The game of conservation: international treaties to protect the world's migratory animals
2010; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 48; Issue: 02 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5860/choice.48-0865
ISSN1943-5975
Tópico(s)International Environmental Law and Policies
Resumoarticulated the parallels between sustainable agriculture and sustainable hunting."Game management," he wrote, "is the art of making land produce sustained annual crops of wild game for recreational purposes."A professional forester, an avid hunter, and an innovative ecologist, Leopold took a practical approach to wildlife conservation in the United States: game animals should be cultivated, like wheat and corn, their numbers augmented for human consumption."There are still those who shy at this prospect of a man-made game crop as at something artificial and therefore repugnant," he noted."This attitude shows great taste but poor insight.Every head of wild life still alive in this country is already artificialized, in that its existence is conditioned by economic forces." 1 Farmers had long ago developed a variety of techniques-seeding, weeding, irrigating, fertilizing, fallowing, and the like-to maximize their annual yields."Game cropping," by contrast, was still in its infancy and the tools of the trade largely still experimental and in flux."History shows that game management nearly always has its beginnings in the control of the hunting factor," Leopold observed in the staccato-like prose for which he was famous: "Other controls are added later.The sequence seems to be about as follows: 1.Restriction of hunting.2. Predator control.3. Reservation of game lands (as parks, forests, refuges, etc.).4. Artificial replenishment (restocking and game farming).5. Environmental controls (control of food, cover, special factors, and disease)." 2 More than seventy years after it first appeared, Game Management is still widely read by wardens and foresters-and with good reason, for it is both a practical guide for preserving game animals and an early history of wildlife administration.Like many game managers before and since, however, Leopold largely overlooked one of the key tools of animal conservation: international treaties.Few game species reside solely within the borders of a single country.Most are mobile creatures that crisscross national frontiers according to their needs, living at certain times of the year in colder and more temperate regions and other times in warmer and equatorial ones.Hunting laws, predator control, forest reserves, game farming, and habitat manipulation are all indispensable tools of conservation, but they often have little practical value if neighboring countries do not take similar measures.Effective game management depends on interregional links, transnational cooperation, and international agreements.Governments worldwide have signed nearly fifteen hundred environmental treaties and agreements over the past century, fully half of which address the question of wildlife protection directly or indirectly.Many are simple bilateral fishing agreements designed to protect a shared river or Chapter 1 Africa's Apartheid ParksThe word "ivory" rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed.You would think they were praying to it.-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness HERMANN VON Wissmann was one of Germany's most renowned African explorers.A travel writer and big-game hunter, Wissmann was best known for having traversed the southern Congo basin on behalf of Leopold II, king of the Belgians, in the early 1880s.Chancellor Otto von Bismarck later asked him to govern German East Africa (which he did intermittently from 1888 to 1896), not least because he was skilled at suppressing colonial revolts.Outwardly, there was little about
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