Simone Haysom · Fortress Conservation · LRB 1 December 2022
Written by Black Hot Fire Network on November 23, 2022
In 2010, graphs that showed wild rhino numbers in South Africa plummeting towards zero began to circulate among conservationists. The animals were being poached at a rate far above replacement level, in a repeat of the crisis that had nearly wiped them out in the 1970s. Similar figures soon appeared for elephant populations in East Africa. In 2016, the Environmental Investigation Agency described the slaughter for ivory, which wiped out half the elephants in major parks in Tanzania and Mozambique, as ‘industrial’ in scale.
The immediate response to this, now known disparagingly as ‘fortress conservation’, was to . . .
