To the newcomer, East Africa is vast, seemingly endless. The Serengeti stretches to the horizon, speckled with plains game. The hills and gorges of Laikipia and the Northern Frontier in Kenya, bordered by the eastern Rift Valley, form a gigantic fractal landscape that defies normal conventions of space and boundary. But Parker has patrolled this land for fifty years, from Uganda through Tanzania. To him, it is familiar, discrete, comprehensible—and finite. And it is not large enough, rich enough, to respond to the demands now made on it. Something has to get the short end of the stick. And that, says Parker, is the megafauna—and the people who historically depended on the megafauna, such as the Wata, a near-extinct Kenyan tribe whose members specialized in hunting elephants with powerful longbows and poisoned arrows. All have been supplanted, he says, with the “strange form” of human being: modern, technologically savvy, urbanized primates whose social status depends on the accumulation of wealth, namely, the conversion of natural resources into goods and money.
As is the case with many people, elephants in particular engage Parker. But unlike most pachyderm fans, he does not romanticize them. He acknowledges their deep intelligence and complex social order. But for him, they are, more than anything else, the emblem of wild Africa—more accurately, the wild Africa that was but now exists merely in tourist brochures. Wild Africa was largely doomed, Parker says, when it started getting chopped up into nation-states. “The large fauna, particularly elephants, had evolved with few geographic constraints,” he says. “They literally had the continent at their disposal, and they ultimately came to require resources on a continental scale to survive.”
Parker explains that East Africa’s great elephant herds originally traversed thousands of miles in their migrations, traveling from Ethiopia to Zambia and back in stately, seasonal rounds as they sought forage and water. And wherever they went, they shaped ecosystems. “They were one of the great evolutionary engines on the continent. An area that contained too many elephants was ultimately stripped of forest. Then the elephants declined in number or moved on and plains game moved in, until the forest came back. Then the elephants returned, and on and on.” This dynamic resulted in a rich tapestry of habitats, with many “edges”: mature and secondary forest, brushlands, savanna, transition zones of every permutation. This varied habitat in turn supported a tremendous diversity of wildlife.
“The problems start when an area has too many elephants that can’t go anywhere,” Parker says. “And elephants started running into real obstacles when Africa began the transition from a series of tribal homelands to nation-states that supported greater numbers of people with accompanying infrastructure—more and larger farms, cities, roadways. Elephants had evolved to need a continent, and then the continent was denied them.”
East Africa’s national parks were conceived to provide elephants and other megafauna with an option to extinction, but in Parker’s view, they have merely delayed an inevitable collapse.“Within ten years of creation, virtually every national park had elephant problems,” Parker recalls ofthe early days of his career.“They flattened landscapes,utterly disrupted local ecosystems, drove the decline of many species. They could not be allowed open-ended population growth in circumscribed areas. Ultimately their populations would grow beyond the means of the available habitat and finally collapse—but not before they had destroyed everything.”
That led to culling—a practice that Parker and a handful of other wardens refined to a science. It was not a business for the faint-hearted, he acknowledges. Given the complexity of elephant society, tremendous stress can be generated in a herd if certain members are selectively killed, particularly older female members, who act as askaris (guards) and instructors of younger elephants. “It is much more humane and much less disruptive to the larger population if entire family groups are killed quickly,” Parker says. “If you shoot the matriarch, the remaining elephants cluster around her, and you are able to take them down in very short order. Ultimately, we got it down to where a few of us could kill an entire herd in fifty seconds.” Culling also had other benefits, in Parker’s view. Local villages were given the meat, highly esteemed food on a continent where protein shortages are endemic. That created a certain tolerance for elephants among farmers who cultivated lands on the margins of the parks, where the animals sometimes foraged: “They felt there was something in it for them.”
Too, ivory from the culled elephants both contributed to communal tribal wealth and supported the conservation efforts of Kenya’s early wildlife services. Ultimately, of course, the ivory trade generated its own dynamic, one that led to the cessation of legalized hunting in Kenya. Parker acknowledges that poaching for ivory played a significant role in the reduction and even the elimination of local elephant populations, but he insists the African elephant was doomed as a populous, free-ranging species long before the Ivory Wars of the late twentieth century.
“Human beings evolved with elephants,” he says, “and we were adapted to them. We shared this continent with them for millions of years and were able to exploit the same habitats.” But then, says Parker, the “strange form” of humans returned to the continent after hundreds of thousands of years of global peregrination and evolution. They brought with them technologies and cultural imperatives that allowed them to reshape the land—demanded it of them. Since this strange form invaded, wildlife habitat in Africa has steadily diminished.
“As a game warden, I was brought up with the idea that conservation is a growing thing, an idea that would only gain power with time,” says Parker. To a certain extent, he says, the decades have borne out that intimation: conservation and its later permutation, environmentalism, have never been more voguish. But the reality shows that where it counts, real conservation is declining. As a percentage of government expenditures, the greatest amount of money put into Kenyan conservation was around 1900. Also, in 1900, 23 percent of Kenya’s land was game reserve—absolutely inviolate sanctuary where hunting was proscribed. Today, only 4 percent of Kenya’s land has reserve status.” Driving the land conversion, Parker observes, is population growth; Kenya’s human numbers have shot up from eight million people at the declaration of the country’s independence in 1963 to thirty million today. Since 1977, the year the hunting ban was introduced, wildlife populations have fallen by 70 percent.
Still, a fraction—even a significant portion—of the game could be preserved, says Parker, if it had real value for the people who live with and around it. But public policy in Kenya, he claims, has reduced its value. The hunting ban ultimately has come to mean that wildlife cannot be utilized in any way and hence has no value to rural residents. Ecotourism benefits the wealthy lodge owner and the tour company operator but not the pastoral herdsman caring for a herd of goats or the freehold farmer scratching a subsistence living from a hectare of maize and pumpkins. For them, wildlife is at best a neutral entity, although seldom even that: elephants raid the maize, lions and hyenas eat the goats. Tribal people can’t, legally, take an elephant or eland for food or sell a permit to a wealthy trophy hunter for a lion. So it makes more sense to poach the elephant, poison the lion, and subsequently raise the goats and maize in peace.
Simultaneous with the surge in Kenya’s human population was the emergence of modern environmentalism. This has not necessarily benefited African wildlife, says Parker. “It was most unfortunate when conservation transformed into environmentalism. The -ism is the problem. When you start creating -isms, you’re creating systems of belief and faith rather than pursuing science-based courses of action.” In East Africa, Parker says, conservation started off as something that was “as emotionless as agriculture. It was obviously in the public interest to pursue it, so we looked at the most effective ways to implement it. Then, over the course of