Some thoughts on conservation

The last two days we had a visitor at the camp, the new assistant director for the research and monitoring, a young French guy, probably of my age, who was here doing the same job as m in 2008. Since then he has been living in Western andCentral Africa working in different projects mainly with primates. We had some interesting discussion, and now I feel depressed and useless, and I feel like I have done a shitty job. But the fact is that you can never do a good job here. I am every time inspired by people like him or Perrine, who are young and enthousiastic and think things can be changed. And it's true, causes need people like them, because the olds are just too disappointed. But the fact is that the olds probably have started as them, and they just bumped into reality. I mean Guillaume is really aware that his hands are tight and that his possibilities are exteremly limited, but even then, the fact is that he needs to do at least something, and what seems like something for us requires at least a year of preparation here. I mean just a simple thing like monitoring a clearing, which means coming here every day and taking notes of the animals coming here, is like a) too difficult for people b) you have to trust them that they will actually do the job. I mean there are more than 200 clearings here, even if you want to monitor only a few of them, you need to train enough people to be able to send them here continously and then you cannot supervise them all the time. So the first thing here is training, which already raises few questions. Do you want your workers to think, to understand and to be interested and involved in their job? Probably yes. Because then you have to explain what's the use of their job, what's the use of conservation, what's the use of taking notes, and all this is just not straightforward to them. For example they want me to dictate sentences about what research is for, what is ecology and ethology etc, like in school, but they don't understand the meaning behind it. They are not used to be thaght but what is worse they are not used to think and to question things. So what you say is words of god and if you ask that why do you think it is important, or why do you think we do it this way they just can't answer, even if you have explained it several times already. So at the end it feels like loosing your time and you prefer them just to do what you want them to do, like a robot, mechanically and then you saved your nerves. But whith this attitude obviously you get nowhere and what is more you lose their motivation, and to do such a boring and monotonous job, people really need to be motivated. So your other choice is to explain everything a million times, but then the question is to what level. I mean how do you explain why we are doing a genetic study of the gorilla population to people who have no idea if birds are animals or if the water is alive not to mention cells let alone DNA. So you have to start at the begining, Guillaume is actually giving them classes, like explaining them things like the earth is round, Congo is in Africa, how to read a map etc... And for some of them it's too difficult, so obviously you can give up very easily, but some are quite bright and you tell yourself if only this guy was given a chance to be born somewhere else. But some things you just can't change, right, so you satrt the work where you can.
But for some stuff it might be too late. For example how do you theach adults to care about the environment, to be sensitive to the nature, to think, to raise questions, to be emphatic about other beings, to take different perspectives. It is extremely difficult and we the western culture have a lifetime of this training ahead of us starting from early development (espetially if we think of Tomasello's cultural development theory where language learing is boosted by this perspective taking, well, here it just doesn't happen, because they just don't talk to their children, they just leave them to dwell on their own, don't pay attention to the children's attention etc). So what you want to use is reasonale arguments, but for this you need at least some basic knowledge so again you are trapped. You should start with the children obviously, but they come at last all the time becuse first usually you have to put off the fire.
And the fire here is poaching, obviously, masacre of elephants, which were already killed in Nigeria, Chad, and now they are coming here, Gabon, Congo, Central Africa, and because there is less and less animals the price of the tusk is going up and the pressure is even higher. And although the park adopted this brilliant idea of telling the poachers to bring their armes and in return they will get a job, these guys will never earn as much with this job as with poaching, so eventually they will go back doing the same. So that's the question of trust, which is extremly hard to determine. For example I am here now with two guys, who are actually realated, Constantin is the uncle of Davy (but is younger than him), and the first was a poacher untill recently and the latter works for the park for 7 years now and has been an ecogard all this time. Now you can think oh, how cool, Davy probably convinced him that it's better to protect the nature, but you can also think that all those years Constantin knew exactely what is happening in the park and where to go to hunt. But what can you do, you need workers in the park, you need a lot of money and a perspective for personal development to motivate them. So that brings us back to the question of education and in my opinion this is what conservation needs the most today: educators and animators to start at all different levels, from children to adults, from illitaretes to those who want but never had a chance to get some knowledge.
For example the two guys now here with me seem both quite motivated. My heart aches much more for Constantin, because he learns fast, he already has a great knowledge of the forest, and he is a good observer, he wants to discover more and more, and his perspective is coming here every day to this clearing and watch the nature's movie in most of the time nothing is going on. Meanwhile the only book he can read is the bird guidebook he knows already almost by heart. I mean how to stay motivated here? Davy on he other hand is not super bright, but really motivated, he is the kind of student, that will write down every word of a teacher and will bring flowers and will be the first to volunteer for everyhing, but you can be sure he doesn't undersand half of it...
So actually instead of planning out research programs and monitoring the population of he park these are the problems that you face when you want to be a research director of the park...
Obviously human factors are always important in whatever enterprise, but here it's not only your workers, but the whole village, and maybe more the whole country is what needs to be taken into consideration and that's where you loose track and you ask yourself whether it is getting you somewhere or you're running the same rounds every time and you start to feel old and tired and less enthiusisastic. But maybe it's something you should not think about...