The myth of wild Africa

Most people would feel a great loss if elephants, hippos, or gorillas were to become extinct, with photographs and fossils our only record of their existence. But would we willingly move our families, change our means of earning a living, and disrupt our culture merely to preserve some large mammal? Many African peoples are being asked to do just this by the world community, without any respect for the fact that these tribes have lived on their land for hundreds of.

Years, if not longer. And they have lived on this land with wildlife as their neighbors, not their enemies, until recently. Jonathan S. Adams and Thomas O. McShane report on how Western conservation has helped sabotage the precarious balance between wildlife and Africans. They break with traditional conservation, which saves animals at the cost of people, and cut through our mythic images of an unadorned, pristine jungle to create a portrait of the real and complex land.

The authors debunk the aura of some famous wildlife specialists, including Dian Fossey, and then explore the new directions of a joint African/Western approach to conservation that hopes eventually to give control back to the African nations. They envision a new conservation in which people and their needs are brought back into the equation, but the animals are not abandoned.