Safaris in national parks in Africa can lead to close encounters with wildlife, such as this cheeta/Sean SmithEditor's note: Sean Smith is a former Yellowstone National Park ranger, and an award-winning conservationist, TEDx speaker, and author. He recently had the opportunity to visit some national parks in Tanzania, and returned home with thoughts of what the National Park Service might learn from its African colleagues.
I recently returned to the Northwest after a two-week Tanzanian safari. It was an amazing experience. The trip took us through Arusha, one of Tanzania’s larger cities, out to Tarangire and Serengeti national parks, and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. The parks and conservation areas were filled with wildlife from the ubiquitous wildebeest to the rare black rhino.
African National Parks share many similarities with their American counterparts.
The parks are big. Serengeti, for example, is more than 3.7 million acres or roughly 1.5 times the size of Yellowstone. Put another way, Serengeti is larger than the state of Connecticut.
The parks are well-visited. Despite having to travel over many poorly maintained dirt roads, parks like the Serengeti and Ngorongoro see roughly 1 million tourists annually.
The parks protect natural and cultural resources. The Tanzanian Park Service, like its U.S. counterpart, protects both natural and cultural resources. Olduvai Gorge in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area protects one of the world’s most important historic sites and some of the oldest fossilized human remains. They like to say at Olduvai, if one traces his/her lineage back far enough, everyone is from Tanzania.
Yet, the Tanzania Park Service diverges from the U.S. National Park Service (NPS) on many issues. The African approach on several issues is an approach the NPS should copy.
Conservation over Recreation
The Tanzania Park Service places conservation and the protection of natural resources and wildlife over private recreation. Nearly every visitor to Tanzania’s national parks has a guide. These guides receive extensive training on resource and wildlife protection. The guides are taught to get the visitors deep into the parks for close-up but safe interactions with the wildlife. Private recreation such as hiking, mountain biking, and swimming is practically non-existent.
Yet, despite this focus on guided rather than private access, park visitors report high satisfaction with their safari adventures.
Elephants seemingly are habituated to humans and their vehicles/Sean Smith
Here in the United States, the NPS mistakenly promotes the idea that it has a dual mandate, one that requires the NPS to balance conservation with recreation. This is incorrect and the courts have consistently ruled that when there is a conflict between conservation and recreation, the law requires the Park Service to favor conservation. The Park Service’s continued pushing of the dual-mandate myth creates undue management headaches, as every recreation interest from snowmobiles to off-lease dog walkers demands access to the national parks. As a result, the national parks are compromised by questionable activities that in many instances do not require a national park setting to enjoy.
Africa takes conservation crimes seriously
Tanzanian park rangers and their African counterparts take environmental crimes seriously. During our safari, I asked our guide if the truck broke down, how would we contact the rangers for help? Our guide responded, “We wouldn’t. The rangers' job was to patrol the borders looking for poachers. We would have to get ourselves up and running again.”
This focus on poaching was recently rewarded when Tanzanian police arrested Feisal Muhammad Ali, the world’s most-wanted ivory trafficker. Meanwhile, rangers in South Africa shot and killed suspected rhino poachers. While I’m not advocating for the summary execution of park criminals, the U.S. government could do more to increase the understanding of the severity of environmental crimes. However, its handling of the Cliven Bundy standoff in Nevada and the courts' unwillingness to impose stiff penalties for poaching sends the message that resource crimes are no big deal.
Hyena in the grass/Sean Smith
Focus on experiences
Another area of focus for the Tanzania park rangers is a on visitor experience rather than amenities. To say the roads of Serengeti and Ngorongoro are rough is an understatement. In some instances, park roads are little more than a mud streak. Meanwhile, the Tanzanian national parks spend little on so-called necessities such as Wi-Fi and cellphone coverage. Interpretive displays are often rudimentary and lack any high-tech whiz bang features found in the United States. However, they provide information in multiple languages, increasing public understanding of why the parks are important.
Rather than providing distractions, the Tanzanian parks focus on preserving authentic experiences. An authentic experience is one that improves a visitor’s appreciation and understanding of park wildlife and natural features, while allowing low-impact intimate interaction with those resources. Unfortunately, many U.S. park activities significantly diminish authentic experiences.
America’s National Park Service will celebrate its 100th birthday in 2016. During the upcoming year, it’s expected the NPS will seek public comment on how best to ensure the park system and Service reach their bicentennial. The agency should look to Africa for guidance.
Sean Smith is a former Yellowstone Ranger, and an award winning conservationist, TEDx speaker, and author. He writes national park thrillers from his home in the shadow of Mount Rainier National Park. To learn more about his conservation work and novels, check out his blog: www.seandavidsmith.blogspot.com or follow him on twitter: @parkthrillers
Comments
Baloney. Lee is the one that brought up Ethiopia not me. I never said anything despariging about the people or things Ethiopian, much less people or things African. Pure fabrication.
Dr. Runte--I was lucky enough to be in Yellowstone as Acting Superintendent when the wolves were reintroduced, some 20 years ago. I am in touch with scores of current and former NPS employees. I have never heard one of them say that he/she did not accept the reintroduction as anything but a good move. Maybe you know NPS people who don't accept wolves but they're sure not on my rolodex.
Rick
Ethiopia
Looks like it's time to start using the IGNORE button again. No sense playing endless word games with a master Troll.
Which was proceeded by your bringing up Ethiopia as 360th on the list of energy users. Hence my response.
If there was any said disparagingly it was your comment:
" Even though he apparently can't understand the need for us to work hard to prevent our parks and natural resources from becoming Ethiopianized."
You never did explain what the means or how you came to the conclusion that was my stance.
I believe the issue here is whether the National Park Service would ever adopt strict controls over visitors, as in Africa. They won't. Why? Because the NPS is too busy widening and straightening the roads for the current crop of visitors entering in mobile homes, tour buses, and SUVS. I know that many of you, as ex-employees, believe that the agency is something different. The problem is: When I get into the records, I don't see those "differences." You may display them, and that is wonderful. But you alone are not the history. So-called "bear management" did not come to the national parks until 40 years ago--and still is fraught with politics. So is wolf management. "They are a headache," one high-ranking NPS official (name withheld) told me just last fall. Bureaucracies do not like headaches. They rather want to be "liked." The NPS is no different. The bureaucracy wants to survive.
You admit it among yourselves--on these pages every day. The "carrying capacity" of the parks is constantly nudged upward, no matter what the "biology" says. In a management contest between biology and visitation, biology loses every time. Yes, 95% of park X is wilderness, and that is where the biology is supposed to go. But what if the 5% is still the problem underming the health of the entire 100 percent?
No one escapes his culture. As a country, we are now even to the point of arguing that wind turbines killing eagles, hawks, and bats are "no big deal." House cats kill far more birds, we say. We rationalize; we invent a new euphemism. We say that the wind turbines are "green." We force the biology onto a smaller reservation so we can have our cake and eat it, too. The national parks have hardly "escaped" that. Preserving "scenery" is therefore so much easier than admitting what really needs to be done.
While you were off jumping down one another's throats about Ethiopia, I note that you gave Stephen Mather another "pass." Those among his contemporaries who were biologists did not. A culture ripples and endures. Just the presence of a widened "road" in a national park changes that park entirely. It "forces" a management style on that park, in Yellowstone, now to hand every visitor coming through the gate a warning to slow down. Why? Because 100 major animals die every year, the warning says. The point is: The NPS wouldn't need the warning IF THE ROADS WERE DOING THEIR JOB. Their job in a park is to slow motor vehicles--with twists and turns, but no, now everything can go barreling through.
We all know what the national parks "do," but we should also be honest about what they "fail" to do. Much of what survives within their borders is due to the sheer luck of the draw. I know that every national park has wildlife; I also know how much biologists pleaded to make it so. Read chapters 6 through 11 of YOSEMITE: THE EMBATTLED WILDERNESS. Read Barbara J. Moritsch's THE SOUL OF YOSEMITE. Read Carsten Lien OLYMPIC BATTLEGROUND. Read Richard A. Bartlett YELLOWSTONE: A WILDERNESS BESIEGED. We are not spending all of our lives writing frivolously. We have done our homework, and so should you.
If you want to believe that what the Park Service IS is not influenced by what it WAS, you are dreaming. But yes, it's a free country, and so dream away. However, the next time you lose a battle--and the loss goes to your gut--remember why we write. You cannot say we didn't warn you.
The preservation argument is interesting, because without any visitors (or consumers in the eye of a few), those parks would never exist. I appreciate that many love the parks as their own, but they still belong to all of us to enjoy.
As for Mr. Runte take on the difference between the draw of African parks vs. US parks, I could not agree more. The two persons I know that went to an African safari were primarily taking pictures of wildlife (and are also quite well-to-do...).
Excellent post Alfred Runte, I remember having lunch one day in San Francisco with Mr David Brower. I was asking one of questions raised by your post, can we prevail on the visitor capacity issue in a major iconic park. He responded (in so many words), in this case maybe, but we must always remember that what is saved today will be the next days development proposal. In several meetings with well informed persons on the issues raised by your post, the subject always comes up, at what stage of the decision making process does the politics become the deciding factor. I completely understand your passion, but we live in a political system, that is the reality, as did Mather. Fortunately, the books you have listed, thank you Barbara Morstich, others, continue to raise the issues, but at some point compromise with the political reality is the way it works, for better or worse. Your post raises so many excellent points, but to respond to one more, I agree that the record does not always show the contributions of many outstanding NPS employees at the park level simply because they are usually filtered out up the management line, they do not conform to the current political spin, but that is true of all organizations both public and private. Politics in its broadest sense is played at all levels, including our own personal relationships. To make it work, everyone has to give something, I am not sure it works very well at times, but it is our system.
Alfred, I don't think the NPS created a new road in a single major National Park within the last decade. I can't think of any of the 59 National Parks having expanded roads, and widening highways. Can you provide an example? The only example I can somewhat think of would be the Clover ramp that is part of the Old Faithful mall lot, but that was more of a fix to a bad original design, than any sort of expansion. While, the old faithful area is crowded, and draws scores of visitors, to me that is not even close to being the "complete and total yellowstone" experience. However, congress has approved of many wilderness areas inside National Park boundaries within the same time frame. In fact some major parks have gone from "managed as wilderness" to actual wilderness over the last decade. So, i'm not sure I agree that the devleopment side is winning in this country. I think the opposite is the case. I tend to draw a line between propaganda, and logic based on factual analysis.