“here Maasai pastoralists, you get this half, and
here, Hadza hunters, you get this half.” But that
essentially sliced each group’s traditional lands in
half. And so the Maasai and the Hadza had this
growing rift, as neither group could get their
needs met. Well, this Maasai gentleman, he went
back and he brought the Hadza and the Maasai together, and facilitated a dialogue between
them. They figured out a way to share their land so
that each group’s way of life could persist.
Similarly, in the Galapagos in 2014, we managed
to get 100 percent buy-in on a program of invasive
species eradication for island restoration despite the
government initially being very wary of the sheer size of
the project and the local people being wary of how much
effort it would require to be successful. But that project is
still ongoing now.
RETURN OF THE CROW
The Center for Conservation
Peacebuilding was able to facilitate
the development of public-private
partnerships to further the work to
try to reintroduce the Hawaiian crow.
The crow, called `Alal in Hawaiian, had
been considered extinct in the wild.
Their reintroduction is still ongoing.
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LET ME GIVE A FEW EXAMPLES
